Billion $ Story

Founder

SPRYNT

Sold workshops led by professionals from Amazon, IBM and Google to corporate clients and startups.

Co-Founder

June Fund

$100M VC firm headed by Google's Chief Business Officer Philipp Schindler

Principal

Heilemann Ventures

Investment Team

iZettle

Operations & Business Development

Deloitte

Made pretty slide decks and spreadsheets very few people ever looked at.

Consulting

I help startup founders raise $1-10 million from VCs with a Billion $ Story | ex-VC at $100M firm by Google board member

Fundraising can be brutal.

After talking to 4,000+ founders over the last 10 years,

I’ve discovered three core problems most of them face (and how to solve them):

1/ You can’t book enough investor meetings
2/ Investors don’t see the potential of your business
3/ They pass on you with bullsh*t feedback or ghost you

Each of them alone could end your run.

If these sound familiar it’s likely because you’ve taken fundraising advice from the wrong people.

And that has resulted in an absolute grind of a fundraise.

Something you don’t care to repeat.

I get it because I’ve been there.

And it’s not your fault.

The internet is a noisy place, and those with no experience often speak the loudest.

Why should you listen to me then?

Because I’ve experienced fundraising from all angles:

→ I was a VC
→ I’ve raised money myself
→ I’ve helped 100+ founders raise $1-10 million rounds

And I can tell you why it’s been a grind for you…

Because venture capital isn’t like most markets.

It’s top-heavy.

It’s feast or famine.

I was a VC for a $100M firm led by one of the most powerful men in tech

…and I’ve seen the reality:

A few outliers get more money than they could ever spend. The rest fight for table scraps.

Because VCs only look for one thing:

Future billion $ companies.

Outliers.

They want founders who can bend reality to their will.

Ordinary pitch advice, generic deck templates, and cookie-cutter narratives won’t cut it.

If you follow the ordinary path, will that make you look extraordinary?

Never.

You’ll drown in a sea of sameness with 90% of pitches.

To create something unique you need an intense approach.

That’s why my help is tailor-made for founders:

1/ I’ll show you how to get 80-100 warm investor connections and book meetings

2/ Together we’ll craft your unique Billion $ Story that will make investors chase you

3/ You’ll learn how to apply my tactics and investor psychology to create conviction and FOMO and close your round

Does it work?

Here’s what my client Frank Gu - currently building his second billion $ business - says:

"Uli is an amazing storyteller, period.

If you're anything like me and tend to overthink things with that extra critical and logical voice in your head, do yourself a favor and book a session with Uli immediately.

He will make your story shine, you won't regret it!"

Interested?

Just DM me “billion$story” and let’s have a chat

Uli Kuenzel

3Victor

Consulting on and implementation of growth programs with founders of technology and service companies. Helping executive teams improve strategy, positioning, messaging, pricing, and sales/marketing channels to achieve growth.

• B2B2C BeautyTech platform: Improved pricing and sales process, increasing ACV to 2.6x, signed $272k in new deals in 8 weeks, and implemented company-wide KPI tracking. Advised founders on strategy and negotiation.
• B2B FinTech startup: Generated 74 opportunities through cold calling and email in 4 months. Advised executive team on sales management, processes, pricing, positioning, messaging, and marketing strategy.
• B2B Event Management SaaS: Generated 120+ investor and strategic partner leads in 8 weeks by reaching out to almost 3000 investors and competitors.
• B2B SaaS for CPG: Generated $493k in pipeline from SMB brands and $269k from agencies, validated cold calling and email channels, and attracted acquisition interest from multiple agencies.
• B2B SaaS for trend prediction: Created opportunities with major companies like General Mills and Nestle, launched a new campaign generating 39 leads and 5 qualified opportunities, and discovered highly effective outbound angles.

INGENO

SaaS development company. Successfully led revenue turnaround, achieving 80% growth in 3 years, 510% faster than the industry standard. This reversed a 12% decline in the previous three years.

• Signed tens of millions in revenue, managing over $50M in total pipeline value.
• Increased YoY signed revenue by 73.1% between 2022-2023, reaching eight figures in Jan '23 TTM
• Signed seven-figure deals with Series A-funded startups in Silicon Valley and large SaaS companies
• Diversified lead sources by reducing referral dependence from 100% to 59%, and increasing outbound (9%) and inbound (32%) channels.
• Led development of inbound channel that grew web traffic 1230% and generated hundreds of thousands in sales, dozens of opportunities and millions of dollars in pipeline.
• Built and led sales & marketing team: 2 marketers, 1 rep, and 1 account manager.
• Implemented qualification processes (BANT and later MEDDPICC) in HubSpot, improving deal focus and revenue forecasting accuracy.
• Recovered a lost client generating an additional $1.9M in revenue, and won a deal against a competitor priced 3.1x lower by leveraging credibility and trust.
• Developed sales and marketing strategy: revenue analysis, segmentation, personas, qualification criteria, and process.
• Reported results and strategy to CEO and Board.

Channels used: content/SEO, organic social, paid social, paid search, community, outbound, partners, and referrals.

Growth Consultant

Director of Sales & Marketing

PHOENIXX Web & Mobile Solutions

Funded services marketplace startup within the HoldCo. Led growth strategies, acquisition channels, and streamlined operations to maximize user acquisition.

• Lowered new user cost per acquisition by 74%
• Lowered posted listing CPA by 58%
• Increased listing conversion rate by 17%
• Increased match rate by 20%
• Designed and implemented marketing channel tests
• Installed pixels and conversion tracking for Google and Facebook ads
• Implemented competitive analysis, growth strategy, and user experience improvement reports

Head of Business Development & Innovation

Bonnie & Clyde Pet Goods

Brand of natural health products for dogs & cats started in 2015. Launched a new pet supplement after analyzing the category and determining competitor weaknesses, developing a unique formulation, and partnered with designers and manufacturers to create the brand. Raised equity and debt capital through private investors and the BDC. Brought the brand to market through variety of growth strategies (marketplace, influencers, direct sales and paid) and developed strategic partnerships with distributors. Our products are sold in Canada, the US, and Singapore.

• Grew listings to over 450 stores
• Grew revenue at 40% CAGR, 8x faster than the industry 
• Achieved a 76 Net Promoter Score, 4.5x higher than the median for companies
• Earned over 95% 4 and 5-star reviews online
• Built social following to over 30,000 followers

In 2019, the company was acquired by a private equity firm and returned a 36% annualized rate of return to early investors.

Founder (Acquired)

Xpertdoc Technologies Inc.

Document automation SaaS platform. Achieved 120% of quota; closed deals with banks, insurance companies, and professional associations; led sales training sessions on compelling storytelling and prospecting; executed 30 to 80 cold calls per day.

National Account Executive

LeddarTech

IoT sensor startup. Achieved 100% of quota; streamlined outbound sales process with a data-driven approach, split testing email templates to produce a 50% increase in evaluation kit sales velocity; successfully opened accounts with two major technology companies in the US.

Sales Development Representative

Canadian Armed Forces | Forces armées canadiennes

- Kabul, Afghanistan Op Attention 2011-2012, Transport Platoon; convoys with heavy vehicles, supporting close protection teams and joint operations with US military; advance promoted to Corporal and recommended for leadership course progression
- Calgary, Alberta 2013 flooding disaster relief operations
- Qualified for CFSAC national shooting competition in 2012
- Counter-Terrorist driving certification, training in small-unit tactics, CQB and unarmed combatives
- Top Candidate & Top Shot in Basic Military Qualification 2009

Infantry Soldier (3PPCLI)

I’m an entrepreneurial growth leader that has sold more than $23M of software, services, and physical products. Over the last decade, I’ve raised money, started and sold a company, built and led teams, and led revenue growth for companies in several industries.

I post videos at https://www.youtube.com/@JonCaldwell_

Jon Caldwell

A sales director told me his company was planning to hire 15 BDRs.

I told him that was a terrible idea.

Let me walk you through the math.

Fifteen BDRs means $75,000 a month minimum, before commission. You're going to need two team leads just to manage them. And based on what I've seen, 60% or more will underperform in the first six months. You'll let them go and start the whole hiring cycle over again.

SDR is a churn-and-burn position. You're not hiring once and done. You're building a machine of constant recruiting, onboarding, coaching, and backfilling.

But here's the thing, management still thinks this way because they're stuck in 2010. The old "Predictable Revenue" playbook: just throw more BDRs at the problem. We've got the funnel math, we just need more bodies.

That's not how it works anymore.

I was working with a client whose SDR was spending 15-20 hours a week on manual prospect research. Copying and pasting from LinkedIn. Checking tech stacks on websites. Ranking accounts in spreadsheets. All by hand.

I built a Clay table in a few hours that automated the whole thing. An AI agent that visits sites, identifies decision-makers, verifies tech stack, and tier-ranks prospects automatically.

The accuracy rate? 90%. As good as the human was getting.

And it gets crazier. Two years ago, I was paying people a dollar per personalized first line. Now AI writes them for half a penny. Pretty wild, right?

The sales director I mentioned? His company went from planning 15 BDRs down to 2. They realized one person with the right tools can outperform a team that's burning cash and churning through hires.

Before you submit that headcount request, ask yourself: is this a people problem or a tools problem?

Founder @ 3Victor | 1x Exit | Fractional growth operator for tech & services founders | $25M+ in sales of software, hardware, and services

You don't need 100 clients to build a real business. You probably need just three (when you're early-stage).

I was talking to a founder last month who was overwhelmed. He was worried about lead gen, sales funnels, scaling, hiring, the whole playbook.

I asked him: "How many clients do you actually need to pay yourself a decent wage?"

He hadn't done the math.

So we did it together. Turns out, if he could land three clients at a few thousand dollars a month each, he'd be covering his expenses and then some.

Three clients. That's it.

Can you find three companies in your target market willing to pay you? Of course you can.

This hit me years ago when I was looking at buying a business. I looked at dozens of deals, signed NDAs, reviewed financials. And I was shocked at what some "boring" companies were pulling in.

One lady ran a B2B events company. All she did was coordinate conferences and speakers. She was making a million and a half dollars a year.

A guy pouring concrete steps for commercial buildings, $3 million a year in profit.

Lawn mowing companies clearing $1 million annually.

Pretty wild, right?

You don't have to invent something new. You don't need a revolutionary idea. People are already paying for the services you want to offer. Billions of dollars changing hands every day.

The question isn't "can I build a business?" It's "can I capture a tiny fraction of what's already being spent?"

You don't need to boil the ocean. You need three clients.

If you're early stage, have you done this math for your own business? What's your real number?

li_at

JSESSIONID

When I started my consulting business, I had a non-compete and almost no network.

The company I was leaving reinforced it on my way out. "You can't work with any of our clients. Don't even talk to them."

The problem? Most of my professional network had been built through that company. I couldn't leverage any of it.

So I had to start from scratch.

I got a Crunchbase subscription for a month and built a list of founders who had recently raised funding, a few million to $10 million, enough that they'd have budget and urgency.

Then I sent them a simple message: "Hey, I made a short video with a strategy for your company. Do you mind if I send it over?"

I didn't have the video yet. I waited until they replied.

Anyone who said yes, I went deep. I researched their competitors, analyzed their positioning, looked at what had worked for similar companies. I put together a 20-page strategy document customized to their business and recorded a 10-20 minute video walking through it.

Two hours per prospect. Insane amount of work.

I sent 1,300 of those initial messages over six weeks.

Four people became clients.

That's a 1-in-325 conversion rate, which is actually incredible for cold outreach.

Those four clients got me started in my new business.

I've had clients ever since.

The volume was high. The effort per prospect was high. But it worked.

What's gotten you your first clients when starting from zero?

We produced 100 SEO articles in two days.

Not hand-crafted thought pieces. Not weeks of research and editing. Just solid, keyword-targeted articles generated with AI and published fast.

SEO is a testing game. You don't actually know which keywords will rank until you try. You can do all the keyword research you want, but Google's algorithm has the final say.

The old approach was to pick your best guesses, invest heavily in each article, and hope you picked right. If you were wrong, you wasted weeks of effort.

The new approach is volume.

Produce 100 articles. Throw them all up. Wait 60-90 days and see what happens.

Some will rank. Some won't. The ones that rank, you improve, add depth, add examples, make them genuinely useful. The ones that don't, you leave alone or cut.

You've turned content creation into a data collection exercise. Instead of guessing which topics will work, you're letting the algorithm tell you.

This only works if you accept the tradeoff. These aren't masterpieces. They're tests. The goal isn't to impress readers with your first draft, it's to find out which topics have traction so you can double down.

The math is simple. If 10 out of 100 articles rank well, you've found 10 winners in two days. That would've taken months the old way.

AI makes the volume possible. Your judgment makes the winners great.

Treat content like a portfolio. Plant a lot of seeds, then water the ones that sprout.

I cold called distributors until they said yes. Then I got our products into 450 stores.

Before I started consulting, I built a consumer products company. We designed products, had them manufactured, and sold them online to validate demand.

Once we knew people wanted the product, I wanted to get into retail. The problem? I had no relationships with distributors. No warm intros. No industry connections.

So I did what I knew how to do: I picked up the phone and started calling.

Most of them said no. Some ignored me entirely. But a few said yes. And those few got us into regional chains. Then those regional chains got us the credibility to approach larger distributors.

Within a couple of years, we were in 450 stores across Canada.

Then we went on Dragon's Den, the Canadian version of Shark Tank. We pitched in front of the dragons and got offers from all of them. Our retail sales spiked 300% in the weeks after the episode aired.

But here's the part I didn't expect:

A friend of mine had sold his company to a private equity firm in Toronto a few months earlier. He made an introduction. They'd seen us on Dragon's Den and were interested.

I couldn't believe it. We weren't looking to sell. We hadn't hired a banker or put together a pitch deck. But suddenly we were in conversations.

We went through due diligence, negotiated terms, and closed the deal. I sold the company in 2019.

The whole thing started with cold calls to distributors who had no idea who I was.

Outbound works. In B2B software, in physical products, in services. The category changes, but the principle doesn't: if you want something, you have to go get it.

What's a door you opened through sheer persistence? I'd love to hear it.

Most sales calls stall because founders ask the wrong questions in the wrong order.

There's a framework called SPIN Selling, developed by Neil Rackham. His team studied thousands of sales calls and found that the reps who closed more deals asked certain types of questions way more often than others.

SPIN stands for Situation, Problem, Implication, and Need Payoff.

Most founders spend too much time in Situation. You ask about the prospect's company, their tech stack, their team size, their current process. That's fine for context. But it doesn't move the deal forward.

Some founders get to Problem. You ask what's not working, what's frustrating, what keeps them up at night.

But almost nobody gets to Implication.

That's where deals are won.

Implication questions help the prospect connect their problem to real consequences. You're not just identifying pain, you're making them feel the weight of it.

Say you're talking to a founder who's struggling to close deals. The implication question might be: "If you don't improve your sales process over the next six months, what happens to your pipeline? To your runway? To the vision you have for this company?"

Now they're not just thinking about a problem. They're sitting in the discomfort of what happens if they don't solve it.

Then comes Need Payoff. This is where you flip it: "If I could help you close more deals, write you a script, coach you through your calls, and you closed even one extra deal this year from what you learned, would that be worth the investment?"

You're not pitching. You're getting them to sell themselves through Socratic questioning.

Most founders skip straight from Situation to their pitch. They never build the tension that makes the solution feel necessary.

If you've never read SPIN Selling, it's worth your time. What frameworks have changed how you approach sales calls?

The terrain dictates the strategy.

It's a military principle. If you're fighting in a valley, you use different tactics than in an open field. The environment shapes what's possible.

In sales, your terrain is your market. And not all segments are created equal.

I was talking to a sales director whose company sells to two types of buyers.

One is large commercial real estate firms. Long sales cycles. Multiple stakeholders. Budget approvals that don't happen until December. A conversation that starts in June might not close until the following year.

The other is mid-sized companies that own their own buildings. Shorter decision chains. Fewer approvals. They can move in 30-60 days.

The contract value? About the same.

So I asked him: if one segment is way more excited about what you're doing, they close faster, and they pay the same, why are you spending so much energy chasing the hard-to-close accounts?

He didn't have a great answer.

Here's what I'd recommend.

Stay with your known segment for most of your efforts. You've got the playbook. You know it works. Don't abandon it.

But start testing in the faster segment. Put some budget, some time, some energy toward those customers who can close in a quarter instead of a year.

If you get that revenue a quarter earlier, it compounds. You can reinvest. You can hire. You can build momentum. The flywheel starts spinning faster.

Don't just ask "who can we sell to?" Ask "who can we close fastest for the same value?"

What's your experience, do you prioritize speed to close or size of logo?

When you post on LinkedIn every day, something compounds.

One of my clients committed to posting daily. Within a few months, he hit 150,000 impressions on a single post. His website traffic spiked. Brand searches went up. He started getting inbound leads from people who'd been following his content for weeks.

None of that happened when he was posting once a month.

Here's why this matters for sales, not just marketing.

Buyers are on LinkedIn. Decision-makers check it at least once a week. If you're posting five times a week, the odds that one of your posts shows up in their feed goes way up. They start seeing your face. Your company name. Your point of view.

Then when they get a cold email or a LinkedIn message from someone at your company, they think: "Oh yeah, I've seen these guys before."

You've built familiarity before you ever reached out. The cold outreach isn't quite so cold anymore.

But here's where everyone gets stuck.

"I know I should post more, but I don't have time. And when I sit down to write, I don't know what to say. I tried ChatGPT and it came out with a bunch of emojis and generic garbage."

The fix isn't to become a better writer. It's to realize you already have the content.

You've been in your industry for years. You know the objections. You know the pain points. You know what works and what doesn't. That knowledge is locked in your head, and in your calls.

You don't need to create content from scratch. You need to extract what you already know.

If you're posting once a month, try once a week. If you're posting once a week, try daily for 30 days. See what compounds.

I just watched the most absurd (read: amazing) piece of outbound I've ever seen.

Dan James 📍 flew 19 hours from Bali to Beirut to shoot a personalized video for a single prospect.

Not a green screen. Not AI. Actually in Lebanon.

The prospect is Lebanese. So Dan researched that, got on a plane, and filmed the entire outreach at landmarks across the country. The video opens with a Star Wars-themed bit: him arguing with three clones of himself over how to land the account, complete with an Emperor hologram.

Then he delivers an actual strategic breakdown of how he'd grow the guy's personal brand and businesses.

Completely absurd. And completely unforgettable.

Dan runs a done-for-you YouTube funnel agency. This is his version of Dream 100 outreach. And it's working.

Here's what I find interesting:

Add up the flight, hotel, food, and production time. You're probably looking at $4-5K all-in. Sounds like a lot for one prospect, right?

But typical B2B customer acquisition cost runs $2-10K depending on channel and ICP. So the math isn't actually crazy. It's just concentrated.

And here's the part that makes it brilliant: the outreach IS the content.

He's not just reaching one prospect. He's creating a shareable asset that demonstrates his capabilities to everyone who sees it. Seth Godin's original definition of "remarkable": worthy of remark. This video gets talked about. It generates its own distribution.

In a world where inboxes are flooded, ads are expensive, and everyone's using the same AI templates, unreasonable effort becomes a competitive advantage.

You don't need to fly to Lebanon.

But the principle holds: as channels get more saturated, lower volume and more handcrafted outreach keeps winning.

The people willing to do what others won't are the ones who stand out.

(Link to Dan's video in the comments, shared with his permission. It's worth the watch.)

Scaling content for business owners with AI & systems | Co-Founder @ Thakos

"AI is keeping me up at night."

A founder told me this on a call last week. He runs an agency.

But his fear wasn't about competition from other agencies.

It was this: "One day, people are just gonna be able to press a button, and AI is gonna replicate everything we do. And they're not gonna need us anymore."

I asked him how he was dealing with that anxiety.

His answer was simple: "If I have a strong personal brand, I can just launch a new offer. It's fine."

He's right.

Think about it. Alex Hormozi could sell almost anything to his audience. Not because his products are magic, but because he's built such a strong relationship that his audience trusts him.

That's the goal.

Not "become an influencer." Not "get famous."

Build a personal brand strong enough that you can sell any future offer to your audience, even if your current business gets disrupted.

Your offer might become obsolete.
Your service might get commoditized.
Your margins might get compressed.

But an audience that knows, likes, and trusts you? That's transferable.

The founders building their personal brand right now aren't doing it for vanity. They're doing it for insurance.

AI is coming for a lot of business models. The question is whether you'll have somewhere to go when it does.

If your current offer disappeared tomorrow, would your audience follow you to the next one?

Your lead magnet should qualify, not just capture.

Most companies offer a PDF. An ebook. A checklist. Someone downloads it, you get their email, and then you start the sales process from scratch.

You know nothing about them except that they wanted free content.

There's a better approach.

Build a calculator or an assessment.

We built a simple calculator that estimates how much pipeline a company could generate from outbound. Prospects punch in their numbers, their deal size, their close rate, their capacity, and they get a result.

They get immediate value. An actual answer to a question they care about.

And we get their inputs.

By the time we talk, we already know their situation. We know their deal size. We know their current numbers. We know what they're hoping to achieve. The first call isn't discovery from zero, it's a conversation about their specific results.

Pretty useful, right?

The calculator also filters.

If someone's deal size is $500 and they're hoping for enterprise results, we know before the call that it's probably not a fit. If someone's numbers show massive potential and they're eager to talk, we know to prioritize them.

You're doing qualification before the first conversation even happens.

This works for almost any business. ROI calculators. Readiness assessments. Benchmark tools. Anything where the prospect inputs data and gets a personalized result.

The PDF captures an email. The calculator captures context.

Build lead magnets that work for you, not just for the prospect.

Don't sign a year contract with a vendor you've never worked with.

This comes up a lot with outsourced SDR companies. They pitch you on results: "We'll book 20 meetings a month. We'll fill your pipeline. Just sign here for 12 months."

Sounds great. But you have no idea if their approach will work for your market.

What if their playbook is built for high-volume markets and you have a niche target list of 5,000 prospects? What if their SDRs don't understand your industry? What if their sequences burn through your best accounts before you realize something's wrong?

By the time you figure out it's not working, you're six months in and locked into another six.

Here's what I recommend instead.

Make it a two or three month pilot. Tell them: "Let's prove this works before we commit long-term."

Any vendor confident in their results should be willing to do a short pilot. If they insist on a year commitment upfront, that's a red flag. They're betting on inertia, not performance.

During the pilot, set clear success criteria. How many dials? How many conversations? How many qualified meetings? What does "qualified" mean? Get specific so there's no ambiguity at the end.

If the pilot works, extend the contract. If it doesn't, you've learned something valuable without being stuck.

This applies beyond SDR companies, by the way. Any new vendor, marketing agencies, software platforms, consultants, deserves a trial period before you commit long-term.

Pilots protect you. Don't skip them.

I've asked dozens of VPs at Fortune 500 companies one question: "Where do you get your information?"

So here's the context. In some engagements, I do positioning interviews for B2B clients. They come to me and say, "We've got 18 competitors in our market. We don't know how to stand out."

So I interview five to ten of their best customers. I ask why they stayed, what they love, why they didn't go with a competitor down the road.

And at the end, I always ask one open-ended question: "Where do you get your information from?"

I don't lead them. I just listen.

And almost every single time, we're talking VPs at aerospace companies, Fortune 500 executives, serious buyers, they say the same thing.

LinkedIn. Newsletters. Blogs.

That's it. That's the stack.

Not podcasts. Not conferences. Not some secret buyer community you haven't discovered yet.

LinkedIn, newsletters, and blogs.

Pretty crazy, right?

These are the people writing six- and seven-figure checks. And they're telling you exactly where they go to learn, discover, and decide who to trust.

If you're a B2B founder and you're not building your presence on these three channels, you're invisible to the exact buyers you want to reach.

Where do your best customers get their information? Have you ever asked them directly?

7,000 views. Millions in revenue.

A founder was telling me about a creator he admires. The guy has one of the most profitable YouTube channels in the business space, relative to his size.

His videos get a maximum of 7,000 views.

Meanwhile, creators with 100,000+ views per video are struggling to close a single deal.

The difference? The first guy built for conversion. The second built for vanity.

Here's the reframe that changed how I think about this:

10 views is a conference table.
100 views is a high school auditorium.
600 views is a packed theater.

When you think about it that way, "only 600 views" sounds different, right?

That's 600 people, targeted, interested, paying attention to you for minutes at a time. How long would it take you to get 600 qualified prospects in a room any other way?

The problem isn't your view count. It's that you're measuring the wrong thing.

Views don't pay the bills. Deals do.

And deals come from expertise, trust, and relevance to a specific audience, not from chasing the algorithm.

A small, engaged audience that trusts you will always beat a large, passive audience that barely knows your name.

Would you rather have 100,000 views from strangers or 1,000 views from your exact buyers?

A guy I know made a Dream 100 outreach.

The target never responded. He still made $3,000.

He built something valuable for a specific prospect, free, unsolicited, customized to their business. Sent it over with a Loom video explaining what it was and why he made it.

The prospect ghosted him.

So he posted about it on LinkedIn. "I made this free thing for this company. We have no prior relationship. I just thought it could help them." He tagged the prospect in the post.

That original target still never bought.

But someone else saw the post, DM'd him, and said "Can you make this for me?"

He closed $3,000 from a prospect he never targeted. That's the power of Dream 100 done right.

Here's how it works:

You identify your dream clients, the 100 companies you'd most want to work with. Then instead of pitching them, you create something valuable for them first.

For an automation consultant targeting VCs, that might look like: "Hey, I built you a list of companies in your investment thesis that are ready for funding. It automatically updates every week. Here's a video walking through how it works."

You send it to the founder or partner. If they don't respond, you follow up. Then you reach out to other people at the company. You fill out their contact form. If they're local and going to an event, you show up.

Hit them on multiple channels. Get creative.

Have you tried Dream 100 or something similar? What's worked for you in cutting through the noise?

If you're the top sales rep on your team and also the sales manager, you're in a trap.

A sales director described this to me recently.

"I'm still the best sales rep on the team, I don't want to take credit for that, but my time matters. The more time I spend managing new BDRs, onboarding them, training them, that's time I lose connecting with actual clients."

He was managing 20+ accounts personally while also trying to build and coach a team.

I've seen this play out before. It doesn't end well.

Scenario one: the team underperforms, but you're crushing it. Leadership looks at you and says, "Well, you're doing fine, what's wrong with everyone else?" Now you're the problem. Even though you're the only one hitting numbers.

Scenario two: you drop the ball on one of your accounts. Someone doesn't renew. Now it's, "What happened? You're supposed to be our best."

You can't win. The role is designed to fail.

Wearing the manager hat while carrying the quota bag gets messy fast. I've seen it with multiple sales leaders, not just this one.

So what do you do?

Set the expectation with leadership upfront.

Tell them: "I can help move the needle on key accounts, but I can't personally manage 50 of them. Here's my proposal: these five accounts, I stay as the account holder. Everything else, I'm building and coaching the team to handle."

Five named accounts. That's your ceiling.

You stay involved when big deals come up.
You help structure proposals. 
ou coach reps through enterprise negotiations.

But you don't carry a full book while also trying to scale a team.

If you're stuck in the player-coach trap, the fix isn't working harder. It's drawing a line and getting leadership to agree to it.

The next few years of building your business are going to be a pain in the ass.

I don't say that to scare you. I say it because nobody told me, and I wish they had.

You're going to be tired. You're going to feel like crap. Some weeks you'll wonder why you started this in the first place.

That's normal. That's the job.

And here's the part that took me a while to learn:

Whether you feel like crap or not doesn't mean you can't do the work.

Your feelings are real. They're valid. But they're not an excuse to stop. You can feel exhausted and still ship. You can feel uncertain and still make the call. You can feel overwhelmed and still show up for the meeting.

The founder journey isn't balanced. Not at the start.

You're signing up for a life of imbalance for a period of time. That's the deal. If you want the freedom and the upside and the thing you're building, you have to pay for it with a season of your life where work takes more than its fair share.

It won't last forever. But it will last longer than you expect.

The founders who make it through aren't the ones who never struggle. They're the ones who keep working through the struggle.

So if you're in the middle of it right now, tired, stressed, wondering if it's worth it, I get it.

Keep going.

What's gotten you through the hard stretches? I'd genuinely like to know.

Your best prospects deserve your best people. Everyone else gets the volume treatment.

Most sales teams treat all prospects the same. Same emails. Same sequences. Same SDRs working the whole list.

That's a mistake.

Your strategic accounts, the ones that could become your biggest customers, shouldn't get the same treatment as everyone else. They need your A-players. Personal outreach. Tailored messaging. Real effort.

Here's how I think about it.

Make a list of your Dream 100. These are your top-tier targets. Long sales cycles. Multiple stakeholders. High contract values. The accounts that could change your business.

Now tell your high-volume team: you're not allowed to call these ones.

These are your golden accounts. You and your senior team work them directly. Everyone else, the other thousands of prospects in your market, that's what the SDR team handles with volume outreach.

Two tiers. Two motions.

The first tier gets direct mail, personalized emails, LinkedIn connections, phone calls from senior people, maybe even custom content created just for them.

The second tier gets automated sequences, parallel dialers, and high-volume prospecting. Still professional. Still personalized where possible. But designed for scale, not depth.

The mistake I see is when companies let their volume team spray the whole market (including the accounts that deserve special treatment). By the time your senior rep reaches out to the CEO of a dream account, they've already been burned by three generic SDR emails.

Protect your best opportunities. Your Dream 100 shouldn't be in the same sequence as everyone else.

Stop trying to become famous.

Aim to be "niche famous" instead.

A founder told me this recently, and it perfectly captures what most B2B founders should actually be going for.

Niche famous means: unknown to the general public, but a legend in your specific space.

Here's an example. Codie Sanchez has over a million YouTube subscribers. She's one of the biggest names in the business content world.

But ask the average person on the street if they know who she is. They don't. Ask someone outside of entrepreneurship Twitter. They have no idea.

Even "famous" business creators are niche famous.

Now think about someone like Cole Gordon. If you're in the B2B sales world, you know exactly who he is. He's built a massive business. People respect him. He's influential.

But outside that world? Nobody knows his name.

That's the goal.

Not mass fame. Not viral videos. Not millions of followers.

Just being the person that everyone in your specific niche knows, trusts, and thinks of first when they have a problem you can solve.

You don't need the whole internet to know your name. You need the right 5,000 people to know it.

That's niche famous. And that's where the money is.

Your cold emails are going straight to spam.

That prospect who seemed genuinely interested? They never saw your follow-up.

A sales director described this exact situation to me.

"I have a great conversation on the phone. The prospect seems interested. I send the follow-up email, nothing. I've seen it happen more than once. The email goes straight to junk. They don't have time to check junk, and after a while, they just forget about us."

When I asked about their setup, they were sending up to 10,000 cold emails a month from their main company domain through HubSpot.

That's how you burn your deliverability.

And it gets worse. His colleague in Europe mass-emailed a major commercial real estate firm. Now he can't reach anyone at that company. Every single email gets blocked. They've been completely cut off from one of their biggest potential accounts.

Most people don't understand what's actually happening with email now.

Email service providers do pattern matching on your copy. If you're sending the same template with slight variations, first name, company name, they recognize the pattern and block it. Your main domain has a reputation. When you blast cold emails from it, you're not just hurting your outbound. You're hurting deliverability for your entire company, including emails to existing customers.

So what's the fix?

You buy alternate domains, 50 or so variants. Each domain gets only two or three inboxes. Half Microsoft, half Google. You warm them up for two to three weeks with automated emails that build your sender reputation.

After warmup, your deliverability is high. And your main domain stays clean.

Test your deliverability today. There are free tools that'll show you exactly where your emails are landing. You might not like what you find, but at least you'll know.

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The Battle

Uli Kuenzel

Jon Caldwell

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taplio

The Battle

Uli Kuenzel

Jon Caldwell

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Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Jon Caldwell's LinkedIn Performance

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