What's the most difficult aspect of cold calling a prospect?

Hey Product Hunt community! I'm Harsh, Product Manager at PaddleBoat. As a startup, we believe it's our duty to keep innovating and solving problems that resonate with a large audience. PaddleBoat was born with the idea of making workplace learning fun because we saw from our own subpar experiences that it needed a rework, and it was also something that resonated with most people. It was almost like a light-bulb moment 💡 where something deeply personal to us, also made sense to solve at scale. For the past year, all of the PaddleBoat team has been a sales rep for us. We have ideated, executed, learned, and challenged ourselves to do justice to this mammoth task of bringing in customers regularly and growing the startup. We realized from our own journey that B2B selling is challenging and hard, to say the least. And let's be real, we've all been there! A lot of times, we ended up burning leads because, in essence, we were engineers trying to sell, and there's an obvious learning curve. It took time to get to a good level, and still, learning never stops. While we relate to this challenge, we also realized that this is a story for many others, including founders, SDRs, and AEs. That's when there was a second light-bulb moment 💡 for us - Clearly, there's a lot to be done in helping people sell better. And yes, there are loads of resources aka 'theory courses' for sales but most of the sales is still learnt on the job. While experiential learning is good, one ends up wasting leads. To validate this, we talked to 100+ stakeholders (sales enablement managers, SDRs, AEs & VPs) and almost all of them resonated with the problem at hand. We discovered the following insights from the conversations - 1. Many a times, actual leads are wasted while ramping-up. While it cannot be fully prevented, it can be reduced. And companies want to constantly preserve the valuable potential revenue. 2. Cold calling is still the preferred way of outreach for most. In the B2B game, every interaction is an opportunity for selling, and it's imperative to make a good impression right from the first call. 3. Reps often feel awkward doing mock calls or buyer role-plays with colleagues & managers and rarely replicate the real-world scenario. Also, managers rarely find time for this. 4. Although the problem is more pronounced for a fresher entering sales, every lead/potential customer is a different beast. Sometimes very experienced folks with tested traditional strategies can also find it difficult to convert leads, especially in today's world where a modern buyer is impatient and hard to get attention from. Additionally, one has to stand out from a large crowd. This gave us a clear picture of actual bottleneck in the ramp-up and what it manifests as for the various stakeholders. It also brings us a step closer to solving for sales training. I'm happy to unveil a way to perfect one's sales pitch with AI roleplays. And we've just launched today! You can check it out here: https://www.producthunt.com/post...