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June 1, 2026Dane Korsi

Cold Calling Taught Me Timing Is Everything

My first sales job was cold calling for a consulting firm. I failed constantly, and it taught me the one thing that matters.

My first job in college was a summer internship cold calling for a consulting company. I failed at a phenomenal rate. It turns out that when you are twenty years old with no network and no useful experience, CIOs are not especially excited to sit around and talk through their problems with you. ## Stumbling into timing Here is what did happen. With enough repeated action, you occasionally stumble into a perfect-timing win. You catch someone in the exact week they are feeling the exact problem you happen to be calling about. It was not repeatable. There was no magic message and no clever script. It was mostly beating your head against the wall until, every so often, something accidentally landed. The wins were real, but I could not have told you how to make another one happen. ## Making the accident predictable What changed is that the accidental part is no longer accidental. Perfect timing becomes something you can find on purpose when you can: - Consider every job posting an organization has had for the last decade. - See the people who were ultimately hired for those roles. - Know every new piece of technology the company has introduced. - Read everything the company has published. - Monitor the pain signals that actually matter: financial, strategic, competitive, and product. - Keep up with their headlines and their public reporting. - Have an agent pull all of that together, tag it to the specific thing you sell, and tee up an approach. None of that is about sending more messages. It is about knowing, before you reach out, who is in the exact situation my twenty-year-old self only found by accident. ## Where this leaves you The goal was never automated cold outreach. The goal is to use the information that already exists to consistently find the buyers who uniquely need your help right now, and then reach out with something actually worth listening to. Timing was always the thing that worked. Now you do not have to wait to stumble into it.

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