Good Morning. We’ve got some breaking news for you this morning… pizza sales are down, and it's getting ugly out there. Pizzerias dropped from the second-most popular restaurant type to sixth, because customers are choosing ‘slop bowls’ like Chipotle & Cava over their product. If your pipeline looks rough right now, just be grateful you're not selling pizza. Now, let's get into today's Follow Up. (:
When they tell you they’re early in the process ✋
Book meetings through the secret 3rd door ✅
The guy who’s replacing his whole sales team with agents 🤖
Sales jobs & a meme 😂
Sales Tip of The Day 💡
When a prospect hits you with “We’re still really early in our evaluation,” push back on the ‘why now’.
❌ “Totally fine, we can circle back whenever.”
✅ “Early is good. What made this worth pulling into your week now?”
This question gently forces them to name the trigger event they haven’t said out loud yet, like a missed number, leadership pressure, a broken process, or a looming decision.
Every sales motion starts with a reason for change.
Close more deals faster while deals are still alive
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Instead of reviewing call recordings after a deal is already lost, Sales OS supports reps during the call itself. The result is faster ramp-up, more confident conversations, and more deals closed.
If you want to feel confident on every call and close more deals in the moment, Sales OS was built for you.
The Secret Third Door To Booked Meetings
Most sellers are taught to go straight to the decision maker.
Find the VP. Send the email. Follow up a few times. Try again next quarter.
The problem is that when you look at most deals, that’s rarely how the first meeting happened.
Most booked meetings start one step away, with someone who has access to the real decision maker.
Every rep is trying to break into an account from the front door, but the easiest access is from the side entrances.
The Front Door Is Overcrowded
As sellers, we’re taught to use the front door.
Cold emails and cold calls directly to the decision maker. And that door technically works... it's just an uphill battle.
Decision makers have a full inbox and a line of sales reps that want their attention. So when everyone’s trying to get in through the front door, you can sneak in through the side.
Alex Banayan wrote a book, The Third Door, explaining how people get access when the front door is closed.
What he found was that access usually follows the same structure, and every opportunity has 3 ways in:
The front door (where everyone waits in line)
The VIP entrance (where insiders walk straight through)
And the third door (where someone on the inside lets you in)
Where Access Actually Comes From
Across careers, industries, and deals, access usually comes from someone already inside.
LinkedIn didn’t scale through cold outbound. Reid Hoffman used his network to get early users that built credibility.
Sara Blakely, the founder of Spanx, didn’t get into Neiman Marcus through emails or pitches. She convinced a buyer to try Spanx on in the bathroom, and that single insider moment opened the door to major retail expansion.
What The Third Door Looks Like In Sales
The third door is usually an intro from someone close to the buyer.
Not the CEO. Not the biggest name on LinkedIn. The person with proximity and trust.
In sales, this usually shows up through people who don’t own the decision but control the path to it.
This can look like reps getting a meeting because:
An exec assistant forwards the note
A former employee vouches internally
A customer champion introduces you
A Chief of Staff routes the message
Same meeting, with a different entry point.
How You Can Use This As A Cheat Code
Let’s be honest. Trying to get a VP to respond directly is hard.
Instead of asking how to get the VP to respond, ask who is around that VP and is easier to get a hold of.
Warm internal paths: Reps getting meetings by asking anyone at their company who has a connection to their target account.
Product-side influence: SDRs land intros through people who are already using the tool and have internal pull.
Network: Lean on people you already know, and have connections to your target account.
Gatekeepers: Get friendly with gatekeepers, and they’ll get you access to people that wouldn’t have responded to you otherwise.
As one of the great poets of our time, Yo Gotti once said… “It goes down in the DM”.
Thanks to social, it’s never been easier in history to get a hold of someone way out of your league.
I mean… tell me another time in history when you could get a response on your tweet from the richest man in the world, or get ‘followed back’ by the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. (This happens every day on X).
So here’s the play: Engage with their content for 2-3 weeks. Add genuine value. Then slide into the DMs, as someone who "gets it," not a stranger.
You’re literally one DM away from your next deal.
Where do most of your booked meetings actually come from?
Social DMs Are The Modern Third Door