Episode #86 The Future of Outbound Sales: What Most Founders Get Wrong with Florin Tatulea

Struggling to bridge your go-to-market gaps? You’re not alone.

In this episode, we sit down with Florian Tatulea, Head of Sales Development at Common Room, to talk all things B2B sales, prospecting, and hiring top talent. Florian shares his decade-long expertise as an SDR, AE, and sales leader—PLUS insights from his new venture, Sales Flow.

💡 We cover:
✅ The biggest mistakes founders make in hiring SDRs & AEs
✅ Why product-market fit comes BEFORE sales scaling (seriously, stop rushing!)
✅ How AI is reshaping outbound prospecting – and why AI SDRs may be killing your pipeline
✅ The real way to build a high-performance sales team without wasting resources

🎯 If you’re in GTM, sales leadership, or just trying to break into the industry, this is a must-watch!

Follow Florin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/florintatulea/

PS - huge shout out to Sendoso for sponsoring our show.

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We are also proudly supported by Pursuit Sales Solutions - Where Hiring A+ Sales Employees is NOT a Pain in the Ass!
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ZoomInfo is also a proud sponsor - check them out here!

🎁 Lastly, we have a gift for you! We’re tired of seeing people getting critical GTM components wrong. Need help with your ICP, Buyer Persona, and Value Prop? Tired of the shitty “resources” people “give away” to gain followers?

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Transcript

This is Bridge the Gap powered by Revenue Reimagined, the podcast where we dive into all things revenue. Each episode we bring you the top founders and go-to-market leaders to challenge how you think about growth and help you bridge your biggest go-to-market gaps. I'm Adam Jay. And I'm Dale Zwizinski. 

As always, thanks for hanging with us. There's a million ways you can be spending your time and we're grateful you're choosing to spend it with us. Be sure to check out our newsletter if you want the show notes and tactical advice on how to bridge your GTM Gaps. 

Let's get to it after a quick word from our sponsor. Let's face it, y'all. Hiring sales talents is a real pain in the ass. Getting A players is key to bridging your go-to-market gap, but it's harder than ever. If you're not actively engaging past the talent, you don't stand a damn chance. That's why at Revenue Reimagined, we trust our partners at Pursuit to help our clients find the best talent fast. If you're looking to strengthen your sales team, go check them out. 

Welcome back to another episode of The Bridge, the Gap Podcast. Today, we have Florian Tatulia with us who is the head of sales development at Common Room. He's been building Pipeline for a decade in the B2B SaaS world as an SDR, an AE, and a sales manager. Little side project, he's also building Sales Flow, which is a consultancy that provides workshops, thought leadership, and courses, mostly related to something y'all need to improve upon, which is the art of prospecting. We're going to dig into that a little bit today. Florian, thanks for joining us. 

Yeah, thank you both for having me. Excited. Awesome. 

Thank you. 

What Adam got to join. He has nothing to do with picking the guests, but I have to stop being demeaning today. 

Hey, Florian. Thanks for joining. So you've been all over the spectrum from SDR to AE to running teams. And we talk a lot about the go-to-market gap, which in our world is a lot of stabilization and making sure people have the right functions and people in the right place to do the right things. Since you've been through that whole process, what makes a good salesperson? Like when you're trying to find that right salesperson, what makes that person like, I have to have that person on my team? 

Yeah, I think it depends a little bit. I would segment it out into different roles because I don't think that's really what makes a great prospector and SDR makes a great AE. 

At the SDR level, I think it's a few things. One, I actually really like people that have some kind of like chip on their shoulder. I tend to find that they're willing to, like no matter what is thrown at them, they're willing to like get themselves out of that situation. 

So you might not have the best territory, but like you're going to find a way to do it. Another big one on the SDR side for me and when we interview is curiosity. So it's like, are you naturally curious and willing to understand what a buyer or a prospect or a specific industry is focused on? And I think that one's like very difficult to teach. You can try to teach it with like, hey, here's like the great questions to ask in a discovery or whatever. But it's like, I've noticed that sustaining curiosity over time is almost something that can hear into a person. Right. You can't teach it. Yeah, it's tough. I'm trying to figure it out. 

How do you screen for it though? 

So a few different ways like, for example, when we send over one of the portions of SDR interviews actually doing like an assignment. I'm actually looking for candidates to ask clarifying questions. Like sometimes the assignment is almost like a little bit vague just to see if they're willing to dive a little bit deeper. And honestly, the biggest help for me actually, and I'm constantly disappointed, is the type of questions that people just ask at the end of the interview. 

Yeah, that's my biggest part of the interview. Like I'll leave 15 minutes at the end or 20 minutes at the end and I'll, if they don't ask good questions, like it's a no go from me. 

I'm still shocked to this day. It's like there's so much, so many resources like you have even chat, you can find 10, show me 10 uncommon questions to ask. But like you'll have so many candidates that will ask one question or even I probably take 20% of candidates. So like, no, like I don't have any questions for you. And it's just like very crazy, right? 

No questions. I want the job, but I don't have one single question for you, but it happens all the time. Yeah. So I agree with you, hiring SDRs, hiring AEs, hiring sales leaders, all different profiles. Having worked with, you know, as an SDR, as in the AE and as a sales manager, when you look at like the different stages, where do you start? Because like, and what I mean by that is a lot of founders we talked to are like, oh, we're just going to get SDRs. But the unit economics, in my opinion, have to make sense. Yeah. In your mind as someone who's leading SDR teams, when do you need SDRs? When do you need full cycle AEs? 

So I'm a pretty big believer that you need, I think like if you were to hire a certain persona first, it would be the accounting executive, but before even hire salespeople. And this is something that my founders at my first company, Lupio did very well. They actually closed like the first 50 deals themselves. And that brought us to, I joined as the first like salesperson, I was in SDR at like 400K an hour. And a lot of that was actually, we had a lot of like inbound. So it was me like qualifying people out for the founders. 

And then shortly after two AEs came along to like really build out that process. The main thing that you should not do is not hire salespeople and specifically SDRs before you have product market fit. Like as a general rule of thumb, I probably... Scream that from the rooftop, please. 

Yeah. So generally, one million a year. No salesperson is going to get you product market fit. 

Yeah. You're literally just asking and usually some more entry level person to like figure something out that is not... That you can't figure out. So that's my advice. Probably at least a million an hour now. Yeah. Yeah. 

And through that process, I wonder if we're all talking about product market fit the same. So a lot of times we're talking about founders or CEOs of SDRs. Like we have product market fit and then like you look at it and it's like, well, the 100 customers you have like 98% of them are all your network or something that it referred to. You haven't done any outbound motion. Like you don't know how to bring in someone cold. 

Like it's great if you have a great network and leverage your network, but how do you actually bring in deals outside of what you know in your network? Yeah. 100%. And we find that a lot. So moving off, like so we have to do a lot of hiring for clients or like we do an evaluation of their team. Then once we kind of get that going, we have to build out a lot of foundational elements. And then in that foundational element, one of the things I find super interesting about common room is like you guys are making connections for people in that process. 

How can people as they're building out their foundational go to market leverage something like common room to help them find better relationships, build more top of funnel? Like talk to me a little bit about that. 

So this is actually kind of interesting. I don't think common room is actually built for people to find product market fit. And this is one of the things that we figured out as we were finding our own product market fit. We work a lot better with companies that are larger, have buyers that are leaving digital breadcrumbs and essentially already have product market fit. 

So we're not going to really help you find that. I think like early stages to find product market fit. There's other platforms where you have like the clays of the world, for example, where you're building more like outbound style lists and trying different types of messages and use cases to various personas to test like what's actually working and talking to various like buyers in the market. But yeah, we're not like really focused on that early stage. Awesome. 

Yeah, it wasn't about early phase. So in foundation, what we're doing with a lot of our clients, like our clients would range from like they have they may need product market fit, which we're helping them with the product market fit. But once we stabilize a lot of companies, like they're not believing anymore, the cast has stopped, like you're kind of getting into some momentum, like we talk about momentum. Then we get into the foundational side of it. And it's like, what are the technologies and infrastructure you need to build that foundation. And that's where I think like you've made initial conversation. You've had initial conversations, you're starting it out on motion, but you need to find a way to start scaling that like what are those foundational elements in the tech sector could be your CRM could be your call recording technology. Like is common room a foundational platform to help people make those connections and build that top of funnel pipeline. Yeah, 100%. 

So I can even give you like an analogy that one of my heads here came up with, but essentially like what we do is we help you fish in a pond as opposed to like the ocean. So I think that the fundamental thing that's like really changed in the last 10 years of prospecting. Before you used to have like the platform like sales loft and outreach, where you didn't have the technology to know like who was in market like you had a few different signals that you could kind of leverage but now you have technology that really is integrated into all of the web and you can see the digital breadcrumbs that people are leaving before you never had that. So what you had to do with what I'm calling like outbound 2.0 because before 2.0 was just like, you know, sending emails and calling manually. You had like a TAM or a SEM and you were like, okay, I don't know who is interested right now, but I'm going to send 10,000 emails and I'm likely going to hit the 10% that are market. It's not super efficient, but it's much more efficient than going manual. Now what technology is like common and allow you to do is we can actually show you who is in market or like starting to display intent so that you're not even wasting time on, you know, that I'm not going to say like 70% of people that are like either not in market or not even in the process of being educated on that specific thing. 

Interesting. You're good, Dale. I like it. I like it. I like it when you have to ponder. 

I have to think. I have to think on that one a little bit. I like it. 

So, yes, I want to double down on this because outbound is change, right? Prospecting is change and you talked about sales loft and outreach and there's all sorts of tools that I truly believe have ruined prospecting because all they encourage you to do and we hear it from our clients all the time and even newer tools, smart lead instantly. 

And I think play is great if used properly, but let's throw clay in there for purpose of this conversation. Just go find a bunch of people who are in your I CP that you haven't redefined in 10 years. Drop them in play and Richard make sure the email is accurate and blast out 100,000 emails. And I do think sales loft and outreach proliferated this and people are still doing this. Yeah. But what is the right way and let's put common room aside for a moment. 

Yes. But what is the right way to prospect because I'm a big believer that like that's a lot of effort for less than a 1% reply rate. And that's a numbers game that sure sales is numbers, but is that the best way to prospect? What is the right way to prospect? 

So, first of all, actually think it starts with like really being able to define like your I CP and building a proper list. I think most people overestimate how big their. So, can is one thing like your total addressable market. You're Sam, which is like what companies can are actually going to buy from you. I think that's like a big distinction that a lot of founders and people are not really making like even for us because we just went through this list building process right now for a new fiscal year. There are about 1500 accounts in North America or like at least global organizations that are like perfect fits for us. That's it. 

Come on. Which is, you know, technically we could probably sell to 100,000 plus companies, but it's like we're going to be so inefficient with a lot of those in the message and the product is just not going to be as successful for them. So, it's like that's a problem not just for sales, but further down the line. 

Like it's going to be turn issues and like there's so many different companies that have dealt with this right. It's like you'll get to one to three million ARR and you think you're you have product market fit, but people are churning in a year. So, you're not actually a product market fit and that's I think because sales functions tend to I mean there's pressure to close deals, but you're not closing the right deal. 

In fact, the definition like what is really product market fit right. Yeah, you may be bringing people in the door. But if you got the hole in the boat, like do you really have product market fit and look at we've all gone a lot of people have gone through the people in door. You guys write revenue. You got to understand but learn and go through that process but also understand like you don't have product market fit. 

And if you're going to get investment, like be clear with the investor. Look at we're at two and a half million in ARR. We have we have a churn problem because we brought in a lot of customers. But now we know our product market like we know our I.C .P. We know we're going to niche down into this. Yes, you want to know the TAM is four hundred and fifty thousand billion trillion dollars. But like what we're going to deliver is really niche here and then we'll grow on top of it and we'll build on top of it. And I think investors are starting to get there. 

And I can give you a bit of like an anecdote story. I won't name the company, but one of the companies I worked at. We were at five million in ARR and we actually did not have product market fit. We found out later because the company imploded. But we close a lot of deals over a year period and then the terms was like insane the year after. So you actually should if you're going to grow heavily, you should actually wait a year to see if like you actually have. 

Does it stay difficult to do because it's going so fast like you want to over invest in the sales team and SDRs and all that kind of stuff. So hindsight is always going to be 20 20. I'm not blaming the founders for that at all. 

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So you said something that I want to go back to. You can sell to a lot of people, but it doesn't mean it's the right people. And Dale and I talk about this all the time with founders where it's like, oh, you know, customer success sucks and they're not doing their job and we have all this churn. But where does it start? It starts with whether you're selling to the right people or not. And I think we're so focused on, Ham, we could sell to everyone, right? 

I have this little thing that might work for you, but 10 other things won't, and you're going to wind up churning. I'm dealing with this with the client right now. They're very focused on retained executive search. But their solution could sort of work for contingency, but we know that those people turn in a year. Why is it so hard to get founders or even let's say CROs to understand that not all revenue is good revenue? Because that takes you, when we talk about the go-to-market gap, you think that you have this repeatability to your point because you have sold $5 million in ARR, but shit, we need to go back to stabilization because we have a leaky bucket that's going to kill us. Yeah. 

I mean, not the time to admit it, but I think it goes back to the human solution of like we want short-term like games and stuff. And I think that's actually exasperated by like VC-funded companies. 

You're just like, there's so much pressure to get to the next ARR target that you just have to deal with that. I'm advising a company called Hyperbound. It's two very young founders. They actually only started exactly one year ago. 

They're over a million in ARR right now. They did something two months after they launched. They did something that I think is extremely wise. I made a post for them that ended up with like a few million impressions. They booked them like 300 plus demos. They made a call at one point where we're like, we're not going to even have a conversation with anybody that doesn't have a sales team of at least 15 people. And they like completely canceled like 250 demos. And that's like pretty nuts to be able to do. 

But more companies should do this in my opinion. It's how you do it. You don't just cancel and say F off, but like, Lauren, thank you so much. We have Hockey Stack is another one that does a really good job at this. If you are not truly enterprise, you might love us. You might think we're great. At the end of a year, at the end of three months, at the end of six months, we're not going to be the best fit and you're going to turn. So rather than that, this is who you should go talk to for your time. And when you get to the right space, we would love to have a conversation with you. And I think you earn so much credibility by doing that. Our world's a little different, but we do that in our world as well. Right? Like you're just not a good fit. And I don't want to just take your money. 

I love that they do that. And one of the first things I did at Common Room when I joined back in May, I implemented Chili Piper. I was like, I'm going to do any type of discovery or any like it's going straight to AEs. And then we just segmented off is like employees under 50 just are not routed to AEs, you go to an interactive demo and there's someone that's filtering through them. 

Like there are a few smaller companies that might make sense for us if they're displaying enough signal in their market, like a PLG company's perfect, for example. Yeah. And that's kind of it. But the message or the path that they take from Chili Piper is not, hey, like you're not good enough or whatever. 

It's like, hey, here's like it. You can take a free trial. Here's an interactive demo. So you're still actually showing them the product, but we're not going to spend time sending that to an accounting executive. And that's just like a business decision that we made. Yeah. 

Yeah. Super interesting. And I think you said something earlier that I find interesting when you're hiring SDRs, but I'm curious your perspective on this because I hear it a lot and I believe it, I believe it, but do you have this path of SDRs to an AE role? So almost using your SDR as like a bullpen for lack of a better terms and like a baseball term or like a AAA team that can generate back into an AE role. 

And what are you seeing nowadays that SDRs are like, I've done this for six months and I want to now be an AE. You're like, what's that timeframe that they're thinking about? Six months. That's a long time. 

Yeah. So as someone that went from an SDR to an AE at my first company and to a manager, I'm a very big believer that it's important to have like a bullpen to get to an AE. And what we found at my first company, Lupio, the top SDRs that became AE's were actually like the probably like within the top 10% of AE's at the company. And I think it's for a number of different reasons. Like you don't have to retrain them. 

They already know how to prospect and sell source pipeline, which I think is a huge thing in that market with to that buyer. And right now I'm literally at common room over the next couple of days. I'm building out the career passing because I want to love it. I want to feed SDRs into our commercial team. I think the thing that's tough, SDRs that are at companies that only sell enterprise, I tend to find that the jump from an SDR to an enterprise is very difficult to make. And it's tough to build a career path there for them. So I don't have a perfect answer in that type of world. 

But if you do have an SMD or a commercial team, I think like you have, you should have a feeder system for sure. And then in terms of like timing, I actually think it's a bit more of an employer's market again, like an expectations have chilled out a little bit. Most people or SDRs now kind of realize you have to be in role for one, one and a half, two years and it's becoming more common. 

It's just like it is what it is. A lot of companies are leaning down, right? Like, you know, it's rare to see a hundred person SDR team, even like a 25 person SDR team for like a company under 500 people. So there's just not as many opportunities. 

Yeah. I appreciate that insight for sure. 

Yeah, it's there's this sense of entitlement, right? That I think folks used to have of and listen, we as an industry created it. Oh, you've been here six months. Here's your promotion. 

Oh, you've been here a month. Sit on sales call so you could get promoted. Yes, you should sit on sales calls. You should sit on sales calls to learn. 

It shouldn't be oh, so you could get promoted. And I don't think it's about doing your time or like putting a deadline on it, but at the end of the day, you have to learn and they're very different. I agree with what you said and I don't think enough people talk about it that going from SDR to enterprise, a like in a full enterprise motion, those are wildly different skill sets. Yeah. And most enterprise orgs are not going to be able to train you to do that. Yeah. You have to be transparent with people about that up front. 

I also think like there was a bit of a shock for me to even go into from team lead SDR to an A.E. role, because it's like you're on calls here and there. Like you listen to demos. They're like, oh, I know the prospect. I know the pains, but I think the thing that a lot of people don't fully internalize is how many different possible situations there are in a sales cycle, especially if it's like a sale cycle that's not like, you know, two days or two weeks. Like I would be the average sales cycle, even commercial was what it was about three months. 

So you have the RFP company. Exactly. Oh, very cool. We have a client that uses them. Nice. 

So you have like, there's a demo, uh, there's discovery, there's demo, there's like negotiation, you have to run POCs, you have to run like trial check and you have to run negotiation calls. Uh, and there's so many different variables of things that could happen in all those different types of calls. 

Uh, that make it much, the learning curve is just going to take a little bit longer. Like when you're an SDR, don't get me wrong. It's a very difficult thing to do, but it's like, there's kind of like five things that could really happen in like a discovery or email exchange, uh, or a basic call call, right? 

For all the, for all the SDRs out there, like they're probably like everyone, if they're listening or like, I want to be flooring, like I want to get to that place. 

Like what's the piece of advice you have for them? Like as they're starting their careers in SDR, maybe they've never sold before. To get to an accounting executive. No, to get to where you are. Ah. Uh. 

So I don't like, I don't like saying, uh, things sometimes are just like end up being lucky because I think you can, uh, influence luck a little bit. But one of the main things that like really blew up my career was working for a company that ended up like growing really fast. So I would be, I had like five or six promotions in seven years. That's all. Uh, VCs and other founders have a very difficult time picking winners. 

So I wouldn't try too hard to pick a winner. Uh, if I had to do it again, I would probably actually recommend that you go to like a large corporation that has a great training system in place. Yep. Get the brand behind you and then, uh, go and work for like these other types of companies. Um, and it's kind of ironic that I'm giving that advice because I, I didn't do that. 

Um, but the wisdom of what you would do if you had to redo it. Yeah. 

That was, that's like the sure path in my eyes. Uh, this other path is more risky, but it's more reward. So it's like, it depends on what kind of person you are. I've always been more of an entrepreneurial type of person. Uh, so I took a shot. Love that. Love that. 

So we've talked a little bit about how outbound is changing. It's going to continue to change. What are your predictions? What are we going to see? There I say for the next year, um, I don't know if we could predict past the next three months to, uh, I just say, I don't know if we can predict past the next quarter or two. Um, but what are we going to see? Let's go and change. Yeah. 

There's a lot of stuff is changing. So we talked about the problem that like, uh, the outreach and sales off of the world's created and I don't want to hate on them because I, I still use, I'm an outreach customer and they did a lot for like the sales, uh, industry. And it's just like naturally things evolved. It is what it is. The 10 X problem is now AI FDRs, which is like outreach and sales off on crack. 

Hmm. I have a lot. 

So we actually considered building an AI FDR at a common room, but, uh, we ended up not deciding not to go that way. And we kind of changed our approach to believing that sales is fundamentally human, at least for now. And we want to use AI to, uh, essentially be like your, your iron man. Sorry, your job, the drivers to your iron man is like the phrase I used. 

So it's kind of this idea of like the co-pilot, right? It's like, I have all the data and you can just give me recommendations. So for us, what that looks like, because we're listening for various signals and can give you a POV on account. 

Uh, the future to me is like, Hey, here, here, here's your book of business of, you know, your top hundred accounts. Here's the signals that are displaying. Here's the two that you should focus on today. 

Here's your best, best path of entry in this account and all the digital footprints that were left. Um, that give you the highest propensity chance to like book that meeting. Uh, or like, as an AI, you know, focus on that. So I think, um, the next year is going to be like this co-pilot. 

You have AI agents that help you do like the mundane tasks that, uh, sales people used to do. Um, the future is like past one, two years. I really don't know. Like it's very difficult to say like stuff is evolving so fast. It's hard. 

It's a, it'll, it'll be interesting to see. I hate AIFDR. Um, that's a whole separate conversation that we don't need to spend our time chatting about. All right, Florian, let's do some rapid fire before we wrap it up. So much good stuff shared. I cannot wait to see, uh, where outbound goes early bird or night owl. Uh, I'm an eight owl. 

If you weren't, if you weren't, if you weren't in tech, where, what like trade or process would you, would you work? 

Uh, well, so I started in like banking. So I went to business school and I just like hated it off of that. So, um, I ended up in tech sales. If money didn't matter, I don't know. I'd probably just be like a, like a captain on a yacht or something. Oh, I love it. 

What is, um, what's your favorite guilty pleasure snack? 

I love these, um, smart sweets. Uh, I don't know if you guys have those in the U S maybe it's like Canadian thing, but it's like low calorie, like sour candies or, uh, home salt and vinegar chips, which I also think is not really an American thing. Ooh. 

Yeah. We get some bigger. My, my, my kid loves, loves salt and vinegar chips. Um, and I'll, my thing. Yeah. 

It's not a thing in the U S right? 

I did. I did. Yeah. Yeah. I haven't, cause, uh, maybe it depends on state, maybe Florida, because you guys are influenced by Canada a little bit there. 

So, uh, there's lots of Ontario plates. Yeah. Exactly. Uh, but I noticed in a lot of states, like it just does not exist. 

Or maybe just maybe as we wrap this up, where's your, uh, dream vacation destination? 

Uh, my, I've been a lot of countries already, like almost 70, but, uh, the place I haven't been that is my dream. Next is Japan. Yeah. 

Very nice. A lot of people have said that recently. And I was just reading an article, Florin, that it's actually the cheapest, uh, one of the cheapest places to go to. 

Yeah. Well, the Japanese yen is, I think down in, uh, in, uh, relative costs to like the USD, uh, and Canadian dollar too. So, uh, every single person that's been in Japan has told me that it's amazing. I've never heard a bad thing about it. Hmm. Ever. 

Cool. Man. Awesome. Florin, thank you so much for joining y'all. Go check out common room, uh, and we're glad that you spend some time with us. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it. Cheers. Thanks so much for listening. We hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as we did. 

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