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If you’re asking account executives to self-source pipeline, you have to train them to do it. Closing deals and opening conversations are complementary skill sets, but they are different skill sets. Being excellent at one doesn’t make someone excellent at the other.
This is one of the things I see organizations getting wrong right now. A company hires AEs who have never worked in a full-cycle role, adds a self-sourcing target, and suddenly expects them to book their own meetings. The assumption is that because they have the AE skill set, they must also have the SDR skill set.
I spent 15 years as a sales leader, and for most of that time I supported full-cycle reps closing four- to six-figure deals. Those reps owned the relationship from the first phone call to the handover. That’s a big ask. If you’re going to make it, you owe your team the support to pull it off.
Key Takeaways
- Closing and prospecting are complementary but different skills. An AE who excels at discovery and negotiation may not have cold called in years.
- If you change the job, change the enablement. Assess each AE’s prospecting skills, then train and coach the gaps you find.
- Relevance should come from segmentation, not an hour of research on every contact.
- Qualified pipeline is the goal. More meetings mean very little if they don’t look like the customers who actually renew.
Why Don’t Closing Skills Automatically Make AEs Good at Prospecting?
Closing skills don’t transfer automatically because the work is different before a buyer agrees to a conversation. Once a deal is in the pipeline, the buyer has already given your AE some time. Prospecting means earning that time from someone who wasn’t expecting to hear from you.
An AE can be brilliant in discovery and confident in a negotiation and still feel rusty on a cold call. Plenty of experienced AEs built their careers with SDRs filling their calendars, and some of them may not have cold called in a decade.
I’d also ask leaders to acknowledge that being suddenly asked to self-source can honestly be a little scary. Treat that as a signal that someone needs practice and resources. Give them a real refresher on cold calling, prospecting, and territory management from a different lens than the one they’ve used to work deals.
How Do You Know Which Prospecting Skills Your AEs Need?
Assess before you train. Self-sourcing asks an AE to do several distinct things: choose the right accounts, write a relevant message, open a cold conversation, run a multichannel sequence, and qualify what comes back. Most AEs will be strong in some of those and rusty in others.
You don’t need a formal assessment to see where each person stands. Listen to a few recent calls. Read the outbound messages they’re already sending the way a buyer would. Then ask them to walk you through their territory. Which accounts would they call first, and why?
That last question tells you a lot. I want sellers to think and act like the CEO of their territory, asking who is most likely to say yes right now. An AE who can answer clearly needs different support than one who plans to start at the top of a list and work down.
Once you see the gaps, train what the whole team is missing and save one-on-one time for gaps that belong to one person.
What Should Sales Leaders Teach Self-Sourcing AEs First?
Start with three skills: finding relevance without hours of research, writing messages the buyer actually cares about, and coordinating outreach across channels. These decide whether a busy AE can earn attention quickly.
How much should an AE research a prospect before reaching out?
Unless you’re running an ABM or key accounts campaign, much less than you’ve been told. I don’t want my teams spending 30 to 60 minutes researching every single contact before they pick up the phone. That still gets prescribed on LinkedIn as what “good sellers” do. I think it’s BS.
Sales leaders love a false choice between quality and quantity, and I don’t think you have to pick. Relevance comes from understanding industry trends and the problems a persona shares. That’s what Value-Based Segmentation is for. Value-Based Segmentation divides an already defined ICP into smaller groups based on the distinct problems and priorities each group has. Once an AE knows which segment a prospect belongs to, they already know most of what makes the message relevant, and they aren’t burning customer acquisition cost on trivia.
How can you tell if prospecting messages are buyer-centric?
Read the message and count the I, we, and our. I see hundreds, probably thousands, of emails a year that companies I work with send and receive, and most of that messaging sucks.
Before anyone gets fancy with pattern interrupts, audit every call script, email, voicemail, and video script your AEs will use. Is it writer-centric or reader-centric? Replace the I, we, our language with you, they, and voice-of-customer language. Your prospect has no reason to care about your company or your features yet, because you haven’t earned the right. Earning the right means creating enough relevance and value that the buyer’s attention feels worth giving, and keeping every ask in proportion to what you’ve already offered.
Which outreach channels should self-sourcing AEs use?
I go with a minimum of three channels, and these days I think in terms of multi-touch, multi-channel, and multimedia. If someone doesn’t answer the phone, maybe you send a voice note, a text, or a LinkedIn message. The goal is to reach people where they want to be communicated with, using a really good message.
The touches also need to work together. On day one, I always double or triple tap. If a call is involved, I call, leave a voicemail if they don’t answer, and use the voicemail to point to my email.
I’ve sold to HR, IT, finance, procurement, and just about every persona in between, on deals from four figures to six figures and up. The phone is still my go-to channel.
How Should Managers Help AEs Practice Outbound Skills?
Give them repetitions somewhere other than a live prospect’s phone line. Inspecting the pipeline is managing, and it won’t teach an AE how to open a cold call. As I wrote in my article on coaching, training, and managing, those are three separate jobs, and a self-sourcing rollout needs all three.
In practice, teach the shared fundamentals together, like your segments, messaging, and multichannel approach, so everyone uses the same language. Then make room for individual practice. Role-play the opener until it sounds natural, review recorded calls together, and rehearse the objections that AE keeps hearing.
Keep the practice tied to real work. An AE about to prospect into one segment should rehearse that segment’s message rather than a generic script. Two AEs can also need completely different help. One may write great emails and freeze on the phone, while another sounds confident on calls but can’t connect the message to a real buyer problem.
How Can Full-Cycle AEs Protect Time for Prospecting?
AEs protect prospecting time by blocking it on the calendar, treating it as planned work, and telling the people around them when they’re unavailable. Without that, prospecting gets squeezed out by whichever deal feels most pressing that day.
When I talked about this with Adam Sockel on Orum’s Bold Calling podcast, he made a great point. An AE who schedules their own demos doesn’t have eight hours a day to prospect like an SDR. They might have 90 minutes. The right amount varies by role, territory, and pipeline target, so be honest about what’s realistic alongside an AE’s active deals. A self-sourcing target that assumes time the AE doesn’t have isn’t a plan.
Then help them defend it. I’ve even used an admittedly aggressive out-of-office reply to set expectations around my availability. Nobody is going to miss your AE if they’re gone for an hour or two, but they do need to tell people. Even for a two-hour cold call block, I set a Slack status and an internal email message so colleagues know when to expect a response.
Prospecting is time-sensitive, but it isn’t urgent. It’s anticipated work, which means it belongs on the calendar. I go deeper on false urgency and prioritization in my article on Key Result Areas.
How Do You Measure Whether AE Self-Sourcing Is Working?
Measure qualified pipeline and skill development, not activity volume alone. A self-sourcing program that fills calendars with poor-fit prospects only makes the forecast look healthier than it is.
Pipeline quality is already a challenge. Ebsta’s 2024 B2B Sales Benchmarks H1 Update found that only 18% of pipeline created in the first half of 2024 matched the business’s ICP. Adding self-sourced meetings without clear qualification can easily make that worse.
That’s why I push for crystal clarity on qualifying, and I don’t just mean picking a qualification methodology. Dig into what makes a customer renew. What does a great customer who has been with you for three years look like? What does the profile look like for customers who give referrals, do case studies, and offer testimonials? Those answers should shape which accounts your AEs prospect into.
Track the skills too. Are messages passing the reader-centric audit? Is the opener getting stronger on recorded calls? Are more conversations turning into qualified meetings? When results are weak, don’t reach for a higher activity target. Look at account selection, messaging, qualification, and whether the AE truly has time to prospect.
What Should Sales Leaders Do Next?
If your revenue plan now depends on AEs generating their own pipeline, treat it as the change to the job that it is. Find out where each AE stands, give them a real refresher, make room to practice, and protect realistic prospecting time. Then hold them accountable for qualified pipeline.
If you’d like help building that outbound motion, book a conversation with me. At The Sales-Led GTM Agency, we help B2B revenue teams build practical prospecting skills, stronger outbound systems, and qualified pipeline that lasts. To learn more, visit www.salesledgtm.com.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do experienced account executives struggle with prospecting?
Many AEs built strong discovery and closing skills while SDRs booked their meetings, so they haven’t practiced opening cold conversations in years. Prospecting means earning attention from buyers who weren’t expecting you. It’s a complementary but different skill set, and experienced sellers often need a refresher when they move into a full-cycle role.
Should AEs research every prospect before reaching out?
Not for everyday outbound. Spending 30 to 60 minutes researching each contact makes sense for ABM or key accounts, but for most prospecting it wastes limited time. Value-Based Segmentation gives AEs relevance at the segment level, based on the problems and priorities a group of buyers shares.
Can you recommend books that will help me learn more?
Yes, you should read Profit Generating Pipeline: A Proven Formula to Earn Trust & Drive Revenue by Leslie Venetz, available at www.salesledgtm.com/book. The book outlines a 9-step formula for prospecting and revenue generation adapted to meet the needs of the modern buyer.
How can I learn more about hiring Leslie as a speaker or to work with my team?
Visit www.salesledgtm.com. You can learn about Leslie’s services and schedule time to meet with her.