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Jackson Walker, BDR at Notion
Bill Woodward, BDR at Notion
From Inside the Sales Floor: EJ sits down with Notion BDRs Jackson Walker and Bill Woodward to talk about going from no dialing culture to a whole team parallel dialing in the same room. Watch the full episode below or on YouTube.
When Bill joined Notion, prospecting meant emails and LinkedIn DMs. If you dialed on the floor, you were "a whack job." A couple of weeks in, his director announced that all 15 BDRs would be parallel dialing together, side by side. The room went quiet.
Six months later, Bill and Jackson tell EJ what happened next. The nerves. The championship belt. A 1,500-call week that saved a quarter. And why a room full of teammates listening to your calls ended up being the part they like most. The episode closes with the two of them tag-teaming a live cold call against a Nooks AI roleplay bot, with the belt on the line.
Key Takeaways
- Notion's BDRs went from one-at-a-time dialing in Outreach to calling three or four prospects at once with Nooks.
- With a week left in Q4, Jackson made about 1,500 calls and booked every meeting he needed to hit quota.
- The team runs power-up dial sessions every Tuesday and Thursday.
- AI Smart Lists pull up 200 prospects who haven't answered in the last month, so there's always a list ready for the next session.
- Battlecards pop up the moment a prospect names a competitor. That matters most for reps still learning the product.
- Hearing teammates' calls in a shared Nooks room felt stressful at first. Now it's what makes cold calling fun.
What was cold calling like at Notion before Nooks?
Rare. Bill came from a company where 200 dials a day was normal. At Notion he found "very much no dialing culture whatsoever." Reps prospected through email and LinkedIn, and the only dialer on hand was Outreach's, which he calls "very slow and manual."
Jackson had been at Notion for two years and had started cold calling when leadership pushed for it, one dial at a time. It was working, a little. "I was seeing some success with it, and so I was starting to buy in," he says. But pickups were rare enough that every time someone answered, he had to stop and get settled before he could talk.
How did the BDR team react to a parallel dialer?
Nervously. "People were definitely apprehensive," Jackson says. "Myself included." Even a single-line power dialer felt intense to him. Four or five lines at once sounded like a lot.
The rollout didn't ease anyone in, either. The whole team would dial at the same time, in the same room.
"Our director, I remember, was like, okay, we're all going to dial on the floor now. And a hush fell over the crowd. That was not what people wanted to hear whatsoever." Bill Woodward, BDR at Notion
The Nooks team came into the office for the trial and ran a rally before the first session. Within weeks the rest of the team had caught Bill's pace. Pipeline was up, meetings were up, and Bill finished the trial holding the Nooks championship belt.
How does parallel dialing change the way reps sell?
It builds comfort fast. Calling three or four lines at once meant more pickups, and more pickups meant Jackson stopped bracing for each one.
"It was so much easier to get comfortable with cold calling when you're doing three or four dials at a time and you're getting pickups way more often." Jackson Walker, BDR at Notion
That comfort carried into meetings, emails and everything else. "The benefits are not just in the silo of cold calling," Jackson says. "It really goes beyond that."
Can a parallel dialer save a quarter?
It saved Jackson's. With a week left in Q4, he was short on opportunities. He pulled prospects from every account he owned and dialed all week.
"I think I made like 1,500 calls in a week. I was just ripping pretty much all day long. And I ended up getting all the meetings and the ops that I needed to hit my quota." Jackson Walker, BDR at Notion
Email can't move that fast. A sequence might take three or four bumps over two weeks before a prospect writes back. With Nooks, Jackson could drop 200 people into a call list and reach a big share of them in two hours.
Which Nooks features do Notion's BDRs use most?
Two, and neither is flashy.
- Battlecards. Notion is a horizontal product with a lot of competitors, and new reps don't know every answer yet. A card that pops up the moment a prospect names a competitor keeps the call alive. "Otherwise you're dead in the water," Bill says, "and it's not a great feeling when you're live on the phone."
- AI Smart Lists. Jackson ran a big call block on a Wednesday and had nothing sequenced for Thursday's power-up. He pulled a Smart List of everyone who hadn't picked up in the last month, got 200 names, and booked a meeting from it that week. "It takes away any excuse" to sit out a session, he says.
What's it like to cold call with your whole team listening?
Stressful for a little while. Then it flips.
"At first, it's a little bit stressful or jarring, but soon it becomes kind of fun. I get to the point where I'm looking forward to my next pickup. Even if the prospect is kind of intense or angry, it's kind of funny to know that the rest of the team is listening along." Jackson Walker, BDR at Notion
Their manager, Shawn, is usually in the room too, sometimes typing suggestions while a call is live. It can be a lot to read mid-sentence. It has also handed them "a super key thread to pull on" more than once.
What advice do they have for SDRs about to start parallel dialing?
Bill's answer is control.
"It gives you a lot more active control and ownership over your pipeline. Yes, I can speak to customers today no matter what, even if they don't respond to my email. That's a really empowering feeling." Bill Woodward, BDR at Notion
Jackson's is to lean in. "It can definitely be a little scary, like it was for us and our team at first. It's only natural. But get excited about it." Custom rooms with funny names, profile pics and the gong all help, he says. The more you dive in, the more you get out of it.
What's new at Notion?
A lot. Notion shipped Custom Agents a couple of months ago and launched its developer platform in the last few weeks. For the BDR team, every launch means learning fast how to talk about it and where it fits each prospect's pain. Nooks is how they get those conversations going at scale, right away.
Did they earn the belt?
EJ made them work for it: a tag-team cold call against a Nooks AI roleplay bot playing Maria Garcia, a VP of Operations at a scale-up. She opened with "we're pretty set with our current tools" and followed with a budget objection. Jackson and Bill traded turns, asked how she handles the problem today, and booked a 20-minute meeting for the following Thursday. First take. The belt went home with them.
