Episode Details

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