Good Morning. A senior partner at KPMG just got caught using AI to pass an AI training exam last week, and was fined $7K for the privilege. Honestly, using AI to cheat on your AI exam might be the most 2026 thing we've ever heard. If you're still trying to figure out how much to lean on AI in your outreach and calls, just know that even the consultants charging $1,000 an hour haven't figured it out yet. Now, let's get into today's Follow Up. (:
‘We don’t have budget right now.’ 🗣
Lessons from Hollywood's #1 sales rep 📖
What a 2026 sales team looks like 🤔
Sales jobs & a meme 😂
Sales Tip of The Day 💡
When a buyer says, “we don’t have budget right now,” flip the conversation into a discussion on priority.
❌ “Are you sure there’s no flexibility?”
✅ “Understood. Out of curiosity, where does solving this rank against your other initiatives right now?”
Make it about importance instead of money.
If you’re ranked low, you have a positioning problem.
If you’re ranked high, you’ve got leverage to help find the budget.
Sales Emails That Actually Work: 75 Templates Inside
Fed up with emails that vanish into the void? Our collection of 75 field-tested templates delivers what others just promise: responses. No fluff, no jargon – just emails prospects actually read and reply to.
You'll get:
25 first-touch templates that spark real conversations
30 follow-up templates that keep deals moving
20 break-up templates that preserve future opportunities
These aren't theoretical best practices. They're battle-tested messages used by successful sales teams to land meetings and close deals. Each template is designed for quick customization – swap in your details and start seeing results.
Sales Tips from Hollywood's Greatest Salesman
Michael Ovitz was a talent agent.
His job was to represent actors, directors, and writers, negotiate their deals, and make sure they never left for a competitor.
If that sounds a lot like sales, it's because it is. Prospecting, relationship management, retention. He just did it with movie stars instead of software or a physical product.
In 1975, Ovitz and four guys quit their jobs with zero clients and no money and started Creative Artists Agency out of a tiny office.
Within a decade, CAA represented more A-list talent than any firm in Hollywood. Spielberg. De Niro. Hanks. Murray. Newman.
And luckily for us, he wrote a book about how he did it.
We spent the last week condensing his best sales learning, lessons, and tips into something you can use and learn from.
Let’s dive in.
300 Calls & a 5:45 am Wake Up
Ovitz was up at 5:45 am. By 6:00, he was on a stationary bike, calling Europe and skimming newspapers.
After cardio and martial arts, he was in the car by 8:00 am, making calls.
Then meetings, lunch, dinner, back-to-back until midnight.
In between all of that, he ran up to 300 calls a day.
He had two assistants just to manage the volume. Every message got a red-ink dot rating. Five dots meant "call back right now." One dot meant "call before end of week."
When he signed Martin Scorsese, he told him straight up: "I'm not going to spend an hour on the phone with you a day. Then I can't be doing everything else I need to do, and I'm worthless to you."
You probably think you’re busy and "high activity." Ovitz made 300 calls a day for decades.
Half a Milly on Gifts Every Year
CAA had a dedicated assistant whose only job was giving gifts.
That's it. Full-time gift giver. (Sounds like a fun job tbh).
Every agent fed intel to this person. Tom Hanks is taking scuba lessons. Stallone admired Ovitz's Ferrari. (Ovitz later gave him the title.)
When a client had a birthday or a movie shooting, they got something. But not champagne or a gift basket. Ovitz's rule was that important gifts should never be disposable. Rare first editions. Paintings. Very personal gifts that only that person would get excited about.
CAA spent over $500,000 a year on gifts. They even sent gifts to non-clients, because in Ovitz's words, "a nonclient is just a future client who hasn't realized it yet."
But you probably don't have $500K to spend on gifts. Although that would be pretty awesome...
The same principles scale down with a smaller budget.
Figure out what your prospect actually cares about and stop sending branded coffee mugs and logo pens that end up in a junk drawer. If they're into running, send them a pack of gels before their next race. If they surf, send a bar of wax with a note. If they just had a kid, send something for the baby.
The dollar amount doesn't matter. What matters is that it's personal enough to prove you were paying attention.
CAA's 4 Commandments
Underneath all of this, Ovitz ran CAA on four rules that every agent had to follow:
Never lie to a client.
Return every phone call the same day.
Follow up and communicate constantly.
Never badmouth the competition.
None of it is complicated. But Ovitz enforced them like law. And in a business where agents constantly talked trash about rival firms and "forgot" to return calls, CAA became the agency that clients trusted.
If a rival agency did good work, CAA agents acknowledged it and moved on. The confidence that comes from never needing to trash someone else is the kind of thing prospects feel, even if they can't name it.
You don't need 300 calls a day or a $500K gifts budget to become world class like Ovitz.
Reps who follow the four commandments consistently are the ones who become the best in any industry.
Which of CAA's 4 Commandments do you think sales reps break the most?
Sales Around The Web 🗞
🤖 What does the 2026 sales team actually look like? (Hint: it involves AI agents.)
🏆 A tier list of the top sales job titles (and the titles to avoid at all costs).
🤔 This head of sales has been fired from two jobs because his former employer keeps calling the new companies he works for.
Cool Sales Jobs 💼
Inside Sales Executive @ Opentext
SMB Account Executive @ Reforge learning
Account Executive @ Descript
Wholesale and Manufacturing Sales @ Mercor ($90-$150/hour)
Sales Meme of the Day
Today’s newsletter was written by Nic Conley