Fixing the Broken SDR Model w/ Mark Kosoglow, CEO at Operator.ai

Hello and welcome back to the Collin Cadmus Podcast. Today I’m joined by Mark Kosoglow.

Mark graduated from Penn State University in 1998 and then became the General Manager of Nittany Notes where he was responsible for everything from hiring, training, development, inventory management, and of course, sales. After discovering his knack for sales Mark went on to hold two more long-term sales positions before finally landing himself the gig of a lifetime as the VP Sales for Outreach in 2014.

Mark is among the rare breed of VP Sales who held his position for over 8 years, including a promotion to SVP of Sales, prior to leaving Outreach. At which point he became the CRO of Catalyst Software in 2022, where he remained until February of this year when he started working on his most recent project Operator, where he now serves as Co-Founder & CEO.

Mark believes that as an industry we got greedy and wrecked the outbound model. The playbook was simple and worked, so we automated it and ignored how resistant buyers were becoming. After having lived through the brightest and darkest times of outbound sales in B2B SaaS, I can say I wholeheartedly agree and I’m darn curious to learn how Operator plans to address this problem.

Before we get started, if you’re watching on YouTube, please take a moment to subscribe to the channel, like the video, and leave us a comment if you have questions. If you’re joining us from Spotify or Apple Podcasts, please drop us a review and let us know what you think of the episode. This stuff really helps to grow the audience.

Without further adieu, let’s dive in and find out more specifically what Mark thinks is broken with outbound and how he plans to fix it.

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TOPICS:

00:00:00 Intro

00:03:35 Outbound Sales is Broken

00:09:20 Growth-at-all-Costs

00:18:18 AI in Sales

00:25:30 Sales Quota Attainment

00:30:36 VP Sales Average Tenure

00:38:33 Raising a Salesperson

00:44:28 Operator

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QUESTIONS:

1. What’s broken with B2B outbound and how did we get here?

2. What’s happening to the Growth-at-all-Costs model?

3. What’s your take on AI in sales over the next 5-10 years?

4. What do you think is the reason for low sales quota attainment?

5. What do you think is the reason for low VP Sales average tenure?

6. What’s it like raising a second generation B2B SaaS salesperson?

7. How is Operator going to change the game?

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LINKS:

Operator: https://www.operator.ai

Collin on X: https://x.com/collincadmus

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