#32: Full-Cycle Sales Will Be the Go-To Method for Mature Mid-Market Companies. Why Is That?

The story of how we specialized sales teams into oblivion and why the future belongs to AEs who can both find and close their own deals.

This topic has been heavy for me to lift off the ground.

I’m stepping on territory here that I love, with a team I appreciate for their hard work, while operating in the realm of sales, an industry known to adopt new things slower than others and, to my great regret, has a bad reputation of not doing anything if it’s not paid for.

Here’s the thing: I’ve built my entire business on sales’ shoulders.

To be specific, on the shoulders of those sales executives and organizations that decided their SEs won’t generate their own pipeline and need SDR services. That’s where I come into the picture.

If it wasn’t for those people and companies, I’d be doing something else.

Today, I’ll share my thoughts on when you need full-cycle sales and when you can use AI SDRs or work with someone like Belkins. My focus lies in mid-market sales, so that’s where I’ll start.

The $100K Trust Factor (Mid Market)

When it comes to buying a $100K-$250K solution in the mid market sales, you really want to be sure you went with the best partner. Having a previous relationship or a bit of trust before moving forward with a partner is a must.

Modern Account Executives have spent the last 10 years refining their skillset to integrate the best solutions for clients of all budgets, especially if you’re spending more.

Solution Selling is the modern go-to playbook, far better for long sales cycles, multi-touch, buying committee-based sales.

But what do we really want from our AEs to be competent at selling our products?

Here’s my list of what I want from my AE:

1. Deep Product Mastery

In-depth understanding of our offering, not just features, deliverables, terms & conditions, but being natively close to how services are delivered or products made. AEs should know the nuances that allow them to converse fluently and offer multiple options for all buyer types.

2. Delivery Intelligence

Any delivery estimations or projections should be part of the skillset. By understanding delivery nuances, AEs should manipulate different scenarios from onboardings, ramp-ups, planning, goal setting to tailor contracts to unique client needs. That’s a critical skill in modern sales. We live in a nuanced world, and as buyers, we expect it from everyone.

3. Industry Expertise

Industry knowledge is critical. Positioning one-solution-fits-all won’t cut it in mid-market sales. This takes AEs on a whole new journey of curiosity, research, and experience gained through months of meetings and working with client teams.

4. Buyer Journey Architecture

The ability to tailor buying journeys for different buyer groups, seniority levels, and deal sourcing requirements is in my top 5. Modern AEs can get you involved from user, champion, buyer, or influencer roles; they know exactly how to pull the right levers.

5. Information Orchestration

Structuring the sales journey so clients consume what they need while protecting them from tons of unnecessary noise. Companies produce overwhelming amounts of information daily. Shopping for the right solution out of 5-10 options is exhausting, so great AEs know this and adjust accordingly. They give you space to reject, evaluate, and digest.

The list could go on.

I haven’t included the obvious hard and soft skills we look for in AEs nowadays. And I’m not saying all my top 5 are must-haves for every AE. This is my list, Belkins’ list, that works in our space.

The Missing Piece

Here’s what’s crazy about this list: It doesn’t include AEs developing an ability to generate their own book of business.

For the past 15 years, we’ve systematically removed this from AEs’ job requirements:

• Talking to customers? → YES

• Signing work orders? → YES

• Building relationships to maximize conversion through trust? → YES!

• Fluently conversing in industry language, leveraging insights? → YES YES YES

But getting the attention of someone who’s never heard of us and doing business with them? → NO.

The Full Circle of Sales Evolution

Before LinkedIn and social media there was email, before email we had the phone, before phones we were selling door-to-door. People also met via professional associations, clubs, through friends, and of course, conferences and trade shows.

I guess today we’re going the whole cycle back, aren’t we?

In a nutshell, before technology, when people wanted to buy something, they talked to other people. Usually, those people were salespeople.

These salespeople built their books of business —contact info of customers who could buy from them or had already bought in the past. When they moved to competing companies, they brought that book with them. Their entire career in sales was about building that book because it really was their most valuable asset.

It took years to build one. Salespeople nurtured all relationships, making sure they could do repeatable business with people.

Finding a lead was super expensive. Imagine:

• Flying to all these conferences

• Going office-to-office, door-to-door

• Selling products to people who didn’t know you

• Fighting past gatekeepers, the receptionists who didn’t let anyone in

Salespeople were the ones who messaged or called prospects for birthdays, weddings, and other special events to congratulate. Being attentive and caring was a must.

But here’s the point → The innate skill of salespeople has always been to find new customers.

When Did We Turn Sideways?

Let me take you on a little journey of reflection. A few things happened:

1. The Marketing Revolution

Marketing became more popular and important; it gave companies reach, volume, and engagement that no direct sales team could match. Marketing could generate more business than any individual contributors, no matter how many conferences they attended or doors they opened.

More companies started relying on marketing campaigns: advertising, content, partnerships with radio, news, publishers, offline, online, whatever brought more eyes. Subsequently, from 100% of the sales budget, companies started putting 50% or more into marketing.

2. The Salesforce Effect

With the introduction of software, CRMs, and automation, companies went even further into scaling their sales teams.

It’s no wonder Salesforce was one of the best at introducing outbound as a standalone motion and BDRs/SDRs as a role. With more companies going digital and email becoming a main business channel, it was only a matter of time until someone like Salesforce realized: It’s not effective for AEs to do their own prospecting.

Think about it:

• Sourcing contact information

• Validating accuracy

• Sending emails or dialing multiple times daily

• All while switching hats from 30-60 minute client meetings (with research and preparation) to making 100 dials and 50 emails

They noticed if AEs did both, one medium would suffer. Guess which one? Business development.

3. The Economics of Specialization

Another factor was conversion and utilization. You can’t hire 100 AEs as fast as 100 junior BDRs. To book X meetings, an AE would need their entire week, while 5 BDRs could do it faster, maybe even at a lower cost.

The playbook became simple: Buy lead list → Hire BDR to enrich and call → If there’s interest, book meeting → Hand to AE who knows the product to close

BDRs grew into AEs if successful. More AEs meant more sales. More sales meant more BDRs. The cycle closed.

4. The Breaking Point

This cycle broke when BDR costs became ineffective:

• OTEs grew from $20K to $45-50K + bonuses

• Hiring and overhead costs multiplied

• Conversion declined (fewer email responses, tougher spam policies, ignored calls)

• Technology became critical: Outreach, Salesloft, Salesforce, Gong, dialers, Sales Navigator—all must-haves

The result? Meeting costs went higher, but AEs didn’t close more. CAC went through the roof.

The Scale Dystopia

In our aspiration for scale, we continued optimizing BDRs:

• More calls → more dialers

• More emails → multi-inbox outreach (if BDRs manage 100 inboxes, they’re called GTM engineers)

We scraped and over-scraped LinkedIn. Data merchants sold all 500 million LinkedIn contacts to all companies. Then outreach tools started offering their own leads (interesting how they got them?). ZoomInfos and Apollos of the age became commodities.

AI brought another level of scale. Now anyone, anywhere can do it. With Clay, you can completely put it on autopilot. Scale, scale, scale.

The Customer Rebellion

If I’m picturing this as a dark dystopia, well, it sometimes feels like one. But here’s the thing: There’s always a customer who says “no.”

• “I don’t want to open your emails”

• “I don’t want to connect with you”

• “I don’t want to give you my phone number”

Since customers are saying no, companies not seeing results are shutting down their BDR teams and going back to the drawing board. This brings us closer to utopia — customers don’t want to live in the dystopian world.

Customers decided not to buy from methods where they’re nameless, faceless, just another cohort in the CRM.

Although personalization is something all companies talk about, it’s yet another vehicle to trick them into buying. This isn’t building trust — this method ruins it.

We’ve already passed the threshold for customers saying “no” to our methods.

All my last 5 newsletters (#28 - #31) on marketing and the last 2 years of my time have been spent searching for what the next good B2B marketing playbook could look like. To bring us back to the trust we once had with customers. I’m still on this journey.

The Forgotten Skill

Meanwhile, throughout this time, AEs have been left to hone their product skills, negotiations, industry experience, client use cases. But what about demand or business generation?

The numbers tell the story:

• Only 1/10 companies have AEs generate their pipeline as their only source of leads

• 3/10 have AEs generating at least 50% of their pipeline themselves

While I’m personally all for scalability and automation, I find it concerning that new relationship creation became secondary.

We created a generation of AEs incapable of solving the growth problem of business by themselves.

The Current Reality Check

Now we’re in a market where business development is struggling. BDR as a role is evolving, as it’s become this extra role companies don’t know where to put:

• Under sales?

• Under marketing?

• Under growth?

Furthermore, it costs a lot. If before:

• In-house BDRs could generate 20-30 meetings monthly

• Outsourced could do 10-15

Now, even in-house BDRs are doing 10-15, and outsourced are doing 5+.

What’s the solution then?

↓

AEs to Return to Full-Cycle

• Build their own pipeline

• Maintain their book of business

• Grow within a specific industry to achieve organic growth

We’ll see fewer salespeople changing industries. Each time they do, they know they’ll start from scratch and take a massive hit on their comp.

The Open Question: Can AEs Generate Their Own Pipeline?

They can and they should. Sales-driven organizations are the future of mid-market B2B.

We recently onboarded a new client in the LMS space—80% of their new sales are driven by field AEs. They’re doing weekly invite-dinners, lots of conferences and sponsorships, collabs with customers. When meeting this customer, I was impressed by their ability to be where their customers are, get in the car, shake hands, pursue opportunities proactively. They were looking for additional help to open new verticals and build a playbook for ongoing nurturing of potential opportunities. We’re their additional resource, not the only resource.

This is a bright example of where mid-market sales is heading.

It’s NOT:

• Volume-based marketing-driven acquisition like companies with millions in VC investment

• AI automation driving the pipeline

• Businesses relying only on outbound BDRs/SDRs

These are businesses where their main salesforce builds themselves up to be where customers are and drives 75% of their pipeline. Marketing becomes a nurturing function that helps close deals.

Yes, you heard me right: Sales should drive their own business, and marketing will enable prospects to stay active and engaged.

In this future, SDRs are a marketing function; they help bridge the relationship with sales and actively pursue nurturing. As a byproduct of strong marketing, lots of new conversations and signals need to be moved across the finish line to AEs.

The New Breakdown

A typical mature mid-market company would look like this:

• Marketing → Activation, engagement, education with content, social, events, community + 15-20% of new pipeline

• Marketing SDR → Enrichment, signal capturing, nurturing + 5-10% of new pipeline

• Sales → Conversion, retention + 75% of new pipeline

Of course, we’ll have brands with different setups. They’ll rely on marketing like Belkins does, generating 80% of pipeline via ads, organic SEO, review platforms.

What’s the problem then?

Moving forward, it’s gonna be impossible to break in for new companies:

• All ads will be bought out by larger companies

• LLM rankings and content reserved for brands that’ve honed their game for years

• Sources like outreach email or LinkedIn overrun by volume

When the obvious methods won’t work, we’ll do what we’ve always done: Go back to where we started—salespeople using their backs to build the pipeline.

The question should always be: What’s best for my customers?

Then it will be best for the business.