Blog

• The Day One Shortlist: What 6sense's 95% Does and Does Not Tell You — 6sense reports that buyers pick from a shortlist they hold before talking to sellers. This teardown reads the sample, the caveats and the 95:5 confusion, then offers a 40-deal test.
• Sourced vs Influenced Pipeline: Definitions and Rules That Stop the Double Counting — Sourced pipeline credits the origin of a deal once. Influenced pipeline counts what helped, so it overlaps by design. This page gives clear definitions, the rules that keep them honest and a handbook line.
• Pipeline by Source: A Five-Day Plan to See Where Opportunities Really Start — When marketing, SDRs and AEs each claim the same deals and the CRM says Other, hours get allocated by argument. This five-day plan builds a source report you can defend and a rule for moving hours.
• 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.
• Sales Pipeline Generation Study: A Teardown of Salesloft's 4x Usage Data — Salesloft reports that its most active sellers create four times as many opportunities as its least active. Here is what the 40,000-seller dataset shows, where it stops, and a two-hour test on your own CRM.
• Partner Sourced Pipeline: A Five-Partner Plan for Warm Introductions — Partners can open doors cold outreach cannot, but only when you ask for named introductions and settle the credit rules first. Here is a five-partner plan, with the Crossbeam data read honestly.
• Sales Pipeline Metrics: The Seven Numbers Worth Reviewing — Thirty dashboard tiles rarely answer a VP's three questions. These seven pipeline metrics do, and each comes with the field to pull and the decision it should drive.
• 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.
• Pipeline Velocity: The Formula, a Worked Example and the First Lever to Pull — Pipeline velocity turns four numbers into revenue per day. Learn the formula, run it for one segment, and see why qualification usually beats speed as the first lever.
• SDR Playbook: A Complete Guide to AE and SDR Teamwork and AI — A playbook is an agreement between the people who open conversations and the people who close them. This guide covers roles, channels, handoff, scorecard, AI tools and selling time, with public data and its limits.
• 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.
• Sales Qualification and Discovery: The Complete Guide for B2B Teams — Discovery collects evidence from the buyer, and qualification turns it into a recorded decision. This guide covers both, compares BANT, MEDDPICC and SPICED honestly, and links to a deeper piece on each step.
• B2B Pipeline Generation: The Complete Guide to Building It as a System — Pipeline generation comes down to five choices: which accounts, which routes, which counting rules, which speed measure and which calendar. This guide walks through each and shows where the published benchmarks fall short.
• Sales Pipeline Stages: A Five-Day Clean-Up With Real Exit Criteria — Stage names alone do not keep a pipeline honest. This five-day routine writes buyer-based exit criteria, tests every open deal against them and recalculates coverage on what survives.
• 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.
• Multithreading Sales: A Teardown of Gong's 130% Win Rate Claim — Gong says multithreading lifts win rates by 130% on deals over $50K. Here is what the 1.8 million-deal analysis can and cannot show, and a 40-deal check you can run this week.
• Cold Email Reply Rate Benchmarks: Why the Published Numbers Disagree — Hunter measured 4.5% across 31 million emails sent in 2025. Other vendors publish figures far above and below that. Here is what each one counts, and how to set your own baseline.
• Sales Discounting Does Not Buy Win Rate: A Teardown of the Math — A discount shrinks every deal you win, so it must win a lot more deals to pay for itself. Here is the break-even arithmetic, the model behind it and a two-hour test on your own pipeline.
• 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.
• Cold Email Follow-Up: A Nine-Day Plan, and When to Stop — Three messages roughly double replies against one, and the returns fall away after that. Here is a four-message follow-up plan with the wording, plus the deliverability and legal limits that decide whether any of it lands.