Patrick William Joyce's Linkedin Analytics

Building lists for 70 clients isn’t just a volume game. It’s a precision game. In theory, building outbound lists should be easy: Define your ICP → Pull a list → Sequence and go. But in practice, ICP definitions evolve. Client feedback reroutes strategy halfway through. The one constant is... nothing stays constant. When that happens, having the right tools in your kit matters. Ocean.io has been a lifesaver. Especially when the ICP isn’t clean-cut and we need to pivot quickly. We use it for: -Narrowing in on second- and third-tier segments when the obvious list is tapped -Spotting lookalike companies we wouldn’t have found otherwise -Syncing it with Clay to run creative enrichment workflows It’s not just a data source. It’s a way to stay on task when list building becomes a puzzle. If you run an outbound agency -- or just want another tool to break out of list building ruts -- check it out. Not a paid plug. We’ve got a content partnership with them, but we were users first. Let me know if you want a peek at how we’re integrating it. Happy to share.

Here’s a tactical blueprint for using AI to write killer emails: Interview 5 customers. Ask what they were doing before, what they hated, and what pushed them to act. Have a notetaker in the call. Keep peeling the onion - act like a therapist and get them to talk as much as you can for the transcriber. Take the transcripts and prompt your favorite LLM as follows: “You’re a senior outbound strategist helping a founder translate raw customer interviews into a friction-first cold email. You have 5 transcripts of real buyer conversations. From these, extract the emotional spikes, recurring complaints, and phrases that signal urgency or frustration. Write a sequence of 3 cold emails that feel like they came from someone who lives in their world. It should: 1) Lead with a pain the buyer actually said, not what we think they feel 2) Be <60 words 3) Avoid adjectives, features, and startup fluff 4) End with a low-commitment ask (e.g. “Does any of that sound like your version of reality?”) Bonus: make it sound so specific it couldn’t have been written by anyone who hasn’t lived their pain.” Test them. Track responses. Keep what hits. Iterate the rest. Until your cold email mirrors a real complaint your customer muttered under their breath last week… you’re still guessing.

Outsourcing sales isn’t inherently wrong. But it’s dangerous if used to avoid the painful process of learning, testing, and failing. You have to build internal competence before you can accurately judge external help. Otherwise, you're just paying someone to help you stay confused.

If your SDRs are chasing everyone, they’re probably struggling. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard a founder say something like: “Our TAM is $20B. Anyone in healthcare, finance, or retail could use this.” That’s not REALLY targeting. Your TAM is the total possible market. Your ICP is the specific buyer you can actually land with your current team, messaging, and price point -- its the ideal. Biggest red flags I see in ICP definitions: “Companies with 50–5,000 employees” “Anyone who wants to grow revenue” “Marketing leaders” (no context on budget, tech stack, or growth stage) If your SDRs don’t know who they’re really talking to and don't have hyper specific lists built, they will be super inefficient. Segment your TAM, tighten your ICP. Those things are not interchangeable.

There's a difference between what you are saying on a cold pitch versus what the prospect is hearing. You’re saying this: “We built a modular, event driven orchestration layer that syncs customer behavior data across your GTM stack in real time. It integrates with Segment, HubSpot, and Salesforce via bidirectional APIs and has a native enrichment pipeline built on Snowflake…” They’re hearing: “You’ve built some niche thing that may or may not apply to what I’m doing… but it sounds complicated, risky, and a b**** to implement. I have no time for this.” They don’t care how it works. They care how their day changes. Try this instead: “Most of the people I talk to have a RevOps team pulling usage data from 4 tools into Excel every week just to prep QBR slides. We built a fix so you can focus on the right buyers at the right time. Do you think that'd make an impact?” You might get a follow up question, like "how would you do that?" Then you can start talking about how. Now they're listening. Hope this helps

If your AE isn’t ready to demo on the first call… you don’t have a sales process. You have a blocker. If you're still splitting your discovery and demo calls, you're not optimizing for the buyer. That should make you stop dead in your tracks and think (I know, it hurts, but you should do it) As a buyer, there's nothing worse than setting aside 30 minutes for a call that turns into an interrogation. Just a rep trying to "qualify" me before maybe showing the thing I came to see. If you're an AE, be ready to do both. Discovery and demo. On the same call. Period. Buyers don’t want two Zooms. If you’re a sales leader, I get it. Process matters. But if your process burns buyer trust in the first 10 minutes, it’s time to adapt. Buyers are smarter. Busier. Less patient. Don’t make them jump through hoops to hear how you can help. Spend 20 minutes figuring that out and then show me how you'd do it for 10 minutes. If I need another call after that to finish the buying decision, loop other people in etc, I'll let you know. What are we DOING?

You don’t learn grit from a President’s Club award. You learn it from the panic of seeing zero on the board with a mortgage due in two weeks. If you’ve never missed quota, I don’t want to learn from you. Sales is a job where you lose more than you win. If you’ve never taken a beating, how do I know your advice works when things go sideways? The best salespeople I know have gotten fired. When I teach reps, I don’t give them theory. I give them stories. What I tried, what didn't work, and what I fixed. I want them to learn from the bruises I already earned. If all your sales content sounds like a case study, I’m out. Show me some scars.

For years, I thought outbound success came down to great copy. If the email was sharp, then results would follow. But after a decade inside startup teams, agencies, and global sales orgs… I learned the truth. Most outbound campaigns don’t fail because of messaging. They fail before the first email is ever sent. Why? Bad targeting. Flimsy segmentation. Bloated lists. Too many personas, too soon. The biggest unlock for outbound performance, the one that separates chaotic teams from consistent pipelines, is this: Get religious about your list. Last week I pulled together a breakdown on what I’ve learned: Why vague ICPs tank results How randomized lists kill SDR momentum What good segmentation actually looks like And how to build targeting that compounds over time It’s short, visual, and made for teams that want to scale without guessing. Attaching the slides here. If you're building an outbound engine right now, I think this will help.

🔥 We’re Hiring another SDR Manager at LevelUp Leads Most sales jobs sell you a dream. This one hands you the keys to build something real. We’re not looking for a “team lead” or a glorified dashboard babysitter. We’re looking for a builder. Someone who’s been in the trenches, knows what world class outbound looks like, and is ready to put their stamp on the next great agency success story. Here’s the deal: LevelUp Leads is one of the fastest-growing outsourced cold calling agencies in the U.S. We work with startups, mid market and enterprise teams across SaaS, ecommerce, fintech, and pro services and we’re growing like a weed. We’ve got: A deep bench of SDRs, already split into pods A strong operational backbone (CSMs, data, tech, training) Proven founders who know how to build and sell High-profile clients and a loud voice in the market What we don't have YET: you. Call coaching. Performance management. Onboarding. Incentives. Culture. Strategy. You’ll touch it all. Who you are: You’ve been an SDR before. A good one. You’ve led reps and made them better, not just tracked KPIs. You’re hungry to build your name in the agency world, not hide behind a logo. You want reps to be proud to say they worked under you. This is not the easy path. But it’s the one that gets your name out there. No BS. No micromanagement. Just the chance to lead, build, and win. If you’re ready to make your mark, find the link in the comments to apply. Message me and Eddie Cortez. Let’s talk.

I was handed 10 enterprise accounts. That’s it. No mobile numbers. No intros. No excuses. Six weeks later, I had $6M in pipeline. Here’s how I cracked it. I was the first biz dev hire at Ekata. Crack 10 Fortune 100 accounts without a brand to lean (they've since been acquired by Mastercard) on and barely any mobile data to work with. So I went surgical: Mapped 30+ contacts per account - treated each org like a system to decode. Five contacts per account, sequenced. If I got no reply after three emails, I swapped in a fresh contact. Wrote tight, frictionless messages Here’s one that got replies: "Hey [Name], noticed your time at Acme. They're a customer of ours — we help them with ID resolution across name, address, phone, email, and IP in geos where the data is hard to obtain. Hoping to go over some similar ideas with you?" Stayed disciplined with outreach No spamming. Lots of guesswork. Structured follow-up and methodical targeting. Minimal cold calls. I called the president of the retail bank at a major US bank at 7pm EST by mistake and he chewed me out. I still got the meeting with someone else. No fancy tools. I was doing this from gmail, notepad, and google sheets. Clarity, process, and persistence. If you want the PDF with the exact method I used to break into these accounts, like/comment/follow and I’ll send it over.