According to recent research from SalesLoft best-performing senior salespeople (like Account Exectuives) need to self-source around 48% of their pipeline–rather than having leads come from a sales development rep (BDR, SDR etc.) or inbound via the efforts of their marketing department.
This uptick in the need for AEs to self-source deals has likely been driven by economics, the need to “do more with less”, but is I trend that may continue as AI tools free up AEs from admin tasks.
If AEs are going to self-source their deals, I believe they are going to have to be good at certain skills.
1. Time management: Managing your time in sales is the critical foundation for everything else. There is always more you can do to bring in more $’s, so figuring out which activities to actually do now is all important. In my experience many salespeople are weak at time management and this leads to significant underperformance.
2. Understanding each buyer’s needs: We often think we know our buyers but somehow we don’t really “get it” at a core level. We have a “fuzzy” understanding of why our buyers’ buy and are missing the key emotional levers that really make them commit.
3. Developing solution hypotheses: In the next era of selling salespeople are going to have to start acting like consultants, having a “one up” approach as Anthony Iannarino calls it. You can’t just show up to a meeting and ask questions (“solution selling”). To even get a meeting you will need to create a hypothesis of the buyer’s issues and solutions that fix them—and you will need to back this hypothesis up with research.
4. Getting referrals: Most salespeople do not ask for enough referrals. It’s an oddity of the psychology in our profession that many people would rather go through the mental grinder of cold calling than risk asking their existing customers for referrals.
5. Actively networking: Most salespeople do not have enough happy clients to generate the leads they need just from referrals. Given this reality they jump straight into cold calling people that don’t know them at all. But introductions can come from anyone in your social network and these introductions will turn into meetings at a much higher rate than cold calling.
6. Cold calling: OK so sometimes you will have been assigned account where no matter how hard you try you can’t find an intro into the executive you need. It’s time for the dreaded cold call! Even here though there are now many tools and techniques to “microwave” your cold calls. Most salespeople are not using many, or any, of these tools and techniques and are settling for terrible conversion rates and hours of deflating rejection.
AI can already help in many of these areas and will become better-and-better at doing so. AEs that are willing to learn the new ways may soon be able to self-source pipeline in a new extra efficient manner. Allowing sales teams to actually realize the CEO’s and CFO’s dream of “doing more with less”.
Here are some resources to get people started on the skills above.
1. Time management: If you want to know how to do time management the right way, I recommend starting with The One Thing book and going from there. The great thing about this system is it aligns your strategic goals with your day-to-day time blocks.
2. One-Up Selling: Anthony Iannarino nails the new approach to bringing enough value to prospects with his “One Up” approach. The full description is in his book Elite Sales Strategies.
3. Referrals: Joanne Black has been telling us for decades now how effective referrals are and how to get them. More details in her classic book No More Cold Calling.
4. Networking: Here’s a post I wrote about how to make prospecting easier. I show some math on how networking is more efficient than cold calling in terms of work time.
5. Cold Calling: If you have to cold call, Jason Bay just released a professionally produced video course. In my opinion Jason is the top trainer in the cold calling space right now. He has a ton of other resources available for free on his website.