Cold Calling Pick-Up Rates Collapsed From 50% to Under 3%

Original source: Adem Manderovic | Closed Circuit Selling™ (CCS)
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This video from Adem Manderovic | Closed Circuit Selling™ (CCS) covered a lot of ground. 6 segments stood out as worth your time. Everything below links directly to the timestamp in the original video.

When someone attacks a prediction with unusual anger, it's worth asking whether they're arguing against the idea or against its consequences for their own livelihood.

Cold Calling Pick-Up Rates Collapsed From 50% to Under 3%

Scott Leese argues that the fury directed at him for predicting cold calling's decline reveals more about fear than disagreement — critics don't think he's wrong, they need him to be wrong because their livelihoods depend on it. The data he cites is stark: two decades ago, half of all calls were answered; today, in tech sales, that figure sits at two to three percent. Culturally, the shift is just as dramatic — a ringing phone once felt like an event worth sprinting toward; now it reads as an intrusion, filtered out by caller ID and silenced ringers.

"It's not that they think I'm wrong necessarily. It's that they need me to be wrong."

▶ Watch this segment — 39:12

How a Misapplied Sales Model Left a Generation of Reps Half-Trained

Scott Leese traces today's sales skill deficit to a single misreading of the Predictable Revenue playbook. That model was designed for large enterprise deals where splitting prospecting from closing made economic sense — but it got applied all the way down to accounts worth $500 a month, producing an entire generation of reps who mastered one slice of the process and nothing else. The damage compounded: a decade of startups selling to each other inflated results without demanding real ability, remote work made coaching harder, and sales leaders who themselves only knew part of the job could only teach part of it.

"When you are responsible for everything in a sales process, you end up learning everything. When you're responsible for one thing, you only learn one thing."

▶ Watch this segment — 16:29

Sales Teams Killed Email the Same Way They Killed the Phone

Scott Leese describes a repeating pattern in sales history: a communication channel works, gets automated at scale, and dies from overuse — phones first, then email, with inboxes now routinely sitting at 74,000 unread messages. His prescription is a return to relationships that predate the outreach: referral networks with explicit commission splits of ten to twenty percent, in-person visits, handwritten letters, and physical gifts. He points to his own teenage children — who treat the phone purely as a content and messaging device — as evidence that cold outreach has no generational future.

"We find a channel in sales that works and then we exploit the hell out of it until it's dead."

▶ Watch this segment — 43:02

Founders Who Skip Sales Lose the Recruiting and Product Edge

Scott Leese makes the case that founders who hand off sales too early pay for it in ways they rarely anticipate. A founder who has personally built pipeline and closed deals can walk into a hiring conversation with concrete numbers — cycle length, call volumes, conversion rates — giving a sales candidate something to test themselves against. One without that experience can only offer enthusiasm. Beyond recruiting, time on the phone surfaces direct customer feedback that no internal briefing can replicate: what features they actually want, which ones they don't care about, and why.

"If that guy George can do it, who's not a salesperson, I should be able to do it."

▶ Watch this segment — 7:23

Contrarian Sales Approach Delivered Two $100M Exits Without a Single SDR

Scott Leese held senior sales leadership roles at three companies during the peak of the Predictable Revenue craze and refused to implement the model at any of them — no SDR teams, no siloed prospecting functions. Two of those companies sold for over $100 million; the third is currently valued in the billions. He fought that position against investors, board members, and founders throughout. His co-discussant Adem Manderovic faced the same resistance for years before the broader market shifted to their view that cold calling and cold emailing were in structural decline.

"Just out of curiosity, did I just take us from worth nothing to worth a billion dollars in the last two and a half years? Am I missing something?"

▶ Watch this segment — 21:00

AI Is Making Human Outreach Indistinguishable — and Worthless to Strangers

When a campaign of roughly 700 personalised, individually recorded video messages sent on LinkedIn prompted recipients to accuse the senders of using AI, it captured something Leese finds genuinely unsettling: authenticity has become unverifiable in digital channels. He can see no reliable solution beyond relationships built in person before any sales conversation begins. Asked by his own teenage children what they should study or prepare for, he admits he has no answer — a moment of honesty that stands in for a much larger collective anxiety about what AI displacement means for careers, jobs, and economic life.

"When your kids come to you and say, 'What should I study? What should I prepare for?' and you look them in the eye and say, 'Fuck if I know' — that's a scary thing."

▶ Watch this segment — 47:52

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• The reliance on meetings booked as a sales metric, advocating for a shift to… (29:00)
• Adem Manderovic and Scott Leese discuss how misaligned incentives, such as… (30:57)
• In the CRO school, market validation and information gathering are central,… (33:40)
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Summarised from Adem Manderovic | Closed Circuit Selling™ (CCS) · 57:39. All credit belongs to the original creators. Streamed.News summarises publicly available video content.