What we talked about
John Karsant shares the unexpected path that took him from college tennis and coaching to sales, remote work, and ultimately founding LevelUp Leads in 2021. John explains how a bold life move:quitting coaching and moving to Argentina to learn Spanish:pushed him to find one of the rare remote roles available in 2015, where he became the first SDR at a small startup and learned sales by wearing multiple hats.
Show notes
John Karsant quit tennis coaching, moved to Argentina with no plan, and ended up stumbling into a remote sales job in 2015, back when remote work was genuinely rare. That accidental first SDR role at a solar lead generation startup became the foundation for Level Up Leads, a company he built during COVID lockdowns with a six-month runway and the confidence he could always find another job if it failed.
What we covered
- Building an internal SDR team is more like building a car from scratch than leasing one, companies often underestimate the management overhead, tool costs, process design, and the reality that the average SDR stays with a company for one year or less before churning out.
- Cold calling outperforms email and LinkedIn as a standalone channel because it produces real-time feedback: you learn immediately whether you reached the right person, whether the message is resonating, and why people aren’t interested, instead of waiting for sparse email responses that are easy to ignore.
- The most common outbound mistake is expecting ROI in two or three months when industry data shows that even an internally hired SDR typically takes six to nine months, sometimes a full year, before generating meaningful pipeline returns.
- Multi-channel works better than single-channel: layering email and LinkedIn on top of cold calling builds awareness across touch points, so a prospect might ignore a call but then research the company, see an email, and book a meeting through that second channel.
- Campaigns should run two to three weeks before any adjustments are considered, pivoting too early based on insufficient data is as damaging as running a dead campaign too long, since attribution across channels makes it hard to know which touch point drove any given result.
- Keeping personalization human in the age of AI means removing the long dash that ChatGPT favors, building real relationships through podcasts and in-person events, and accepting that most recipients assume cold outreach is AI-generated, which raises the bar for anything that actually lands.
About John Karsant
John Karsant is the founder and CEO of Level Up Leads, an SDR appointment-setting agency based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He launched the company in 2021 after eight years in lead generation, building on his experience as the first SDR at a solar lead generation startup and later working alongside the CEO of a B2B outreach agency.
Episode 98 of the PreVetted Podcast.