Stop Spamming, Do This Instead (w/ JB Daguené, CEO of Evergrowth)

What It Covers

JB Daguené explains how sales automation and AI turned SDRs into button-clickers sending spam at scale, why email-first strategies now fail, and how research-based phone outreach with AI-powered context windows creates the new competitive advantage.

Key Questions Answered

• •Research-based selling: JB closed 600 customers in two years at Trustpilot by manually researching every prospect before calling, spending the first twenty seconds demonstrating company-specific knowledge to shift conversations from defense-attack dynamics to peer-to-peer dialogue within two minutes of connection.
• •Data quality collapse: When lead databases commoditized around 2014, companies automated outreach using only three filters—industry, company size, region—resulting in 70% of contacted companies falling outside actual ICP definitions, transforming predictable revenue methodology into systematic spam that trained buyers to ignore outbound.
• •Hallucination elimination: AI hallucinations stem from poor prompting, not model limitations. Adding fallback instructions like "if you don't find the information, reply I don't know" removes fabricated responses. Every agent needs explicit fallback prompting and shared training context to maintain consistency across autonomous workflows.
• •Phone channel resurgence: Cold email reply rates dropped from 20% connection rates to 3% overall replies with only 20% positive, requiring 400-730 emails per positive response. Meanwhile, phone calling becomes the new blue ocean as an entire generation of salespeople never learned phone skills, creating competitive advantage through research-based openers.