Stay ConnectedMeet Gabe Lullo.
Gabe Lullo is the CEO of Alleyoop, a sales development agency working with industry giants such as ZoomInfo, Salesloft, and Adobe.
He has trained over 8,000 salespeople across diverse businesses and, during his tenure in Alleyoop, he has personally hired and managed more than 1,500 SDRs.
With over two decades of experience in sales, marketing, and executive recruitment, his strategies have significantly driven Alleyoop’s growth.
"Most sales teams don't have a tactics problem. They have a trust problem. For decades, we have taught our buyers to not trust us." - Leslie Venetz, Founder of Sales-Led GTM and USA Today Bestselling Author
Leslie was on track to become a CRO by 40.
The offer was on the table: $460,000.
She turned it down the same day, walked away from the goal she'd spent her entire career building toward, and paid herself $50,000 in year one of her own business.
The philosophy behind her agency came from a mistake she made early.
Six months into her first corporate job, her manager got fired and she inherited a team ten years her senior.
She assumed the title came with trust. It didn't.
From that experience she built what she now calls the earn the right framework: before you do anything, ask yourself whether you've actually earned the right to ask for this person's attention.
Most teams skip that question entirely, which is why their pipeline looks like a tactics problem but is really a trust problem.
On curiosity, she doesn't accept "I'm just not naturally curious" as an answer.
If someone told you that you needed a 50% free throw percentage, you'd know immediately the path there was practice.
Curiosity works the same way.
"Grit isn't doing one hard thing for two weeks. It's showing up for months and years toward a bigger purpose, even when it doesn't feel like it's working."
"I did a reverse image search, found his wife's bakery in Illinois, and put in an order for cakes with a note inside. He called me at 6:30 the next morning." - Paul Higgins
Paul's sales career started on an ice cream van.
Before that, he was upselling cologne to classmates at school for 50p a spray.
He talked his way out of a post room job after hearing the buzz of the call center floor and deciding that's where he belonged.
From there, it was pensions, then insurance, then recruitment tech, teaching himself HTML and CSS along the way.
A mentor once handed him two VHS tapes: Boiler Room and Glengarry Glen Ross.
He says they changed his career, cutting his daily call volume from 150 dials to just 40 because they taught him something volume never could: how to actually close.
What sets Paul apart today is his ability to sit with a CTO and talk architecture, then walk into the CFO's office and talk about cost savings that same afternoon.
Most reps only speak one language. He learned to translate between technical and commercial conversations by understanding how the products actually worked, not just how to pitch them.
That same mindset shows up in his prospecting.
One unicorn account had gatekeepers he couldn't get past for months.
So he reverse image searched the decision-maker, found his wife's bakery in Illinois, ordered a box of cakes, and tucked in a handwritten note asking for a callback.
It worked.
That single conversation became a five-year, $1.2 million contract.
His research is just as methodical.
Before his team calls a prospect, they already know how many job boards the company uses, how many developers they employ, and roughly what their current setup is costing them.
That level of preparation helped improve SQL-to-close rates by 40%.
Not by making more calls.
By making smarter ones.
"Don't dwell on the things you messed up on. I've lost millions. The more you put in, the more you get out."
"I did a reverse image search, found his wife's bakery in Illinois, and put in an order for cakes with a note inside. He called me at 6:30 the next morning." - Paul Higgins
Paul's sales career started on an ice cream van.
Before that, he was upselling cologne to classmates at school for 50p a spray.
He talked his way out of a post room job after hearing the buzz of the call center floor and deciding that's where he belonged.
From there, it was pensions, then insurance, then recruitment tech, teaching himself HTML and CSS along the way.
A mentor once handed him two VHS tapes: Boiler Room and Glengarry Glen Ross.
He says they changed his career, cutting his daily call volume from 150 dials to just 40 because they taught him something volume never could: how to actually close.
What sets Paul apart today is his ability to sit with a CTO and talk architecture, then walk into the CFO's office and talk about cost savings that same afternoon.
Most reps only speak one language. He learned to translate between technical and commercial conversations by understanding how the products actually worked, not just how to pitch them.
That same mindset shows up in his prospecting.
One unicorn account had gatekeepers he couldn't get past for months.
So he reverse image searched the decision-maker, found his wife's bakery in Illinois, ordered a box of cakes, and tucked in a handwritten note asking for a callback.
It worked.
That single conversation became a five-year, $1.2 million contract.
His research is just as methodical.
Before his team calls a prospect, they already know how many job boards the company uses, how many developers they employ, and roughly what their current setup is costing them.
That level of preparation helped improve SQL-to-close rates by 40%.
Not by making more calls.
By making smarter ones.
"Don't dwell on the things you messed up on. I've lost millions. The more you put in, the more you get out."
"If you're operating in survival mode, that's when it leads to burnout. That's when it leads to the rock bottom moments that a lot of reps struggle with." - Malisa Nguyen, Mental Performance Coach and Founder of MTN Collective
Malisa went from top performer to burning out in a role she earned through a promotion she worked hard to get.
She did everything sales culture told her to do: more volume, more hustle, longer hours.
She worked weekends and twelve-hour days and still couldn't find her footing. The pressure gave her anxiety attacks at night and made her unable to be present in her own life.
She went to an Anderson .Paak concert and spent the whole time thinking about quota.
That experience sent her down five years of studying mental performance and nervous system science, and what she found reframed everything she thought she knew about sales inconsistency.
Her core argument: inconsistency isn't a skill problem. It's a nervous system problem.
Spraying and praying is a fight response. Procrastinating on cold calls is flight. Freezing in analysis paralysis is exactly that. Over-discounting to please a prospect is a fawn response.
None of those are fixed by more roleplay or more pressure.
In fact, piling on pressure usually makes all of them worse.
The reps who bounce back from rejection quickly aren't tougher.
They've just stopped making it mean something about themselves.
The moment you tie the outcome to your self-worth, the spiral starts.
"You can only go so far hustling and grinding your way through. Eventually you're going to hit a wall. I hit that wall."
"If you're operating in survival mode, that's when it leads to burnout. That's when it leads to the rock bottom moments that a lot of reps struggle with." - Malisa Nguyen, Mental Performance Coach and Founder of MTN Collective
Malisa went from top performer to burning out in a role she earned through a promotion she worked hard to get.
She did everything sales culture told her to do: more volume, more hustle, longer hours.
She worked weekends and twelve-hour days and still couldn't find her footing. The pressure gave her anxiety attacks at night and made her unable to be present in her own life.
She went to an Anderson .Paak concert and spent the whole time thinking about quota.
That experience sent her down five years of studying mental performance and nervous system science, and what she found reframed everything she thought she knew about sales inconsistency.
Her core argument: inconsistency isn't a skill problem. It's a nervous system problem.
Spraying and praying is a fight response. Procrastinating on cold calls is flight. Freezing in analysis paralysis is exactly that. Over-discounting to please a prospect is a fawn response.
None of those are fixed by more roleplay or more pressure.
In fact, piling on pressure usually makes all of them worse.
The reps who bounce back from rejection quickly aren't tougher.
They've just stopped making it mean something about themselves.
The moment you tie the outcome to your self-worth, the spiral starts.
"You can only go so far hustling and grinding your way through. Eventually you're going to hit a wall. I hit that wall."
"You can't just follow up with someone when you have an agenda. Staying in touch with people without even talking about your product is probably one of the most impactful things you can do." - John Melton, Marketing Veteran and Entrepreneur
John started out as a kid who hated school, was getting into fights, and had no direction.
Two weeks before 9/11, a friend brought him to a marketing presentation. He thought it was a genius idea. But the company eventually got shut down, but what he learned there became the foundation for everything that followed.
He took those skills into mortgage sales, made real money for the first time, and eventually came back to network marketing when social media arrived and changed everything.
His organization has done $450 million over the last decade. He calls it a 16-year overnight success story.
What separates the people who make it from those who don't, in his experience, has nothing to do with talent.
It's coachability.
On content, the formula is simple: be entertaining, empowering, or educational, and don't be boring. The algorithm doesn't care how many followers you have.
But the principle he keeps coming back to, the one he's built 25 years on, is follow-up.
Not an aggressive follow-up. Just staying in touch. Wishing people a happy birthday. Sending a voice note. Checking in without an agenda.
People who had been watching from the sidelines for years finally reached out when the timing was right, because the relationship was already there.
"The fortune's in the follow-up. Be a friend first and a marketer second. It's amazing what you attract."
"You can't just follow up with someone when you have an agenda. Staying in touch with people without even talking about your product is probably one of the most impactful things you can do." - John Melton, Marketing Veteran and Entrepreneur
John started out as a kid who hated school, was getting into fights, and had no direction.
Two weeks before 9/11, a friend brought him to a marketing presentation. He thought it was a genius idea. But the company eventually got shut down, but what he learned there became the foundation for everything that followed.
He took those skills into mortgage sales, made real money for the first time, and eventually came back to network marketing when social media arrived and changed everything.
His organization has done $450 million over the last decade. He calls it a 16-year overnight success story.
What separates the people who make it from those who don't, in his experience, has nothing to do with talent.
It's coachability.
On content, the formula is simple: be entertaining, empowering, or educational, and don't be boring. The algorithm doesn't care how many followers you have.
But the principle he keeps coming back to, the one he's built 25 years on, is follow-up.
Not an aggressive follow-up. Just staying in touch. Wishing people a happy birthday. Sending a voice note. Checking in without an agenda.
People who had been watching from the sidelines for years finally reached out when the timing was right, because the relationship was already there.
"The fortune's in the follow-up. Be a friend first and a marketer second. It's amazing what you attract."
"People don't actually do the thing for hours on end every day consistently. They just talk about theory." - Tony Brophy
Tony started cold calling in a boiler room in Dublin. His first day on the job, someone handed him a phone, a stack of magazines, and a script, then told him to start dialing.
He had no idea what he was doing, but he kept showing up anyway, and two years later he built a business around it.
Not a coaching program. Not a course. Actual cold calling, for clients who hand him a list and expect results.
Six hours on the phone the day he recorded this episode, running hour-and-a-half call blocks five or six times a day, speaking to roughly 20 people per block, a quarter of whom hang up the moment he opens his mouth.
He calls it getting kicked in the teeth for a living.
The reason he went all in on one channel and one service, no multi-channel strategy, no fancy funnels, is simple: he's got ADHD and if he doesn't lock onto one thing, he goes off the rails.
So he picked the hardest thing in sales and did it every single day until the discomfort became background noise.
His advice to new SDRs comes down to a few things.
Set call blocks and protect them. Follow the script instead of trying to be clever before you've earned the right to improvise. Speak like a normal person, not like someone auditioning for a movie.
And when a prospect asks if you're AI, have something ready. His line: they don't have the Irish accent on AI yet, mate.
Everything else is just showing up and making the dials.
"The only way you're going to get better is by pushing through that fear and that discomfort. Nobody else is going to do it for you."
"People don't actually do the thing for hours on end every day consistently. They just talk about theory." - Tony Brophy
Tony started cold calling in a boiler room in Dublin. His first day on the job, someone handed him a phone, a stack of magazines, and a script, then told him to start dialing.
He had no idea what he was doing, but he kept showing up anyway, and two years later he built a business around it.
Not a coaching program. Not a course. Actual cold calling, for clients who hand him a list and expect results.
Six hours on the phone the day he recorded this episode, running hour-and-a-half call blocks five or six times a day, speaking to roughly 20 people per block, a quarter of whom hang up the moment he opens his mouth.
He calls it getting kicked in the teeth for a living.
The reason he went all in on one channel and one service, no multi-channel strategy, no fancy funnels, is simple: he's got ADHD and if he doesn't lock onto one thing, he goes off the rails.
So he picked the hardest thing in sales and did it every single day until the discomfort became background noise.
His advice to new SDRs comes down to a few things.
Set call blocks and protect them. Follow the script instead of trying to be clever before you've earned the right to improvise. Speak like a normal person, not like someone auditioning for a movie.
And when a prospect asks if you're AI, have something ready. His line: they don't have the Irish accent on AI yet, mate.
Everything else is just showing up and making the dials.
"The only way you're going to get better is by pushing through that fear and that discomfort. Nobody else is going to do it for you."
"The GTM bar is quite low. And that's a good thing for those of us who get it." - Neil Weitzman, Fractional CRO and Founder of Weitzman Go to Market
Neil's philosophy comes down to three words: get it done.
Not more frameworks, not more slide decks, just execution.
His take on the say-do ratio is simple:
If you say you're going to do something, do it.
If you can't, communicate it before someone has to ask.
Sounds obvious. Yet most companies still miss the mark.
The follow-up that never comes, the quote promised on Tuesday that's still sitting in the drafts on Friday. The proposal that takes two weeks instead of two days.
Neil's point: the bar is so low that simply doing what you say you'll do already puts you ahead of most of the market.
When he joins a company as a Fractional CRO, he starts with the data.
Do they know what good looks like in their funnel?
What's converting? Where are deals getting stuck?
Most companies have fragments of the answer.
Very few use that information to coach, hire, and improve consistently.
Build the foundation, create repeatable systems, get the team running, and eventually hand it off to a full-time leader.
And for founders who say they want honest feedback?
He'll give it.
The best ones are willing to hear it.
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