month. I’m emphasizing high quality because frequently outbound sales teams pump up their results by throwing over lots of poorly-qualified demos and appointments to their Account Executives. So when I say “high quality,” I mean it. Back to March 2003…my goal was to generate at least eight highly qualified opportunities per month. I was doing two per month through cold calling. OUCH. How was I going to quadruple my results? Breakthrough #1: The biggest bottleneck in prospecting into companies that have more than a few executives isn’t getting to the decision maker/influencer/point person…it’s finding them in the first place! Oftentimes the ultimate decision maker—such as the CEO or VP Sales in the case of Salesforce.com, is not the best person for your first conversations. And in larger companies, there can be so many people with the word “sales” or “marketing” in their title, it’s impossible from the outside to tell who does what. I learned this through hard work—cold calling, cold emailing, plugging away. I realized I spent most of my time hunting for the right person—not trying to sell or qualify them. If I could find the right person, I could usually have a productive business conversation with them. But it took a LOT of time to find them, especially in those byzantine Fortune 5000 companies! In Desperation, I Tried An Experiment I’d always assumed that mass emailing executives wouldn’t work. Don’t I need to carefully craft each email to them to make it personal? I wrote one email that was a classic cold calling letter: “Do you have these challenges? X, Y Z…” I also wrote a totally “short and sweet” different email—in plain text, with no HTML -- simply asking for a referral to the right person at the company. (I don’t share the actual email templates in this book for two reasons, which I will share