Sixty-eight percent of B2B buyers say sales reps don’t understand their business. At Aptivio, we sold to sales leaders — the exact people who coach reps for a living. Watching our own team get this wrong, in front of buyers who knew exactly what was happening, was one of the most instructive experiences of my career.
The Deep Dive
Most reps research the company. Very few research the person. This is the prep gap — and buyers feel it within the first minute of a call.
What most reps look up before a call: company revenue, LinkedIn job title, recent funding round. What they rarely look up: what this specific person has said publicly about the problem your product solves, what changed at their company in the last 90 days, what they’ve tried before and why it didn’t work.
The gap shows up immediately. “So, tell me about your business” — six words that signal: I did the minimum. I’m going to make you work. This is going to feel generic.
Compare that to: “I read your post about rep ramp time from last month — and I noticed you mentioned your team doubled in size this year. I’m curious whether the onboarding bottleneck you described is connected to what we typically see at that growth stage.” That’s six sentences that signal: I prepared. I see you as a specific person. This conversation will be worth your time.
The difference in buyer engagement is immediate and measurable. Buyers don’t just feel more comfortable — they share more. They give you the exact information you need to make the sale. And they do it because you earned it by showing up prepared.
This is teachable. It’s not about being a researcher — it’s about spending 10 focused minutes before every call on the person, not just the company.
What Dextego Is Seeing
Calls where reps open with a researched hypothesis (Opener D from our A/B test) generate an average of 2.7x more open-ended buyer responses in the first 5 minutes than calls that open with generic questions. More buyer words in the first 5 minutes correlates with higher deal advancement.
The Framework: The 10-Minute Pre-Call Research Protocol
- 3 min — LinkedIn: What has this person posted or commented on in the last 60 days?
- 3 min — Company news: What changed recently? New hire, funding, product launch, earnings?
- 2 min — Google: Their name + a keyword from your product category — have they been quoted on this topic?
- 2 min — Write one researched hypothesis you’ll open with. One sentence. Specific. Curious.
Ten minutes. Every call. Non-negotiable.
How Dextego Closes This Gap at Scale
Dextego was built to solve exactly this problem — automatically. Instead of asking reps to spend 10 minutes hunting across LinkedIn and Google before every call, Dextego pulls that public data itself and builds a profile of how your specific buyer thinks, decides, and communicates: their psychographic style, likely motivators, and probable objections, mapped to your actual deal stage and methodology.
Reps then rehearse against that real buyer profile in an adaptive roleplay — via chat or audio — before the call ever happens, so the opening line isn’t “tell me about your business” but a hypothesis grounded in who this buyer actually is. Once the call starts, Dextego’s Chrome extension and AI sales coach surface real-time guidance inside the conversation without interrupting it, and a post-call scorecard feeds straight into the next prep session, so every rep’s research gets sharper over time instead of starting from zero.
The effect shows up in the numbers: teams using Dextego see roughly 15% higher win rates, 30% shorter sales cycles, and 50% faster ramp time for new hires — because the prep gap closes before the rep ever says hello.