Edward Gorbis

Cold outreach is dying.

Response rates are down. Inboxes are flooded. Buyers are ignoring you.

Meanwhile, the top performers I worked with at AWS weren't grinding through 500 cold emails a week. They were asking for 3-4 warm intros — and booking 10x more meetings.

The difference?

→ Cold email converts at 2-3%
→ Warm intros convert at 35-40%

The math is obvious. But most sales reps don't do it because:
• It feels awkward to ask
• They don't know WHO to ask
• They're afraid of burning social capital

Over the last 15 years, I worked in enterprise sales at AWS, WeWork, and other startups closing 8-figure deals. The common thread in my biggest wins? Warm introductions.

Now I'm sharing everything I learned:
→ How to find who in your network can connect you to any prospect
→ The exact scripts that get 60% yes rates on intro requests
→ How to build relationships that compound over time

I post daily about warm intros, relationship-building, and enterprise sales.

Follow along if you want to book more meetings without sending another cold email.

📩 DM me "INTRO" if you want my free intro request template.

SMB Growth

I deleted 4,000 LinkedIn connections last month.

Not unfollowed. Deleted.

Here’s why: I had 35,000 connections. Sounded impressive. But when I searched for someone who could intro me to a VP at a target account, I got 40 results I didn’t recognize.

A network you can’t navigate is just a vanity metric with a blue border.

So I started auditing. If I couldn’t remember how we met or why we connected, gone. If they hadn’t posted in 2 years, gone. If they were clearly a bot, gone.

What’s left is smaller but infinitely more useful. I can now search “Snowflake” and get 6 people I actually know.

Everyone talks about growing your network. Nobody talks about pruning it.

When’s the last time you cleaned yours?

Edward Gorbis 🇺🇸

I write Morning Sales ☕ for B2B sellers | Warm intros convert 10x better than cold — I show you how | Top 1% Seller @ AWS | 15 years enterprise sales | ₿itcoin

Stop sending cold emails.

I'm serious. For the next 30 days, replace every cold email with one warm intro request.

Here's what the math says:

Cold email → meeting: 3%
Warm intro → meeting: 38%

One good intro request is worth 13 cold emails.

But nobody teaches this.

Sales training covers objection handling.
It covers discovery questions.
It never covers: "How do I ask someone I know for an intro without feeling like a leech?"

I spent 15 years figuring this out.

Documented every message that worked.
Every one that failed.
The exact scripts with 50%+ response rates.

Comment "INTRO" below and I'll send you the playbook.

What's stopping you from asking for more intros?

My parents left Ukraine with two suitcases and $400.

Nobody questioned their dedication. They questioned their sanity.

“You don’t speak English.” “You have no connections.” “You’ll never catch up.”

They heard “no” in a language they barely understood for years before they heard “yes.”

I think about that every time someone tells me an idea won’t work.

Because the people who’ve actually rebuilt from zero don’t critique from the sidelines. They’re too busy figuring out the next move.

The loudest opinions about your potential usually come from people who’ve never had to prove theirs in a country that doesn’t owe them anything.

Who shaped your definition of “possible”?

90% of C-level decision-makers won't respond to cold outreach.

But here's what they will respond to:

A name they recognize.

I didn't believe this until I tested it.

For 30 days, I spent 15 minutes before every cold email doing one thing:

Engaging with that person on LinkedIn.

Not pitching. Not sliding into DMs.

Just thoughtful comments on their posts.

Results after 30 days:

Cold emails to strangers: 3% reply rate.
Cold emails to people I'd engaged with: 11% reply rate.

Same message. Same offer. 3x the response.

Here's the math:

5 minutes finding their recent post.
5 minutes writing a real comment (not "Great insight!").
5 minutes letting them see my face in their notifications.

Then I send the email.

By then, I'm not a stranger. I'm "that person who had a good take on my post."

The inbox is brutal right now.

Average cold email open rate dropped to 27% this year.

Recognition is the cheat code.

If you're not warming up prospects before the first touch, you're competing against 150+ other cold emails in their inbox.

Be the familiar name.

Cold vs Warm: The Math Nobody Does

Peter Marriott just told me something that should make every sales leader uncomfortable.

"Never thought to reach out to a prospect merely asking for a referral from their company until reading the comment section on one of your posts."

Read that again.

A professional seller — someone who prospects for a living — never considered asking for a warm intro until they stumbled across a LinkedIn comment.

That's not a knowledge gap. That's an industry failure.

We trained an entire generation of sellers to send 200 cold emails a day. We gave them AI tools to send 2,000. We optimized subject lines, sequences, and send times down to the millisecond.

But nobody taught them to say: "Hey, I noticed you're connected to [name]. Would you be open to making an intro?"

Here's what AI can't replicate:

The trust your former colleague has in you. The favor your old manager owes you. The relationship you built over three years of working side by side.

AI made cold outreach faster. It also made it easier to ignore. Every inbox is drowning in AI-generated messages that sound polished and say nothing.

Meanwhile, one text from someone who knows you — "hey, take this call, this person is legit" — still closes more deals than a thousand perfectly crafted sequences.

Your network isn't a nice-to-have anymore. It's the last channel AI can't commoditize.

The reps who figure that out first won't just hit quota. They'll be unhirable — because every company will want the person who brings relationships through the door.

Shoutout to Peter Marriott for the honest feedback. What's the one intro that changed your career? I'd bet it wasn't from a cold email.

"Never thought to reach out to a prospect merely asking for a referral from their company until reading the comment section on one of your posts."



"Your price is too high."

Four words that separate closers from discounters.

I heard it on a $180K deal last year at AWS. My gut said cave. My training said don't.

So I asked one question instead:

"Help me understand — too high compared to what?"

Then I shut up.

What she said next changed the entire deal.

"Compared to what we budgeted." Not the product. Not a competitor. The budget.

Which meant I wasn't talking to the person who could actually approve the spend. I was negotiating with someone who'd already been told no.

That one question saved me from giving a 20% discount to someone who couldn't sign the contract anyway.

I've watched this play out hundreds of times. The answer falls into one of three buckets.

And it's almost never about the price.

When someone says "compared to [competitor]" — you have a positioning problem, not a pricing problem.

When someone says "compared to our budget" — you're probably talking to the wrong person.

When someone says "compared to what we expected" — you didn't set expectations early enough in the deal.

Three different problems. Three different fixes. None of them require a discount.

The reps who cave on price at the first pushback train every future buyer to push back on price.

The reps who get curious and ask better questions close at full margin.

Price objections aren't about price. They're about perceived value.

Fix the perception. Keep the price.

What's the best response to a price objection you've ever used or heard?

The worst discovery call I ever ran changed my career.

2018. Big prospect. Huge deal potential.

I spent 45 minutes talking about our product.

Features. Benefits. Case studies. ROI.

Nailed the presentation.

Lost the deal.

Why?

Because I never learned what actually mattered to them.

I was pitching. Not discovering.

Here's what I do now:

I ask one question that unlocks everything:

"What would have to be true for this to be worth your time today?"

Then I shut up.

The silence is uncomfortable. Let it be.

Most reps fill silence with more talking.

That's the mistake.

The best discovery calls feel like 80/20.

80% them talking.
20% you asking better questions.

When they're done, I ask: "What else?"

Every time. Without fail.

Because the first answer is rarely the real answer.

It's the safe answer. The one they give everyone.

"What else?" gets you to the actual problem.

The one keeping them up at night.

That's where deals are won.

Stop presenting on discovery calls.

Start discovering.

The 6 months that protect your ego are the same 6 months that make you irrelevant.

Justin Welsh as nailed it — most people would rather be average forever than look stupid for 6 months.

In sales, that’s fatal right now.

Every rep I know is “waiting for AI to get better.”

Meanwhile the ones actually using it — badly, awkwardly, in front of their whole team — are rewriting how they sell.

Not because the tools are perfect.

Because the reps are training themselves to think differently.

The gap isn’t AI skills.

It’s willingness to be the worst person in the room at something new — while everyone else polishes skills that are quietly expiring.

6 months of looking stupid with AI will teach you more about your buyers than 6 years of “trusting your gut.”

Your gut doesn’t read 10-Ks at 2am.

The 6 months that protect your ego are the same 6 months that make you irrelevant. 

“90% of all LinkedIn looks like it’s been piped through ChatGPT.”

I wish I could argue with this. I can’t.

Because it’s true.

AI writes a post. AI drops a comment. AI replies to that comment.

Nobody learns anything. Nobody connects. Nobody walks away sharper than they were five minutes ago.

It’s just machines exchanging words with machines while the humans scroll past all of it.

I’ve been in sales for 15 years. The best content I ever consumed on this platform came from founders and leaders who wrote about things that actually happened to them.

A lost deal. A hard quarter. A conversation that rewired how they thought about selling.

And the comments were just as good. People adding their own experience. Challenging the take. Sharing something you could actually use on your next call.

That was a real value exchange between people with skin in the game.

Now most of it reads like it was written by someone who has never sold anything, lost anything, or learned anything the hard way.

Because it wasn’t written by someone at all.

Here’s the thing most people miss:

AI is the sharpest tool a salesperson has ever been handed. I use it every day to research faster, prep deeper, and personalize at scale.

But there’s a massive difference between using AI to sharpen your thinking and using AI to replace your thinking.

One makes you dangerous. The other makes you invisible.

The path forward is simple.

Write about what you’re actually experiencing. Share the lesson that cost you something to learn. When someone posts something real, add something real back.

Do that consistently and the right people start to notice. Not because you gamed an algorithm. Because trust still works the way it always has.

One honest interaction at a time.

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"This looks great. Let me review with my team."

Translation: you'll never hear from me again.

I lost a deal in 2023 that still bothers me. The prospect had said those exact words on a Thursday. Sounded enthusiastic. Even smiled on camera.

I followed up Monday. Nothing. Wednesday. Nothing. The next Monday. Read receipt, no reply.

By week three I'd sent 5 follow-ups, each one more desperate than the last. "Just checking in." "Circling back." "Bumping this to the top of your inbox."

Every single one made it worse.

What I didn't know: her budget got pulled the day after our call. She felt guilty. The guilt made her avoid me. My follow-ups made the guilt worse. The guilt made her avoid me more.

A death spiral. And I was the one spinning it.

That deal taught me something I now see everywhere: ghosting is a symptom, not the disease.

The disease is almost always one of three things. They weren't the actual decision-maker. Something changed internally they didn't tell you. Or you were the "get a quote for comparison" call and they already knew who they were choosing.

More follow-ups don't solve any of those problems. They just make the guilt heavier.

So I stopped chasing. Started pattern-interrupting instead.

The message that's worked best for me is almost embarrassingly simple: "No worries if priorities shifted. Just let me know and I'll stop following up."

That one line has resurrected conversations after 2, 3, even 4 months of silence. Because it does the opposite of what every other vendor does. It removes pressure instead of adding it.

People don't ghost because they hate you. They ghost because responding feels hard.

Make responding easy and you'll hear back from prospects everyone else already gave up on.

What's the longest silence you've broken with a single message?

The rep who outsells you next quarter won’t work harder than you.

They’ll just know how to use AI and you won’t.

That’s the new unfair advantage. And it’s invisible.

A rep I mentor told me she stopped telling colleagues how she preps for meetings.

Not because it’s proprietary.

Because when she explains “AI helped me build this,” people get weird about it.

So she stays quiet. Shows up more prepared. Wins more deals.

While her peers spend 3 days on a competitive analysis, she does it in 47 minutes.

Same deal. Same stakes. Same room.

Guess which one the prospect calls back.

Meanwhile, here’s what most reps are using AI for:

Writing slightly better cold emails.

That’s it.

Here’s what the sharpest reps are actually doing:

Pre-call research in 5 minutes that used to take an hour.

Account plans built around the prospect’s own 10-K language.

Objection prep that anticipates what the CFO will say before the meeting starts.

Personalized business cases that make procurement say “this rep gets it.”

The gap between “AI for emails” and “AI for selling” is where careers are splitting right now.

And most people don’t see it yet.

I read that a managing partner at a top law firm spends hours a day with AI.

Not because he’s bored.

Because he’s senior enough to understand what happens to people who coast.

The reps saying “AI can’t replace relationships” are right.

But the rep with strong relationships AND AI fluency?

They’re not working more hours. They’re extracting more value from every hour they work.

Here’s the thing nobody wants to hear:

This window closes.

Right now, AI fluency makes you the most dangerous person in the room.

In 18 months, it just makes you normal.

One hour a day. Every day. Try something you haven’t tried before.

Do that for 6 months and you’ll understand what’s coming better than 99% of the people around you.

The bar is still on the floor.

It won’t be for long.

What’s one way you’ve used AI in your sales process that actually moved the needle?

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