Navigating Lead Scoring and AI in Sales

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Sandy Mangat, Head of Marketing at Pocus.

Summary: AI and outbound prospecting has flooded our inboxes with poorly personalized, irrelevant, and frankly lame template attempts at human connection. But some teams are seeing the light… the purple light. Sandy takes us inside the dimly lit fortune telling parlor of Pocus where we gaze into the swirling galaxies of the crystal ball of modern sales. We travel through visions of product-led sales, network referrals, signal correlation and AI agents all swirling together to fill pipelines.

About Sandy

• Sandy is based in beautiful Vancouver BC, she got her start at GE Digital in Product Marketing
• She later moved on to ThoughtWire, a tech company specializing in smart building
• She then joined Charli AI, a multidimensional AI company specializing in the finance sector
• Today Sandy is Head of Marketing at Pocus, an AI-native prospecting platform trusted by high growth companies like Asana, Monday, Canva, and Miro

Outbound Needs a Cold Hard Reset

The blunt reality about outbound sales is that automation obsession and meeting quotas have created a wasteland of deleted emails and blocked LinkedIn profiles. Sales teams continue spraying prospects with templated messages, while response rates plummet to new lows. Yet leadership keeps pushing for higher volumes, creating a self-destructive cycle that poisons potential customer relationships before they begin.

This mess stems from sales organizations fundamentally misunderstanding what drives genuine business relationships. Sales leaders chase efficiency through automation, treating prospects like data points rather than future partners. The result? Inboxes overflow with desperate attempts at "personalization" that read like they were written by a caffeinated robot trying to sound human. Meanwhile, genuinely interested prospects have built fortress-like defenses against the daily barrage of cookie-cutter outreach.

Consider how actual business relationships form: through authentic interactions, shared understanding, and carefully built trust. Successful outbound motions mirror this natural process, whether through thoughtful event networking, well-researched phone conversations, or precisely targeted digital outreach. Even companies swimming in inbound leads eventually require strategic outbound capabilities, especially when expanding into new markets or launching products that demand fresh customer conversations.

The path forward demands embracing what experienced sales professionals already know: shortcuts and automation cannot replace genuine human connection. Sales organizations must rebuild their outbound approach from the ground up, focusing on quality interactions over vanity metrics. This means investing serious time in prospect research, crafting genuinely personalized messages, and showing patience as relationships develop organically.

Key takeaway: Sales teams have to abandon the lame industrial approach to outbound prospecting and return to building relationships and human-centered selling. Ditch your batch and blast automation addiction, focus on qual over quant, and giving sales professionals the time and tools to build authentic relationships rather than chasing arbitrary activity and volume metrics.

Building Sales Teams for Product Led Growth Companies

Product-led growth companies harbor a poorly kept secret: they all run sales teams. The idealistic vision of products that "sell themselves" crashes into market realities faster than venture capitalists can say "negative churn." Companies like Miro, Asana, and Canva discovered that relying solely on product-driven acquisition limits their growth potential, especially when expanding into new markets or use cases.

The evolution of PLG sales teams reflects a sophisticated marriage between product usage data and human-driven outreach. These teams capitalize on product signals that indicate expansion potential, creating what Sandy calls "warm outbound" opportunities. When users demonstrate specific engagement patterns or hit usage thresholds, sales professionals step in to guide them toward broader adoption or premium offerings. This approach transforms traditional cold outreach into data-informed conversations with already-engaged users.

Yet even these PLG darlings recognize the strategic value of traditional outbound sales. They approach their go-to-market strategy like a diversified investment portfolio, using cold outreach to hedge against the limitations of product-led acquisition. This hybrid model proves particularly valuable when testing new markets, launching products, or exploring different use cases. The rapid feedback loop from direct sales conversations provides invaluable insights that pure product analytics might miss.

The WordPress.com experience illustrates this evolution perfectly. Despite massive organic traffic and brand recognition, they eventually built a sales team to capture enterprise opportunities and service-based revenue. This mirrors the broader industry pattern where even the most product-centric companies discover that sustainable growth requires a balanced approach combining automated product experiences with strategic human intervention.

Key takeaway: Successful PLG companies build sales teams that leverage both product usage signals and traditional outbound tactics. Rather than choosing between product-led or sales-led growth, organizations should create a balanced strategy that uses product data to inform outreach while maintaining direct sales capabilities for market expansion and enterprise opportunities.

How Product Led Sales Teams Time Their Customer Outreach

These days every SaaS company wants the magic of product-led growth: minimal sales headcount, viral expansion, and revenue that scales without an army of account executives. Yet behind the glossy investor decks and growth charts lurks an uncomfortable reality about human intervention in the sales process. Even the most automated, product-led companies scramble to hire sales teams the moment enterprise deals enter the picture.

The data tells a ruthlessly practical story: throwing sales resources at every free trial wastes everyone's time while ignoring high-value accounts costs serious money. Smart companies obsess over usage patterns, tracking signals that indicate when a prospect needs human guidance versus automated nurturing. They build sophisticated scoring models to spot accounts teetering between self-service success and quiet abandonment, timing their outreach to tip the scales toward expansion.

Sandy points out how divergent growth patterns demand radically different playbooks. Some products drive natural expansion through viral team adoption but struggle with initial activation. Others convert early users easily yet hit a wall when trying to expand across departments. These distinct patterns create clear intervention points where human touch generates outsized returns, whether that means helping a complex enterprise implementation succeed or guiding teams toward advanced features that unlock real value.

The reality of product-led sales revolves around mapping your market's actual behavior, not following someone else's playbook. Enterprise deals often demand early sales involvement due to security requirements and complex buying processes. Other segments thrive on automated expansion until they hit specific technical or organizational barriers. Companies who understand these patterns build flexible systems that deploy sales resources at precise moments of maximum leverage rather than burning cycles on low-value outreach.

Key takeaway: Map your actual user b...