Recommendation · MoneyDon't pepper a prospect with questions for the full 30 minutes — weave in a customer story that mirrors their situation, including specific numbers, then stop and let them react. Structure it as: situation match ('a customer came to us with the same thing'), what you did, how you solved it, and the coolest result — e.g., a final sequence with an 80% open rate and ~7% response rate. After delivering the punchline, pull the rug out and move to the second point — the goal is to make the prospect say 'we want that' repeatedly throughout the call so next steps happen without pushing.
30 Minutes to President's Club | No-Nonsense Sales · #619: Active Listening to Loosen up Your Discovery Calls and First Dates | Sam McKenna | 30MPC Hall of Fame
Recommendation · MoneyChris Dreyer advises niching down so specifically that you have a tailored offer: know how many cases you need to create, what content to create, and which marketing channels your niche congregates in. No one says 'I'm in home services' — they say they're a plumber or a roofer; define your niche that specifically.
Ahrefs · How I Make $32M A Year Dominating This SEO Niche
Method · MoneyGary Vaynerchuk gives a concrete post-production recipe: every live show episode should become a Substack and Beehiiv article and be cut into 19 clips posted on every platform.
Method, not a verified protocol.
GaryVee · You Might Be Making Content Completely Wrong
Recommendation · MoneyRob Walling's first strategic approach is to take a general tool and apply it to a new vertical, such as scheduling for hair salons or accounting for car dealerships. He notes this has been popular since SaaS emerged in the late 2000s, when low distribution costs made small niches worthwhile.
Startups For the Rest of Us · Episode 854 | How to Find Startup Ideas (Sneak Peek Chapter from My New Book)
Method · MoneyAlex lays out a giveaway campaign: run a $2,000 private summer camp giveaway as the 'ballistic' version of the campaign, leading with the $5,000 private summer camp full summer experience as the main hook (anchored by starting with the really expensive thing first). Calculate the total value of the package ($500/week x 10 weeks = $5,000) to anchor the prize, and set second place at $3,000 off the $5,000 value, making the ticket $2,000. Make sure more than one person can win second place to stay legal and compliant — say 'more than one person can win' and announce first and second place prizes explicitly instead of saying 'everyone is going to win,' which removes the excitement. Run the giveaway as a seven to ten day campaign with giveaway ads plus a landing page, a countdown timer at the
Method, not a verified protocol.
Alex Hormozi · Can I Save This Failing Theme Park in 90 Days?
Recommendation · MoneyStart collecting all the ground truth you can evaluate your agent against — from historical data, production, or samples run with your domain experts. If you're in a regulated space, define your hard limits (things that definitely shouldn't happen, e.g., in financial services the agent should never give investment advice) and ingrain them in your evaluation set. Ideally this ensures they never happen; at least you will know about it when it does.
AI Engineer · Evals for High-Stakes AI Agents — Doneyli De Jesus & Annabell Schäfer, Langfuse
Recommendation · MoneyDoneyli De Jesus advises verifying that an LLM judge catches what you intended by manually judging a representative sample yourself and optimizing the judge for coherence with human raters. Without calibration against human-labeled ground truth, the judge will not judge the way a human would and may miss what you wanted to catch.
AI Engineer · Evals for High-Stakes AI Agents — Doneyli De Jesus & Annabell Schäfer, Langfuse
Recommendation · MoneyFor customer-facing or regulated-industry use cases, don't risk the agent doing something it shouldn't: build ground truth datasets before production. Curate them with domain experts within the company, include expected outputs (sample replies, expected behavior, keywords), and validate them with customers. Ground truth is also the foundation for auto-improvement.
AI Engineer · Evals for High-Stakes AI Agents — Doneyli De Jesus & Annabell Schäfer, Langfuse
Recommendation · MoneyTo ensure LLM-as-a-judge consistency (inter-rater reliability), judge a representative sample yourself, then run your LLM judge and optimize for coherence with what your human raters do. Academically you'd have a few human raters; practically, one human labels some data and you optimize the judge against that ground truth. Check the judge over time to make sure it stays representative. When running on production data, start with a few too many false positives — catch a little more than necessary but don't miss anything — then tune it down over time.
AI Engineer · Evals for High-Stakes AI Agents — Doneyli De Jesus & Annabell Schäfer, Langfuse
Recommendation · MoneyDefine quality gates for your agent and verify they are being enforced and scored on every interaction. Scores are automatically calculated whenever a new interaction or trace is captured by the system. Score whether information given to the customer is compliant with banking scope (e.g., a weather question is not compliant), detect failure modes and guardrails blocking answers, and use a score to flag customer intent (e.g., investment advice) so you can easily filter for those cases in traces.
AI Engineer · Evals for High-Stakes AI Agents — Doneyli De Jesus & Annabell Schäfer, Langfuse
Recommendation · MoneyAsk the buyer for a standard MSA and their non-negotiables (payment terms, litigation jurisdiction), then run everything through your own legal, procurement, rev ops, and sales ops in advance — because whatever the buyer wants, you ultimately won't agree to without internal review. Get on your own legal and procurement team's calendar early, before everyone else is rushing to do the same.
30 Minutes to President's Club | No-Nonsense Sales · #613: Master Parallel Selling Strategies to Speed Up Every Deal | Sam Mckenna | 30MPC Hall of Fame
Recommendation · MoneyTo multi-thread without being salesy, ask your contact specific questions they can't answer — questions only the decision-maker could answer — and they'll volunteer to bring that person in. Use decision-maker-level questions like: What are the priorities for this year? What are you forecasting? What's the growth? What's the roadmap? How are you gonna get there?
30 Minutes to President's Club | No-Nonsense Sales · #613: Master Parallel Selling Strategies to Speed Up Every Deal | Sam Mckenna | 30MPC Hall of Fame
Recommendation · MoneyWhen a deal is blocked waiting on a board presentation, schedule the procurement meeting directly after that presentation date. There's no harm in getting the meeting on the calendar early — it gets you on their calendar before everybody else tries to book time.
30 Minutes to President's Club | No-Nonsense Sales · #613: Master Parallel Selling Strategies to Speed Up Every Deal | Sam Mckenna | 30MPC Hall of Fame
Recommendation · MoneyBest reps parallel-process vendor review (procurement, legal, security) during the evaluation instead of after, because the three-month vendor review can slow the deal. Start as soon as you know the deal is moving forward (e.g., a 75-90% commit deal), rather than waiting for the decision to be final. By parallel processing paperwork during the evaluation, you'll have ~95% of the paperwork done by the time the decision-maker returns to sign the MSA.
30 Minutes to President's Club | No-Nonsense Sales · #613: Master Parallel Selling Strategies to Speed Up Every Deal | Sam Mckenna | 30MPC Hall of Fame
Recommendation · MoneyAsk the champion: 'How can I help you prepare for that meeting? What questions come up? What objections come up?' — including whether they have one or two skeptical partners — and offer to prepare them for those questions so they look like a star. Reference the questions managing partners or executive committees typically asked at similar firms and ask if those questions matter to their firm. Deliver the questions in language that feels authentic to you and fits the personality of the person they're presenting to. The goal of champion prep is making the champion look as prepared as possible, which in turn gets your deal across the line.
30 Minutes to President's Club | No-Nonsense Sales · #613: Master Parallel Selling Strategies to Speed Up Every Deal | Sam Mckenna | 30MPC Hall of Fame
Recommendation · MoneyEvery time you hear the word 'they' from a rep or buyer, ask yourself: do you know who is in that 'they'? When a buyer says they'll take it back to the team and decide together, ask who makes up the buying committee — some may have been your clients, have mutual connections with your execs, or worked with your CS team. If you don't know who the competition is, you're aiming in the dark.
30 Minutes to President's Club | No-Nonsense Sales · #613: Master Parallel Selling Strategies to Speed Up Every Deal | Sam Mckenna | 30MPC Hall of Fame
Recommendation · MoneyThe speakers recommend getting into the typical TDD red-green-refactor loop with your agent, using it within the verification piece itself: verify, reproduce, show me, fix it, then show me the proof. How the agent shows proof of a fix is just as important as the fix itself, because proof is what allows you to trust the model to do the work alone — when the agent says it's done, you know it's done because it has proved it to you in some way.
AI Engineer · Teach Your Agent to Prove It's Done — Nick Nisi & Zack Proser, WorkOS
Recommendation · MoneyThe speakers recommend giving your existing end-to-end tests (Playwright, React Testing Library) to your agent as a tool so it can run them and prove things out itself.
AI Engineer · Teach Your Agent to Prove It's Done — Nick Nisi & Zack Proser, WorkOS
Recommendation · MoneyThe speakers recommend writing good error messages — more important than ever because an agent can interpret and run with an error really well — and making failures explicit about why they failed with as much detail as possible about how the app got into that state, so your agent can self-heal from the error. They add that this is very easy and very worthwhile.
AI Engineer · Teach Your Agent to Prove It's Done — Nick Nisi & Zack Proser, WorkOS
Recommendation · MoneyThe speakers recommend that the most important thing is to start: create an eval baseline, use it consistently, and evolve it together as a team. Get to the point where your changes and PRs automatically run the eval, so you know whether changes are safe to land, improving things, making things worse, or not changing anything. They note your team might score verification differently or have different criteria — the scoring approach is super flexible.
AI Engineer · Teach Your Agent to Prove It's Done — Nick Nisi & Zack Proser, WorkOS
