You're not paying $200,000 a year for cold outbound
After more than 20 years in sales and business development, I've started asking a question I never would have asked earlier in my career. You're paying a fully loaded Account Executive around $200,000 a year. Are you actually getting $200,000 of the work only they can do?
For years, most organizations have measured the health of their sales teams through activity. Calls made. Emails sent. Meetings booked. Opportunities created. Those metrics have value, but they don't answer the question that actually matters: are we investing our most expensive people in the activities that create the greatest return?
Depending on the organization, a significant portion of that AE's week can be consumed by prospecting, internal meetings, CRM administration, forecasting, and account planning, before they ever have a meaningful conversation with a qualified buyer. None of those activities are inherently bad. Every one exists for a reason. The question is whether we've accepted them as normal without ever asking what they cost.
One AE is doing the work of three roles
It's common today for an AE to generate hundreds, sometimes thousands, of outbound touches a quarter for a small handful of real meetings. When that's the ratio, the instinct is to ask how we get people to prospect more. The better question is why one person is doing three jobs at once. Somewhere along the way, in a lot of organizations, the AE became responsible for creating awareness, qualifying interest, and closing the deal, work that used to belong to three different functions.
A working revenue engine doesn't ask one person to do all of that. Demand generation creates awareness and surfaces interest. A BDR function turns that interest into a real, qualified meeting. The AE spends their time on the part only they can do: complex buying conversations, trust, navigating internal politics, and helping a customer make a confident decision. When that structure doesn't exist, or has quietly eroded, the AE absorbs all three jobs by default, and the numbers on cold outbound will always look brutal, because they're measuring one role doing the work of three.
The best salespeople I've worked with throughout my career aren't great because they send more emails or make more calls. They're great at exactly that last piece, the complex conversation, the trust-building, the decision support. That's the highest-value work an AE does. The current model buries them in the two jobs that were never supposed to be theirs, and then measures them on activity instead of asking why the activity is so expensive in the first place.
This is a business question, not a sales question
The conversation is changing regardless. Buyers have more information than ever before. Research happens long before the first sales conversation. Thought leadership influences vendor selection. Communities shape opinions. AI is making outreach easier to produce and harder to make stand out. None of that makes the case for pushing AEs to prospect harder. It makes the case for building the demand generation and BDR functions that should be doing that work in the first place.
Executives should spend less time asking how to get the sales team to do more, and more time asking whether the system around that team exists at all. That's no longer a sales question. It's a business question.
If your AEs are doing the work of three roles because the connection between demand and close was never built, the GTM Operating Model engagement, part of Build, fixes that.
See how Build works →