In today’s newsletter, I’ll share my retrospective on 2024, what worked, and what didn’t. This will be more personal than other newsletters, but I promise I’ll get back to more sales-oriented newsletter after this one.

Let’s dive in:

Q1: Business as usual

Q1 2024 was quite similar to most Q1s since I started working for myself. I launched The Prospecting Engine. With 65 customers and around $20,000 in sales, I was pretty happy about the results.

I also ran a few sponsored posts, and trained a few sales teams with the content of The Prospecting Engine. In terms of revenues, the first quarter was pretty similar to most other first quarters.

Q2: Darkness

At the beginning of Q2, we went back to France after spending 3 months in Mexico. My wife was pregnant of 6 months, and everything was all right. That was until we went for the third trimester echography, right before our flight back to France.

We discovered that our daughter had a life-threatening malformation, which made it impossible for her to live.

We lost our baby.

This was the worst time of my life. From April to June, my wife and I fell into a dark hole, and our lives were completely turned upside down. We kept working to numb the pain, but it was impossible to function normally in these few weeks after loosing our baby.

If you’re ever in this situation (or was), and you need to talk to someone, please reach out, you’re not alone.

Q3: Doubt

As a result of these tough 3 months, I wasn’t able to create quality content like I used to. Couple that with the summer, an algorithm change, and my LinkedIn performance tanked. I went from having 50+ reactions on my posts to 2, 3 reactions.

It was hard.

But I started recording videos for LinkedIn, worked on my copywriting, and my post engagement came back to a normal level. I also noticed that my engagement fell, but I was still able to turn conversations into revenues (coaching, online courses, sponsoring, etc.).

I also worked really hard on a course called Close Your First Side Gig. I set up a segmentation survey on my website, I ran interviews with salespeople who wanted to work for themselves, and I created a waitlist.

This launch was a flop. I made less than $600.

Q4: Rebuilding

Q4 was much better than the rest of the year. My wife became pregnant again (we’re having a boy in May 2025), and we moved to Mexico. We decided to leave France because our life there wasn’t nearly as fun an interesting as what we’re building in Mexico. We’ve been there for 3 months and we’ve experienced more than in two years in France.

I have also launched a 1:1 coaching subscription where my customers and I work together for 1 hour per week, while having unlimited WhatsApp access to me.

Another great success of 2024 has been the revenue I was able to generate for affiliate partners. In total I generated over $96,000 of revenues for my partners in less than a year. If you want to discuss how we can do this together, go check my sponsor page. I’m looking for long term sponsors for my newsletter and a new show I’m launching next year.

In conclusion, 2024 was the worst year of my life. My wife and I have been through hell, and our professional lives have suffered immensely. 2024 has also been the worst year in terms of revenues since I started my business in 2018. But in all that darkness, it was a year of learnings, transition, and resilience.

I have learned that nothing is constant, and you need to keep reinventing yourself if you want to keep paying your bills. I’m now more grateful for what I have, and I cherish every moment I get to spend with people I love, while building my business.

Happy New Year to you and your family!

Cheers,

Thibaut Souyris

In today’s newsletter, I’ll share the exact system I’m using to restart my prospecting as I’m back from the holiday break. If you can replicate these steps, you’ll already be ahead of your fellow sales reps, as they are emerging from the holiday season without a plan.

Here’s how, step-by-step:

Step 1: Define your ICP and their problems

Start by building your ICP matrix. The ICP matrix is composed of your Ideal Customer Company (ICC) in columns, and your Ideal Customer Title (ICT) in rows. Your ICC is the type of company you’d like to go after, and the ICT is the type of job title you’d like to go for.

When your ICP matrix is done, focus on understanding the problems of your prospects. If you need to go further, I recommend checking the Cold Message System.

Step 2: Find where they hang out

Humans are social creatures, and they typically hang out with other humans who have the same interests. Nowadays, they mostly do it online, on social networks.

For most salespeople, LinkedIn is a great place to find prospects, and identify triggers to help them start conversations.

I recommend following these 4 steps to identify where your prospects hang out, and create personalized messages at scale.

Step 3: Enrich data

Now that you know where to find your prospects, you need to find the correct emails and phone numbers of your prospects, on top of their LinkedIn profiles. You can use the Kaspr extension to do so (+ you’ll get 25 free mobile credits when you sign up with my link).

Step 4: Build a problem centric sequence

You now have all the information you need to start reaching out to your prospects. Before doing so, you need to build a sequence to maximize your reply rate. I did a quick video to help you create a sequence from scratch, with ChatGPT.

When the sequence is ready, you’ll need to use messages that stand out from the hundreds of outbound touchpoints your prospects have to deal with. Here’s a collection of top-performing templates.

Step 5: Restart your daily prospecting routine

All these steps will result in nothing if you don’t create a daily prospecting habit. This step is by far the most challenging, since humans have a hard time building and keeping healthy habits.

I recommend doing the following:

• Step 1: Identify the time when you’re the most productive
• Step 2: Put a recurring blocker of 60 minutes
• Step 3: Follow the steps in this short guide
• Step 4: Repeat until it becomes a habit (at least 21 consecutive days)

You can also try my Prospecting Engine if you need a more in-depth guide.

And these are the 5 steps I am currently following to restart my prospecting for 2025. Here’s a quick video example I did last year if you want to learn more.

 If you follow these 5 steps, you’ll be in good position to grab your prospects’ attention, engage them in conversations, and book meetings with people who are trying to solve a problem you can help with.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Thibaut

Today’s newsletter is a bit different. It’s almost the end of the year and I thought I’d share a quick update I’m really excited about. A few weeks ago, I stumbled on a post from Justin Welsh, where he shared his Intro link.

In today’s newsletter, I’ll share 3 concrete steps you can follow to close a deal today. Salespeople (especially Enterprise salespeople) love to explain how their sales processes are different, how it’s impossible to close a deal without involving all the stakeholders, etc, etc.

No matter what you sell, if you follow the 3 steps I’m about to share with you, you’ll close deals a lot faster. In fact, I closed one myself (I’ll admit, it was a small deal) in one day. Here’s the WhatsApp conversation I had:

In today’s newsletter, I’ll share a simple tool to help reduce the risk of burning out when working as a remote salesperson. 2024 hasn’t been easy, especially for remote salespeople. Around 2/3 of salespeople are expected to miss their sales targets this year, adding a lot of pressure to their lives.

We’ve all been there. You wake up one day, and you instantly start getting anxious. You know you have a ton of things to do, but you have no clue how you’re going to do them when there are so few hours in the day. Even worse, you know that your to-do list is growing bigger every day.

You start your day with this dark cloud over your head. You can’t stop thinking of what have to do, which makes you less present and more anxious. I know about it because I experienced it when we moved to Mexico in September.

This is where a Mind Sweep will help. A Mind Sweep is a simple exercise I discovered when I purchased Notion Mastery, a few years ago.

Here’s how it’s done, step-by-step:

Step 1: Capture your thoughts

Start by writing down all of your thoughts. You don’t need to get them structured, or prioritized. Just list everything you have on your mind. It can be professional or personal. It doesn’t matter, as long as you’re capturing it.

I don’t know about you, but I often get stressed or anxious because I know I need to do something, but I’m afraid I’ll forget to do it. Something simple like paying the electric bill, or following up with a customer. I know I need to do it, but if I don’t write it down, or act on it, I start worrying.

As the day goes by, I feel anxious, but I forget why I’m anxious. I spend more time thinking of why I’m anxious, and I can’t remember why. Then I become angry, stressed, and soon enough, I’m unbearable.

By capturing your thoughts, you go from worrying about what you have to do, to knowing that your thoughts are captured, and you just need to go back to your mind sweep to see what you have to do.

Here’s an example from my Mind Sweep for Sales: