Nobody likes cold calls. Not the person making them and definitely not the person getting them. Yet businesses still need to find new customers. That’s the problem Daniel Saks decided to fix. After years of grinding through phone books at Royal Bank of Canada, he now leads Landbase, where his team uses AI to find better ways to connect businesses with customers who actually want to hear from them. His approach? Build trust first, sell second.
Learning Sales the Hard Way
Nobody hands out phone books to interns anymore. But Daniel’s early days of cold calling wealthy zip codes left a mark. “One of my first jobs right out of college was an internship at the Royal Bank of Canada, and I was tasked with bringing in business for a wealth manager,” he recalls. Those long hours of working the phones weren’t just about making calls – they taught him how people make decisions. The manual grind of cold calling showed him what was missing: trust.
Daniel noticed something that changed his approach entirely. By creating a simple website for the broker, he could turn cold calls into warmer conversations. “When I was able to call a business, I could reference the website and the website gave him more credibility,” he explains. That small change made a big difference in how potential clients responded. It wasn’t just about having a website – it was about building trust before the first ‘hello’.
Adapting to Modern Sales Strategies
Times have changed since those phone book days. Daniel’s discovery about building trust led him to a bigger truth: “The lesson learned is that an omni-channel approach builds trust and allows you to have better conversion rates.” But today’s buyers need more convincing than ever. “It takes today 18 interactions with a target buyer for them to engage and be ready to have a consultative conversation to want to buy your software,” he points out. Those 18 touchpoints can’t just be random attempts at contact. Each interaction needs to move the conversation forward. “You need to be strategic about sending messages in a sequence and each time driving relevant messages that builds trust and credibility,” Daniel explains. The days of hoping a single cold call will land a sale are long gone.
At Landbase, Daniel puts these insights to work with a modern twist. His company isn’t just about making contacts – it’s about making connections that matter. They’ve built something that handles everything from understanding your business to executing campaigns that actually work. The approach is comprehensive but focused. “We can equip you to do that end to end, everything from understanding your business, the pain points you solve for your customers, who your target customers are, enriching that data and executing omni-channel campaigns,” Daniel says. They work across every channel that matters: email, phone, LinkedIn, retargeting, and website traffic.
Creating Meaningful Engagements
Most companies blast out messages hoping something works. Daniel takes a different view. At Landbase, each email, call, or message fits into a bigger picture. “We can equip you to do that end to end, everything from understanding your business, the pain points you solve for your customers, who your target customers are,” he explains. Behind the fancy AI tech, Daniel’s still using what worked back in his phone book days. You can’t rush trust. But now instead of one cold call, his team builds relationships through carefully timed touchpoints. Each message adds another brick to the foundation.
Some things haven’t changed since Daniel’s internship days. People still buy from people they trust. The difference? Now he’s replaced that dusty phone book with tools that help businesses find the right people, at the right time, with the right message. To learn more about transforming your lead generation strategy, connect with Daniel Saks on LinkedIn.
