Alex Rivera

Alex Rivera writes about the psychological and behavioral aspects of sales success, drawing from years of experience in startup environments and a passion for understanding what makes deals actually close. Known for breaking down complex buyer psychology into practical frameworks, Alex focuses on the mental game that separates top performers from the rest. When not writing, Alex can be found mentoring emerging sales talent and experimenting with new prospecting techniques in the ever-evolving tech landscape.

Articles by Alex Rivera

• Inbound vs Outbound Sales: Route Each Account Instead of Picking a Channel — Inbound versus outbound is a false choice. Tag each target account by state, give it one owner who sees both routes, and respond to raised hands within minutes.
• How to Build a Target Account List in Five Days: A Ranked, Capped, Owned Plan — A target account list is only useful if it is short enough to work. This five-day plan mines your deals, scores fit and timing apart, caps three tiers by capacity and gives every top account an owner.
• Sales Coaching: The Complete Guide to the System Around the Manager — Coaching works only when quota, pay, manager span and the calendar leave room for it. This guide maps the six parts of the system, tests the evidence, and says where to start.
• Account Executive Onboarding: Your First 90 Days, Week by Week — Ramp time for AEs has reached a record 6.2 months, so ninety days is a learning window, not a quota test. Here is a four-block plan with checks your manager can verify.
• AI SDR: What the Evidence Actually Supports, and What It Cannot — The adoption figures behind the AI SDR debate are from 2024 and measure implementation, not results. The verifiable buyer data points the other way. Here is the split test to run before you sign anything.
• Talk-to-Listen Ratio: What the Numbers Support, and What They Do Not — The best-known talk-to-listen figures come from two analyses that disagree, and the gap between winning and losing calls is about five points. Here is how to use the metric as a trigger for call review without turning it into a target.
• Buying Group Consensus: Why Arming One Champion Is the Wrong Job — Gartner found that three quarters of B2B buyer teams carry unhealthy conflict through the decision, and that individually targeted content makes it worse. Here is how to surface the disagreement early and write for the room instead.
• Win-Loss Analysis: Why the Buyer's Answer Beats the Rep's Dropdown — Closed-lost reasons are written by the one person with the strongest incentive and the weakest view of the deal. Here is how to build a win-loss programme from buyer interviews, surveys and recordings, and how to separate what a rep could control from what they could not.
• Sales Navigator on LinkedIn: Which Plan Is Your Team Actually Using? — Core, Advanced and Advanced Plus differ less in search power than in who can share and what syncs to your CRM. Here are the published 2026 prices and an honest way to pick a tier.
• Mid-Market Sales: Why It Is Not Small Enterprise or Big SMB — The revenue range every sales blog quotes has no source behind it, and the institution that owns the term starts the middle $40 million lower. Define the segment by how it buys instead.
• Stop Using Pressure Tactics —