The $50,000 Deal I Almost Threw Away

Good Morning. Today is Make Up Your Own Holiday Day, so I'm officially declaring it National Follow Up Day. And better yet, Thursday is arguably the best day of the week to send a follow up. Everyone's in a good mood because the week's almost over, but they still have a full day left to actually get work done. If you've needed a reminder to do your follow ups today, here it is. Now, let's get into today's Follow Up. (:

When your buyer is leaving the company ❓
75 sales emails that are converting right now ✍
Disqualifying in the best way possible 😅
What the CRO of Replit looks for in Sales Reps 👀
Sales jobs & a meme 😂

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Sales Tip of The Day 💡

When a contact tells you they're leaving their company, use it as an opportunity to collect unfiltered intel.

❌ "That's exciting, congrats on the next chapter! Would love to stay in touch."
✅ "Congrats, that's huge. Could I give you a quick call this afternoon? I've always valued your perspective and wanted to get your honest take on a few things."

A buyer who's leaving has no internal politics to protect, no vendor relationships to maintain, and no reason to give you anything but the truth.

Ask them what the real problems were, who actually owns the budget, or what it would take for a new vendor to get a shot.

This is a rare opportunity to get insight that prospects are often afriad to share.

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.

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The $50K Deal I Almost Threw Away

A few years back, an inbound lead came in at a company I was working for.

Like always, I got excited when I saw the notification. But my excitement disappeared pretty quickly when I saw a Gmail address and a budget listed as "under $5K."

Everything about this lead screamed "tire kicker" and the kind of form submission most reps either ignore completely or send a templated email, expecting to never get a response.

I almost did the same thing. But something made me pick up the phone. And after a few minutes on the call, the budget conversation completely changed. The prospect explained that they use their Gmail to collect information without tipping off vendors that they're at a big name buyer.

That lead that looked like a fake, unqualified buyer, all of a sudden turned into a $50,000 deal.

It taught me something I think about on every single call now: disqualification is one of the most important skills in sales, but also one of the most dangerous.

Your Pipeline Is Lying to You

The reality is, 40-60% of B2B deals end in no decision.

The prospect doesn't go with a competitor or decide to build it in house. They just literally don’t buy anything. And while those deals sit in your pipeline looking like they might close "next quarter," they're eating your time and inflating your forecast.

On top of that, nearly 60% of forecasted deals slip to the next quarter. And a big reason is what we call "happy ears," or the habit of hearing what you want to hear on a call.

The prospect says, "this is really interesting," and to a rep with happy ears, it translates to “this is something we want to buy”. So the rep marks the deal as 70% likely to close. Meanwhile, the prospect has no budget, no timeline, and no urgent pain to make them buy right now.

Disqualifying these deals is necessary to focus your time on the right deals. A clean pipeline with 15 real opportunities will always outperform a bloated one with 50 maybes.

The Rules Don't Always Apply

Disqualifying leads is important. But it’s tricky.

In my example above, if I had followed our standard qualification criteria on that Gmail lead, I would have disqualified it in five minutes. On paper, it looked like a waste of time.

But after one phone call, every signal said this was a real buyer, with a real budget.

And that's the trap of rigid disqualification. Without proper discovery, there’s no exact formula to rule out a lead. Unless of course, your buyer pool is so small that you already know them all, which does happen in some industries. But that’s a different story.

How to Actually Disqualify

There’s a few different disqualification frameworks out there, and they’re all pretty similar.

The actual framework you choose isn’t that important. But you should pick at least one to be your base layer.

For the sake of this example, let’s use BANT: Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline. The idea of this framework is to figure out 4 important things:

Can they pay for this?
Are you talking to the right person?
Do they actually have the problem you solve?
Is there a real timeline to make a decision?

If you can't get clear answers on at least two of those after a few conversations, it’s probably a signal. But you can't just run a checklist and make a call. Some of it is about the feeling you get on the phone.

Is this person engaged and curious, or are they just collecting information to justify a decision they've already made? Are they pulling you into their process, or keeping you hanging?

A prospect who checks one BANT box but shows up early to every call and is extremely responsive might be a better bet than one who checks 3 boxes but shows little interest.

The other piece of the disqualifying equation is simple math. You have a limited number of hours in a week to actually sell. Every deal in your pipeline is competing for that time.

When you keep a dead deal alive, you're taking time away from a real one.