Ninety percent of a SaaS tool goes unopened

Hey there,

David here.

The build I get asked about most is also the smallest one we ship. It is a pair of apps that sit either side of a sales call. I recorded a walkthrough this week. There is one part of it I want to put in writing properly.

Watch: Every Sales Call Gets Prepped Before And Scored After

01Why we build these rather than buy them

We go looking for a SaaS tool to cover one specific job. Ninety percent of the features are ones we never open. The one we actually need sits behind a higher tier, so we pay for the tier. Even then it rarely works the way we would run it.

Building it ourselves used to cost too much to justify. That changed, and it changed recently.

The first one we built was a copy framework. In theory Claude can write outbound copy with no framework at all. You ask, it writes. The gap shows up when you want output at the level a good operator would produce.

That takes knowing what actually converts. The best first lines. The best PS lines. Which signals are worth using. How to place a personalisation so it reads as relevance rather than decoration.

None of that lives in the model. It lives in the people who have run the campaigns. The framework is where we put it so it stops being tribal knowledge.

02The two that run around the call

The discovery call prepper runs before. It reads the website and the LinkedIn profiles. It works out who the decision makers are and lists the objections likely to come up. Then it tells the rep what to raise and what to leave alone.

The sales trainer runs after. It scores the call against a scorecard built for that client:

• How well the pain was quantified
• Whether the ICP was confirmed
• Whether the stakeholders were mapped
• Whether a real next step was agreed

The general practices give us a starting point. The weighting is where each client's own view of a good call goes in. So we build the scorecard per client.

The score is the smaller half of it. Underneath sits the line that says where the conversation turned, and what could have been said instead.

03The part I did not expect

We prepare for calls by thinking about everything we should say. What I keep seeing is the reverse. One sentence lands wrong and the rest of the call stops mattering.

Here is the version I have watched happen to us. A prospect arrives wanting a detailed, white glove approach. Somewhere in the call we mention the size of the sending infrastructure we can stand up. They hear scale, and they quietly file us as a spray and pray shop.

They are not being unfair. They have no idea about the white glove work we have done, because we have not told them yet. They took one detail and built a picture from it.

Everybody does this. Every conversation, every company, everyone you have ever formed a view about. Simplifying is how people handle new information.

So the thing worth catching is the moment the simplification goes wrong. Those moments are specific. They are usually one sentence long, and until now nobody was writing them down.

That is what the scoring is really for. The grade matters far less than the record of where the call turned.

Day to day it is quiet. The rep gets briefed in the morning on the calls they have that day. The next day they see the scoring on the ones they ran.

We spend a great deal to get a call booked. A call that does not convert costs the same to produce as one that does. These two work on the second part.

I would like to know which one you would reach for first, the prep or the review. Reply and tell me, I read all of them.

PS. If you want to talk through what this would look like on your own calls, grab a time here