Good Morning. Welcome to 2026! Hopefully you're lucky enough to have today off, eating leftover party food, and regretting that fourth glass of champagne. Our intern, however, was up this morning with two espressos, making sure we could get this to you on the first day of 2026. Someone had to do it. Now, let's get into today's Follow Up. (:
When a deal feels too easy 💰
The 4 sales trends to bet on this year 🫵
Companies are making sales reps ‘share quota’ 👀
Sales jobs & a meme 😂
Sales Tip of The Day 💡
When a deal feels a little “too easy,” or your prospect seems a little too agreeable, pause and verify power.
❌ “Looks like we’re good to go.”
✅ “Who else needs to be confident in this before it’s a yes?”
Easy seeming deals get killed by unseen stakeholders. Find out who they are as soon as possible.
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Finally, a curated database of 100 proven side hustles (that actually work)
Each idea comes with required startup costs, time investment, and potential earnings
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Detailed skill requirements so you can match your talents to the right opportunity
Bonus: Priority scoring system to identify which hustles align with your lifestyle
Don't let another month slip by watching others build their empire. Your next income stream is hiding in our database, waiting to be discovered.
4 Sales Trends You Should Bet on in 2026
We spent the last month talking to sales reps on the front lines, and digging through Reddit threads, private Slack channels, and LinkedIn rants nobody reads.
And the same patterns kept showing up. Over and over again.
The best teams and reps are trying new things and adjusting to what’s working, and adopting new tools and workflows that give them an edge.
So we put together the 4 sales trends that you should be betting on this year to give yourself an unfair advantage.
AI Is Giving Small Sales Teams An Advantage
For a long time, sales rewarded volume.
More reps. More messages. More activity. Whoever could do the most usually won.
That formula is getting disrupted with AI.
Now everyone can generate emails, call notes, prospect research, and operate like a team much bigger than they actually are, for under $100/month.
The futuristic sales rep will operate like a team of 5. Except instead of five humans, they’ll be 1 human with 4 AI agents.
Reps will treat AI like an assistant or a chief of staff. Research before calls. Clean follow-ups after calls. CRM updates without chasing notes at the end of the day.
HubSpot’s 2025 State of Sales Report shows AI is already embedded in how teams operate and used by 92% of reps surveyed.
If it isn’t already obvious by now… you’re falling behind your competitors if you’re unwilling to adopt AI.
Trust is at an all time low. And that’s why it matters.
Thanks to AI, it’s hard to know what’s real these days.
Fake audio, deepfake videos, and every Software company claiming their barely-usable tool is going to replace a $100K employee.
Trust is harder to earn than ever. And because of that, it’s becoming a moat.
Sales reps who gain trust in their market create an advantage that makes it feel impossible for competitors to get traction.
So how do you actually build it?
Show up consistently.
Admit when you don't know something.
Give away valuable stuff for free.
Follow through on tiny promises.
Be honest about your product's limits.
Mass Outreach won’t work like it used it.
Let’s be real for a second… Cold email doesn’t work like it used to.
Now that anyone can cheaply generate 1000s of AI messages and blast them out to 1000’s of random email addresses, there’s a ton of noise to cut through.
We saw Ramp announce the shutdown of their AI SDR team this year, because it didn’t have the edge like it used to.
As AI gets better, cheaper, and more accessible, the human touch becomes more valuable.
Human reps enhanced with AI will be the unfair advantage in 2026.
In-person is still king.
The energy. The speed. The trust.
A Zoom call will never replace walking into a prospect's office, reading their body language in real-time, and adjusting your pitch on the fly.
In-person selling is rare now. And that's exactly why it works.
And this goes for selling to prospects in person and working with your sales team in an office.
Sales teams run differently when everyone's together. You can't replicate the energy of a bullpen over Slack. Momentum is contagious. Remote teams lose that.
A remote sales rep on Reddit recently visited his first prospect in person after years of selling over Zoom and felt like he'd discovered a whole new world.
We made so much progress in person, I got to shake hands and build awesome relationships, and we’re looking good to get a 6-figure signed very fast.
The prospect even told him that showing up in person was one of the deciding factors for going with them.
Which sales trend will matter most this year?
