Kevin Hopp drops invaluable cold calling knowledge

Adam Sockel (00:01.408)
You're listening to Bold Calling, a podcast presented by Orem where every episode we're bringing on the biggest and brightest minds in the tech and sales industries for a discussion about their biggest challenges and the unique ways they are working to solve them. I'm your host, Adam Sokol, and I'm really excited because today's guest is someone who, when I first started two years ago at Orem, he was doing a bunch of webinars and different things with our leadership. And I just remember being like, my God, this person knows so much about sales development and cold calling and

I had a lot to learn and I still have a lot to learn. So I'm excited to be chatting with him. I've got Kevin Hopp on today. He is the founder of the Hopp Consulting Group and the CEO of Calling Culture. Kevin, thank you so much for taking some time to chat with me today.

Kevin Hopp (00:43.492)
Adam, thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it. I go way back with Oram, back to the dial bot days, believe it or not, which is what Oram used to be. I don't know.

Adam Sockel (00:55.402)
Yeah, you've been working with Oram longer than I knew Oram existed and even was a thing. So yeah, I'm super excited about this. And I wanna, you we just recently released our state of sales development report that I a of people have seen at this point. there's some stats about calling and everything. still, people still love calling, which is great. But before I dive into like questions specific about the stats, I wanna ask you as someone who was working with clients every single day about outbound and calling in general, like how does...

as someone who's in the trenches, how does the state of, you know, sales development outbound feel to you right now? Does it feel like there's a shift and is it easier to get a hold of people? Is it harder? It's kind of like, what are you seeing right now?

Kevin Hopp (01:37.724)
Well, you know, the elephant in the room with most of the customers that you guys sell to and the customers that I work with is, you know, things are really nice for long time. I'd say from like 2018 to like the end of 2022, it was a good run for outbound in that VCs had a very favorable view.

of companies spending a large percentage of their budget on outbound, on sales, on marketing. I have seen that shift pretty dramatically in terms of people are not investing in outbound like they used to because they think the VCs in the boardrooms think that they can use AI to replace people and all this stuff. So that's like the biggest shift that I've seen is like it used to be a growth at all cost model.

Adam Sockel (02:08.907)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Sockel (02:22.494)
Mm-hmm.

Kevin Hopp (02:29.116)
and CAC was like a term that people were like, what do you mean? That's like what my cat does when it has a fur ball. CAC, what does that mean? It means customer acquisition cost. It's something that every company looks at eventually, but most companies don't even take a look at it until series C or series D. Now that conversation gets started way earlier. And that's like the macro. If you're about like the state of sales development, the state of outbound, the budgets used to be a lot bigger. So.

Adam Sockel (02:51.988)
Yeah.

Adam Sockel (02:56.117)
Mm-hmm.

Kevin Hopp (02:57.67)
Budgets are getting a lot smaller. And guess what? Head count is going way down as well, right? Like people are just not hiring for sales development like they used to because AI, right? The concept that AI can replace people, it can do better than people, all this stuff, right? I'm seeing a lot of that, but despite the macro movement headed that way, guess what I'm still having a lot of success doing? Can you guess?

Adam Sockel (03:22.251)
I'm gonna hope it's cold calling or else I have brought the wrong person.

Kevin Hopp (03:24.938)
god, yeah. It's almost as if cold calling ain't debt. And the more confusing people try to make outbound with their fancy clay tables and their automations and their warm calling and you know, this big fad, Adam, that I'm rolling my eyes at around website visit, de-anonymization, right? Like it's like the hottest thing since sliced bread.

It's all cute and cool, but like you could still just pick up the phone and call a cold lead and have a great conversation and set a great meeting. And I'm still doing it every single day with my clients. So, you know.

Adam Sockel (04:01.643)
Yeah, okay, so I wanna dig into some of that. also did the, I broke a card in the role of podcasting there because you literally like, normally when people say something funny, you try not to laugh over them while they're talking. I literally like almost did a spit take. So good job on you, I really love that. But know, cack and cats, so maybe kiggle. So we have seen in the, our data does show, like you said, the customer acquisition cost is up, sales cycles are longer. Interestingly, one of the things we did see is,

The amount of touch points it takes to land a meeting is down. Last year it was like anywhere from seven to 15. This year it showed like three to nine. And I do think a lot of that has to do with we've seen an increase in calling, which is great. And I do think it's a much more direct way to get a meeting. You no one's, I was talking on LinkedIn back and forth with some influencer yesterday and they were talking about how content is the best thing you can do for outbound. And I was like, that's great, but no one has ever looked at a piece of ORM content and responded, book me a meeting. Like that's just not.

what happens is because it happens on the phone. so I want to ask like, there's, know, there's going to be the forever cold calling is dead stupid content that you see out there. like, for you, are you? my God. And I bit like three different like, Kevin, like three different times this week, I've responded to people who said that. And I was like, I'm part of the problem. I'm responding to people. I'm a problem. are you seeing with your with your clients? Are you having more success than in past like

Kevin Hopp (05:08.476)
It does so well on LinkedIn too. I hate it. I hate it.

Kevin Hopp (05:19.419)
Right.

Adam Sockel (05:25.021)
On the phone, do you see that people are more receptive to taking those calls? Obviously has a lot to do with how they present themselves on the call. But are you seeing people being more receptive to those conversations?

Kevin Hopp (05:35.484)
Well, let's put it this way, I have a few clients. I've built a little mini niche in kind of cybersecurity, which is interesting because cybersecurity is one of these industries, one of these types of customer segments that I can never really explain to you what these companies do. But what's cool is my methodology, it doesn't really matter. You just need to understand the

Adam Sockel (05:54.377)
That's a yeah, it's elaborate.

Adam Sockel (06:01.579)
Mm-hmm.

Kevin Hopp (06:03.996)
core business challenges and then the core solutions. core problem and solution is what cold calling is. What I'm hearing on the phone from clients that are making two, 300 calls a day are a lot of, I get 14 cold emails a day. I get maybe one cold call a day. So I appreciate you giving me a call. And part of my methodology is I teach the reps to be very upfront and honest about that. Like, hey, look.

I'm an interruption, you got a minute? Just one minute, let's get this over with. Like I don't want no cat and mouse game, no spammy emails back and forth. Let me ask you a question about your business and let's figure out if it makes sense for us to talk again. And I'm hearing that more and more, to be honest. So, Cold Callin' is having a bit of a renaissance in that. Like the email spam bots are easier than ever to spin up. So, a great way to stand out in your market is to actually put up the phone.

Adam Sockel (07:01.611)
So how much are you suggesting for your clients and the reps you're working with, how much are you suggesting that they do pre-call research and looking into stuff? Because there's all this data, I love that you're already excited to answer this. We saw this data where reps are spending at minimum 11 hours a week on research and then follow up stuff. And obviously AI can do a lot of that, but to your point, I'm curious what you think about.

Kevin Hopp (07:17.06)
yeah.

Adam Sockel (07:30.335)
how much of that you actually need, how much prep you need for each person you're talking to. Just kind of like walk me through your thoughts on the pre-call research and what you think a rep really needs to know to have a successful conversation.

Kevin Hopp (07:46.118)
Yeah, I mean, this is another one of these topics that's like a debate as old as time, like research versus no research. And what you find, Adam, is if you go look at the gurus that talk about the research angle, they don't build calling teams at scale. Like, that's just not what they do. And oftentimes they don't have a background in sales development. Like, they were in SDR for like six months or a year, seven to 10 years ago. And then they've been in AE ever since, and they say,

No, no, no, you need to do research. And guess what? STRs love that. Because it gives them permission not to do things that might be awkward or not. You don't have to put your ego on the line if you're doing research on LinkedIn for five hours a day, right? Right. They're hiding behind a computer screen. The short answer to get to the most direct question is reps need way less research than they think.

Adam Sockel (08:20.735)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Sockel (08:29.578)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Kevin Hopp (08:44.444)
to go have a really good call, right? And this actually goes on both sides. And this is like one of the things that I do with companies that are really early stage. They come to me and they say, well, we don't know if phone prospecting will even work. And I'll do these little pilots with them where I will hop on the phone. And in a 45 minute session with them, I get more than enough information on what they do. And then I go set meetings in this little three, four week sprint that I do with them. And they're always like, my God, like how did you do that?

Adam Sockel (08:56.032)
Mm-hmm.

Kevin Hopp (09:13.414)
Like because it doesn't really like matter. It doesn't matter if you know that Adam went to Rutgers. It doesn't matter if you know that this guy used to work at Dell. It doesn't matter what really matters and what we should be talking about is business problems and solutions to those problems. So if your reps just know that and they know in general who's going to be on this list, right? Like a lot of this goes back to structure, right? If your reps are calling one by one.

Adam Sockel (09:22.933)
Yeah.

Adam Sockel (09:28.031)
Mm-hmm.

Kevin Hopp (09:42.565)
through Salesforce, kind of randomly, as they feel like it, right? That's the worst case scenario, is to set it up so reps like, I have to choose each individual person I wanna call every single day. Why is that bad? Well, there's like hundred reasons, but the really quick explanation of why that is bad is, we as humans tell ourselves stories about people we've never met. Just by looking at their name, just by looking at their picture on LinkedIn, we create a narrative in our brain

Adam Sockel (09:52.746)
Yeah.

Kevin Hopp (10:12.038)
that is completely made up about what that person's gonna be like, what they care about, and how the call is gonna go. And then that creates little walls, little barriers between us taking actions to actually talking to that person. So the best thing anyone can do if you have a sales development rep is to batch their leads, lead lists, a list of people that have common traits. And we go off conversations about the same things with these people, everyone on the list.

Adam Sockel (10:32.501)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Sockel (10:38.973)
Yeah, I want to ask. I, I agree with you on everything you've said. The one thing I'm curious about is like you, I think about this with like our SVP of revenue, Colin, who you know very well, Colin Spector. I, you like, I've watched you make cold calls. are, it's effortless for you because you've done it so much. Just like, like Colin will hop in our sales floor and he has like a free 45 minutes and just like take someone's listen call.

Kevin Hopp (10:52.08)
Yeah.

Adam Sockel (11:07.307)
There's no idea who's going to pick up. But like you said, he knows what Oram does literally like the back of his hand. He knows the solutions and like regardless of who picks up, he's like, you're a CRO. Here's what my internal talk track for you. you're a BDR manager. Same thing. How long? And this isn't like a Malcolm Gladwell 10,000 hours garbage answer, but I'm curious for you, like because you can do this basically in your sleep and you're showing these companies like, look, this is how it's how you can execute this on the phone.

How long do you think it takes a rep who maybe has a little bit of calling experience but to know is not the Kevin Hopp, Kyle Inspector, expert, how long do you think it takes them to get comfortable with exactly what you said, they know their product, they know their solutions, and getting comfortable confidently conveying those to a prospect in real time?

Kevin Hopp (11:58.268)
That's a great question. That's a really great question. this is, know, dovetails perfectly into kind of what I do, right? The mini commercial for calling culture. What I do is training, coaching, calling culture development, right? A big part of what I preach is we gotta practice first, because there is an element of cold calling that we can't get away from, which is you need to be saying very similar things on every call. Sales is half science, half art.

Adam Sockel (12:21.941)
Mm.

Kevin Hopp (12:26.158)
I want the art to come out. I need the art. I need you to add something to the call, but I also need to know exactly kind of what you're saying and what you're talking about in order to make deductions from that, right? To make changes. Science is changing, holding variables constant, okay? So that is an element of it. So you need to practice. And once you can say the right sorts of things again and again in a confident tone, then we need to go up to conversations. Now this is the 10,000 hours part kind of, right? There are...

There's actually only a certain, you know, for every market, for every company, there's only a certain list of things that people say on the phone. And there's two sides to the conversation, right? The first part is the most unpredictable part, which is when you cold call somebody, could be, and I have heard it all, I've heard it all out. I'm at my mother's funeral, who is this? It's like, why'd you pick up the phone? I've heard, I'm on my way to the hospital, my wife's in labor, who is this?

Why'd you pick up the phone? I've heard it all, right? So there's the first half of the call where we're just trying to get to the point of, I talk to you right now? The reps are gonna hear all sorts of wild stuff there. And you just gotta train them to know when to proceed and when not to. It's pretty simple. If they're busy, you say, hey look, I'll give you this time back, adios. If they are not busy, then we say, hey look, this will just be a minute. Can I tell you why I call? Okay, the second part is the 10,000 hours part where,

Adam Sockel (13:33.152)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Sockel (13:44.928)
Mm-hmm.

Kevin Hopp (13:54.108)
when it comes to what you and your company does specifically, you need to understand how it's different. And if you don't have a differentiator, that is a to do. That is a to do. Go to your CEO, go to your head of sales, go to your head of marketing. What makes us different? Like seriously different. Because when you go have conversations with actual people, actual prospects, they're going to say they have some sort of solution. They don't have the problem that you have. And you need to understand the nuances behind that, right? You need to understand

Adam Sockel (14:03.488)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Sockel (14:17.344)
Mm-hmm.

Kevin Hopp (14:23.418)
what's gonna come up there, the common competitors, the differences you have there. I mean, I've seen reps get dangerously good in as little as four to five weeks with the right tech. mean, a little advertisement here for Orem, if you're using a parallel dialer, you're getting a lot of conversations. Like that minimum bar should be about 10 to 12 live conversations a day, every day. Yeah, about four weeks until they're setting meetings at a very, very good rate.

Adam Sockel (14:34.623)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Sockel (14:54.366)
And then I know you feel very passionate about this. How should the, like, how can you do the role playing and coaching so that people, so that sellers can get better at it faster? And I know the answer isn't AI, AI chat.

Kevin Hopp (15:12.336)
Well, you'd be surprised. I think that AI is getting very good here. Now this is an area where AI could help out. I have seen some things recently. I'm launching a new partnership with a new business called AI Champ. Mini-advertisement for them is it's an AI role-playing coaching thing where you can call the bot, right? I like that because the algorithm is being adapted to real life. So you're gonna get some real stuff that happens in there, meaning...

Adam Sockel (15:30.571)
Mm-hmm.

Kevin Hopp (15:40.956)
People are busy when you call them. They're mean, they want to get off the phone. People are genuinely interested. They ask you more questions with this bot. It's really good stuff that gets you really good reps before you go on the phone. Now, if you're not using an AI scenario, the best thing you can do is actually try to practice with people that aren't at your company. That sounds weird, and it's kind of awkward, but if you can find somebody who's not at your company, that's gonna be best. Because, cow, I've heard some like,

Adam Sockel (15:44.043)
Mm-hmm.

Kevin Hopp (16:11.152)
real awful role plays. And it doesn't help you if your buddy sitting next to you or your buddy that you work with is tossing you softballs. Yeah, I got a minute. okay. Yeah, that sounds fantastic. I actually have a solution in place today. That's not the way people talk on the phone. There's always an element of like curiosity that's hard to replicate. And there's normally an element of like, who the frick are you and why the frick are you calling me?

Adam Sockel (16:13.919)
Yeah.

Adam Sockel (16:29.868)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Sockel (16:41.04)
Mhm.

Kevin Hopp (16:41.168)
You know, hard to replicate in a role playing scenario. So I think this is an area where AI is stepping up to become a, a real kind of solution to getting reps that, that first awkward, you know, evolution of how, how should the call flow? Call the bot.

Adam Sockel (17:02.037)
How do you feel about, and obviously this is gonna be different depending on the size of the company that you're calling into and how long the sales cycle is for the tool that you're using. We were just talking about a platform that we won't name that has a very long sales cycle and is very pricey and is hot commodity. But when you have reps who are calling into maybe larger organizations where they,

you know, they know that the buying committee might be seven or eight people and they're just trying to get a bunch of information so that when they get to the decision makers, they can actually book the meeting. Like, do you have reps? Do you have a process where you're telling reps like different approaches? If it's just like, Hey, I'm not even trying to book a meeting with you. just want to like inform you about what's going on. I would love to send you a report we just released or anything like a hot. Do you have different approaches or is your kind of like what you want people to really be focusing on every single call is to get that meeting book.

Kevin Hopp (17:59.485)
That's a good question. think, you know, the, one of the things that I've introduced to many companies that they kind of have this like, you're right. We should be doing that moment is how they take the information from a cold call and actually seed it into their CRM. Right. It's one thing to have a tool or to create this, this environment where I can just call people all day and have conversations. It's another.

Adam Sockel (18:10.847)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Sockel (18:18.911)
Mmm.

Kevin Hopp (18:27.366)
to use a tool like Oram, another, know, no free ads but an ad for Oram, right? Like Oram integrates with almost all of the major tech stack players out there. Why is that important? Because now we can actually take what's being talked about on the phone on a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and plug it into your CRM, your HubSpot, your Salesforce, wherever, where customer data should live. And if you're a serious enterprise that's trying to scale, I mean,

Everybody should be doing account-based marketing. Account-based marketing just means I can name the top four or five hundred companies I want to sell to, go buy data on them, have it there, and then start taking actions so you'll figure out where are they in the buying cycle. They've never heard of us. They've heard of us. They don't want to buy right now, but they might buy later. They're never going to buy for some reason. We start informing that CRM when you use a tool that integrates all the way down. So like the no brainer thing I tell people is like, we need to be able to take those notes.

Adam Sockel (19:09.949)
Mm-hmm.

Kevin Hopp (19:24.858)
and inform the account level records in your CRM, which if you buy an integrated tool, you can't. If you buy some of these other tools that don't integrate, then you're creating a data silo and you need to get that data from the rep's mouth all the way back to the account level research that's being done. So the other, the second half of this, like the answer Adam is like, I do believe that the point of cold calling is to have a conversation. Now,

Adam Sockel (19:44.33)
Mm-hmm.

Kevin Hopp (19:53.858)
outcome from that conversation is not always a sales meeting. But a core tenant of like the calling culture methodology is there are valuable things that come out of conversations that are not sales meetings. But it's only valuable if you can capture that data, if you can capture that information and make sure that, okay, next time I call this company, I've got the record of the last four conversations I had there. Now all of sudden we're building knowledge and it's proprietary. It's knowledge you can't just

Adam Sockel (20:05.995)
Mm-hmm.

Kevin Hopp (20:22.534)
buy from a data provider. It's from the horse's mouth. You know what mean?

Adam Sockel (20:23.221)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, we had a conversation with a customer. We're doing a customer story. was like a year ago at this point. They basically said they don't look at cold calls exclusively as like, did you book the meeting or not? Like they, had so many positive outcomes in their dispositions. It was like, learned who the decision maker was learned who was on the buying committee, learned who the, know, who was heading up from a champion standpoint, like the user, the user group, or just like, to your point, like learned if they were hiring or not learned if they

you know, did have but whatever it was like, to your point, it moved the ball a little bit further down the field. So that like when they were ready to score, to use this broken analogy, they could then get into the end zone, you know, so I agree with you. I love that idea. And I want to, you know, kind of one of the questions about this point I want to ask you is, I've had a lot of conversations lately with different people, both internally and externally about how SDR should be comped. Like is it booked meetings? Is it

closed one revenue and then thinking about, like you said, from an ABM standpoint, when you're going after a bigger account, it's an interesting conversation, because if you ask an SDR, if your sales cycle is nine months and you ask an SDR, hey, we're gonna comp you on closed one, then you're like, I might be in this role for eight months. I'm curious how you think about how SDRs should be comped for the work that they're doing. Is it booked meetings, is it closed one? I know it's kind of a big topic, but.

It's something that I'm endlessly fascinated by.

Kevin Hopp (21:57.412)
Yeah, I mean, it's so fascinating because there's no right answer. That's the tough part. It is very unique to the the selling environment that your company has. But more importantly, what I see a lot is this misalignment between, let's say it's a VP of sales, their targets, their goals, the direction that they have, the strategic plan they have that is at least what, three, four, five quarters out.

that they are trying to align the business towards in terms of sales. There's misalignment between where the VP of sales or head of sales wants to the company and how they're compensating the SDRs. So that's like the first thing is you need to have a very like you need to consider that as you're making your program. A lot of the times when I've been pulled into conversations for consulting and stuff where they're like, we just, we think BDRs, it just doesn't work. It just doesn't work. We're paying them $150 a meeting and they're set meetings with their friends.

Adam Sockel (22:28.428)
Hmm.

Kevin Hopp (22:54.364)
I'm like, well, what are the goals that you have that you presented to the board? Because if you're a VPS sales at a venture-backed company, you have to come up with an entire plan as to how we're going to go drive revenue. If you have a long sales cycle, it doesn't make sense to comp them on revenue. If you have a shorter sales cycle, it probably does. And there are various stages. And this is like the two terms that we hear a lot in sales development. The various stages that the dials return is.

Adam Sockel (23:01.781)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Sockel (23:10.954)
Yeah.

Kevin Hopp (23:23.196)
Quality and quantity, right? Like early stage seed series A, I see you comp on quantity. You want to incentivize reps to take actions to get meetings. As the company matures, as the revenue organization matures, and we don't want Steve, the AEs, make a 150k base taking meetings with every Tom, Dick, and Harry, we want him taking meetings with more qualified people, then we can start to turn that dial and say, okay.

Adam Sockel (23:24.651)
and

Adam Sockel (23:34.239)
Yeah.

Adam Sockel (23:47.115)
Mm-hmm.

Kevin Hopp (23:52.784)
your quota is a little bit smaller, but we do need to have a qualification criteria to this. And guess what? If the sales cycle is short enough, give them a piece of the revenue. I'm a huge fan of that. Because it really does draw a straight line from what the SDR does on the phone and the things they can control and their compensation. I want to help the revenue team win, to help the sales team win, and I'm going to win when we all win. As opposed to, I'm not getting a piece of the deal. I just want to get as many meetings as I can.

and we get misaligned goals. So, I don't know, does that answer your question?

Adam Sockel (24:24.108)
Yeah, it does. Yeah. And the data that we have kind of agrees with you. Like we asked basically, what is the main KPI for your, for your SDRs? And it was like qualified meetings and just like kind of activity stuff. And it was 52, 48. It was like 52 % is qualified meetings and 48 % was kind of like activity stuff. But when we broke it out, when we were in like a cross tab with size of organization, like it was literally like their focus on qualification and like bigger things.

as the company gets bigger, and like to your point, and when it's when they're smaller, they're just like, they just want to be bringing in meetings. And yeah, absolutely. All right, last question for you. I want to I'm curious. You know, one of the things is like, one of the aspects of this report was kind of forward looking. And we asked all these 1000 sales leaders, like, you know, basically, do you feel good about the state of sales woman in different questions? Like, how do feel about, you know, how do you feel about like calling 85 % of the people are like, absolutely, we keep doing it. The overwhelming majority of the sales leaders we

Kevin Hopp (24:58.044)
Yeah.

Adam Sockel (25:22.557)
interviewed or sorry, interviewed, sorry, surveyed said they plan on hiring more SDRs in the next 12 months, which is great news. But I'm curious as someone who's in the trenches every day, how do you feel sales development will kind of change in the next six to 12 months?

Kevin Hopp (25:39.676)
It's a question. It's hard to answer this question without talking about AI. It's almost impossible because AI is... We're kind of in that dial-up internet phase. Have you ever seen that famous Good Morning America clip where they talk about email? And they all laugh. They all laugh. They laughed and they said...

Adam Sockel (26:02.537)
Yeah, I sure, electronic mail. Mm-hmm.

Kevin Hopp (26:08.732)
Can you imagine going to your computer to send people and stuff? Right? That's kind of what a lot of people are doing with AI right now. You know what I mean? And like the Dreamforce keynotes are all about AI this, AI, but you're left, if you're a revenue leader right now, you're left with more questions than answers when it comes to how is AI going to impact my business in the next 12 months? The next wave of startups where money is going to fly out.

Adam Sockel (26:18.323)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Sockel (26:22.869)
Yeah.

Kevin Hopp (26:38.588)
door is anyone with .ai and creating an AI tool. Now what I like, what's been interesting is like out the gate a few of these like AI SDR companies got really popular right and they got big funding recently in the last month or two and the idea of my god this is brilliant I just don't need people I just need AI bots that's kind of the first like the pendulum swinging way over to the other side

And what we're going to find and what I've found from talking to executives who have done this, run the pilots, invested in it a little bit is, we're not ready for that. It's going to come back. Now here is my like cautiously optimistic take on what is really going to be happening in sales development in the next 12 to 18 months. I think that there's going to be an evolution in the tool set, in the tooling of what we have. Like what does every revenue organization have? A CRM, a way to send emails.

a way to get data into your tools and then a phone tool. It's kind of like, that's just the most basic stuff that every revenue organization should have. I think these tools are going to get smarter and that's gonna make our job easier as a sales development rep. I do believe that is the direction that we're going. can we ever be really replaced by AI? I think there's certain industries, certain places, certain ways, maybe.

Adam Sockel (27:40.511)
Mm-hmm.

Kevin Hopp (28:03.952)
that if it's a heavily inbound model, like an AI chatbot should do better than a rep probably. Customer service sucks for 90 % of companies. Have an AI bot do that, you know? But at the end of the day, and what I preach at Calling Culture is sales is people selling to people. And there's no amount of AI in the short term here that's going to replace the connection that you can have at the live conversation on a phone. And that is why cold calling.

Adam Sockel (28:09.419)
Mm-hmm.

Kevin Hopp (28:32.238)
never gonna die. It's gonna get easier.

Adam Sockel (28:36.288)
I love it. I feel like I could talk to you for six hours, Kevin. I appreciate you dropping all this knowledge. Real quick, I will obviously put the link in the show notes to track you down. if people want to get a hold of you, if they're interested in kind of bringing you on for your services, what's the best way to get a hold of Kevin Hopp?

Kevin Hopp (28:52.07)
Yeah, well, Adam, thanks for having me on the podcast. I really do appreciate it. I'm a huge Oram fan. Callingculture.com, that's my website. My LinkedIn page is always a place you can go check stuff out. I got a big content thing I'm doing now. I got these TikTok style videos, people really digging it. So give me a follow, but callingculture.com is a great way to reach out and talk about how I can bring calling culture to your organization.

Adam Sockel (29:15.915)
Perfect. Thank you so much for joining me today, Kevin.

Kevin Hopp (29:19.164)
Thanks, Adam.