Over the last five years, we’ve sat down with more than 350 sales and marketing leaders on our podcast, The B2B Revenue Executive Experience. During this time, the sales landscape has transformed dramatically—from the surge of remote selling to the widespread adoption of AI and the ever-evolving shifts in buyer behavior. The most fascinating takeaway? Despite these seismic changes, the advice from top revenue executives has stayed incredibly consistent.
We asked every guest two questions:
- As an executive, you’re a prospect for many sales professionals—what captures your attention and earns time on your calendar?
- If there’s one piece of advice you could share with revenue executives to help them hit or exceed targets, what would it be and why?
We then analyzed the responses to those questions—distilling more than 600 game-changing insights into actionable advice for revenue leaders and their teams.
Here’s what we learned:
How to Prospect More Effectively
After analyzing the responses from leading executives, their prospecting advice can be divided into six distinct themes as outlined in the following chart.
Let’s look at a synthesis of the most actionable advice we heard on the podcast:
1) Building Rapport and Trust: Focus on establishing a genuine connection and trust with the prospect through authenticity, empathy and understanding—show genuine interest in the prospect’s success.
2) Understanding Customer Needs and Challenges: Conduct enough research to understand the prospect’s business and their likely needs, challenges and goals before reaching out.
3) Persistence and Follow-up: Never give up after the initial contact—employ strategies for keeping the prospect engaged over time and recognize the importance of timing and multi-channel outreach.
4) Creative and Engaging Techniques: From video prospecting to strategic gifting to leveraging social proof and referrals, creative outreach opens doors—don’t overlook humor or personal touches, either.
5) Value Proposition and Clarity: Use clear, concise communication that directly addresses how a product or service can solve a specific problem or add value to the prospect’s business.
6) Personalization and Research: Tailor outreach efforts to the individual’s specific interests, challenges, role and industry—use this knowledge of the individual prospect to engage in meaningful ways that resonate on a personal level.
How to Hit or Exceed Targets
When we asked more than 350 leading executives, “If there’s one piece of advice you could share with revenue executives to help them hit or exceed targets, what would it be and why?” They wove a rich tapestry of diverse strategies and insights for navigating the complexities of business growth and sales acceleration. After analyzing their responses, six key themes emerged, as outlined in the chart below.
With 27% of responses centered on embracing change and continuous learning, it’s a potent reminder that future success depends on the right habits. And it’s no surprise that the following two emergent themes, Buyer-Centric Strategies (19%) and Personalization and Authentic Engagement (15%), are all about the customer experience. Taken together, these three themes focus on the most human elements of sales success: professional growth, change readiness, buyer-centricity and authentic human-to-human connection.
Of course, you won’t go far if the underlying frameworks, culture and tools aren’t in place to support continued growth. That’s where Leveraging Data and Analytics (15%), Collaboration Across Teams (13%) and Innovative Sales Frameworks, Techniques and Tools come in. Our recent ebook, “4-Step Guide to Measuring Sales Enablement Impact,” showed that effective feedback loops can transform your revenue engine, and it all begins with establishing regular practices for sharing information in the voice of the customer. After all, multiple departments and roles play a part in driving revenue growth and customer loyalty. It’s vital they share a common framework and gather their data from the same source of truth to facilitate cross-functional collaboration.
Conclusion
The distilled wisdom from over 350 seasoned executives underscores a consistent theme: the imperative to adapt and innovate while maintaining the foundational elements of proven sales frameworks and strategies.
The six themes of prospecting success underscore the importance of personalization, value creation, creativity, persistence, deep customer understanding and trust-building. These essential competencies not only improve response rates—they set you apart in a sea of impersonal outreach. When it comes to our Acceleration Insight, the emphasis on embracing change and continuous learning speaks directly to the necessity of staying competitive in an era of rapid tech advancement.
As we said in the introduction, the most striking element of this study was the consistency of the responses. Despite five years of dynamic change, the collective wisdom of leading executives was focused on building a revenue engine and sales culture that values empathy, deep customer understanding and strategic innovation.
Download the full ebook here: https://www.valueselling.com/research-ebooks/innovate-or-stagnate-lessons-from-350-revenue-executives
