Most CEOs think prospecting breaks because the team is not doing enough. They assume the answer is more volume, more outreach, more reps, and more activity. That is rarely the real problem.
John Karsant sees the issue much earlier in the process. If you are targeting the wrong people or saying the wrong thing, scale only helps you fail faster. As he put it, “The volume doesn’t really matter if you’re not targeting the right people or you’re not saying the right things.”
That is the real lesson from his work at LevelUp Leads. Sales development does not become effective because you increase output. It becomes effective because you first build the right foundation, then increase output once you know what is working.
Start Small, Then Scale
One of the strongest themes in my conversation with John was discipline. He does not talk about prospecting as a brute-force game. He talks about it as a process of learning.
Many companies claim they know their ideal customer profile. In reality, they do not. Others admit they do not know it at all. In both cases, they are usually trying to scale before they have earned the right to scale.
John put it plainly: “You want to start out small and start gaining some traction and then you can start scaling it from there.”
That sounds simple, but many teams skip it. They want immediate pipeline, so they chase volume before they understand fit. They start sending more emails, making more calls, and expanding lists before they know which titles care, which pain points matter, or what message actually earns a response.
That approach creates noise, not momentum.
The better approach is to treat early outbound like a learning system. Start with a narrower audience. Test messaging. Study reactions. Learn what matters to the buyer. Then scale the motion after the signal is clear.
That is slower in week one. It is much faster by quarter two.
Your ICP Is Probably Not As Clear As You Think
John made another important point that more CEOs need to hear. A lot of companies either say they know their ICP and do not, or they admit they have not defined it at all.
That problem is bigger than most leaders realize because the ICP affects everything.
- Who your team targets
- What your messaging says
- How your offer is positioned
- Which objections you should expect
- Whether your outbound feels relevant or generic
If the ICP is fuzzy, the whole sales motion becomes fuzzy.
What I like about John’s approach is that he does not treat ICP work as a one-time branding exercise. He treats it as something refined through active market feedback. Outbound becomes a way to sharpen the company’s understanding of the buyer, not just a way to fill the calendar.
That is an important distinction.
If you approach prospecting only as a lead-generation activity, you miss the strategic value. Good outbound also teaches you what the market cares about, who feels the pain most urgently, and where your message is still weak.
The Hire That Changes Everything
John also offered a lesson that applies far beyond sales development. When I asked what would have saved him the most time and energy earlier, his answer was immediate. He would have hired an operations person sooner.
That is a classic CEO inflection point.
In the early stages, founders often stay too close to everything. They push through by working longer hours and handling more decisions themselves. That can work for a while. Then it stops working.
At some point, the company does not need more founder effort. It needs clearer systems and stronger operational support.
John described the shift well. Sales was still something he could do, and still does. Operations required a different skill set. Once he brought in someone who could own that side of the business, he gained the freedom to focus on growth, sales, and leadership instead of carrying work he was not best suited to do.
This is one of the hardest transitions for founders because it forces a different question. Not “What can I still handle?” but “What should I stop handling?”
That is a better CEO question.
Delegation Is Really About Trust
That leads to a broader point. CEOs do not scale because they become capable of doing more. They scale because they become capable of handing off more.
John’s framing here was strong. If you hire people to own certain departments, let them own those departments. If something comes to you that belongs elsewhere, reroute it. Do not hold onto it just because it landed in your inbox.
That sounds obvious. It is not easy.
Founders often stay involved because they believe they are protecting quality. Sometimes they are. Often they are simply slowing the company down.
Delegation works when you do three things well:
- Hire someone strong enough to own the function
- Give them the authority to make decisions
- Stay close enough to ask good questions without taking the work back
John emphasized the importance of asking questions, not pretending to be the expert in everything. That is exactly right. A CEO does not need to be the technical master of every function. But you do need to be competent enough to guide, challenge, and evaluate the people who lead those areas.
That is what real delegation looks like. It is not abandonment. It is structured trust.
Remote Culture Needs More Intentionality
Another insight from John that will resonate with many CEOs is how difficult it is to build culture in a remote company.
Remote work makes it easy to stay efficient. It also makes it easy to become transactional. That is the danger.
When work is mostly Slack messages, short calls, and issue routing, culture does not emerge naturally. You have to create it. John was direct about that. It is hard.
His answer was not complicated, but it was grounded. If your team is spread out, you need regular communication, clear goals, and occasional in-person time when possible. People need enough shared experience to feel connected to something beyond their individual task list.
He also made a point I strongly agree with. Once you step too far away from the team, culture becomes harder to maintain. That means the CEO cannot completely disappear from the human side of the company, even after systems improve.
You may not need to be in every workflow. You do need to stay visible in the culture.
AI Will Not Save Bad Sales Strategy
John’s perspective on AI was especially useful because it avoided both extremes. He is not dismissing it, and he is not pretending it magically solves sales.
Internally, AI is already helping his business in practical ways. It can analyze calls at scale, surface the ones worth reviewing, and even create training environments where SDRs can practice scripts against bots before getting on live calls.
That is real value.
But he also made clear that AI does not fix broken fundamentals. If your ICP is wrong, if your messaging is weak, or if your team is chasing volume without relevance, AI will only help you do the wrong thing faster.
This matters because too many CEOs are looking for efficiency before they have clarity.
John’s comments on email were especially telling. Outbound email has become crowded because AI makes it easier to produce more of it. That lowers the barrier to execution, which raises the amount of noise in the market. As a result, channels that once felt scalable now require much more care to stand out.
The good news is that the core principles still hold.
- Relevance still matters
- Clear targeting still matters
- Good messaging still matters
- Real conversations still matter
Technology can improve execution. It cannot replace strategy.
What Great CEOs Do Here
The strongest CEOs do not confuse activity with progress. They understand that scale only works when focus comes first.
John’s advice maps cleanly to that reality. Define the right audience. Test the message. Learn from the response. Build systems around what actually works. Hire for the functions you should not own forever. Delegate with trust. Use AI where it creates real efficiency, not where it becomes a distraction.
That is not flashy. It is effective.
And it creates the kind of company that can grow without the founder becoming the permanent bottleneck.
I am Glenn Gow. I coach CEOs.
If your sales engine feels noisy, inconsistent, or overly dependent on heroics, step back and ask a harder question. Do you actually know your ICP? Do you know what message earns attention? And are you building the discipline to scale what works, or are you just increasing activity because it feels productive?
The answer to those questions will tell you a lot about the next phase of your growth.
