B2B Sales

**Inbound sales** — reps work leads generated by marketing (form fills, webinar attendees, free-trial signups). Best when your target market is actively searching for your category. The economics work when you can rank for commercial-intent queries and your ICP skews toward self-service research. Cost-per-acquired-customer is typically the lowest of any motion.

**Outbound sales** — reps cold-prospect a target account list via email, LinkedIn, and phone. Best when your category is new, your ICP is narrow and well-defined, or you're moving upmarket into accounts that won't find you through SEO. Higher CAC but faster velocity when the target list is tight.

**Account-based sales (ABM/ABS)** — marketing and sales coordinate campaigns against a shared list of named target accounts. Best for enterprise deals where a single account is worth 6 or 7 figures and multi-threaded engagement is required. Highest CAC per account but also the highest ACV.

**Product-led sales (PLG)** — buyers self-serve into a free tier or trial, and sales engages only when product usage hits a qualifying threshold. Best for products with clear time-to-value in the first session and a natural expansion motion (seat adds, usage tiers). Lowest CAC when it works; requires real product investment to work at all.

**Multi-threading.** Deals with 3+ threaded contacts close at 5–10× the rate of single-threaded deals (Gong data). Single-threaded deals die when the champion leaves, gets reorg'd, or loses political capital internally.

**Fit discovery over feature pitching.** High-performing reps spend 60%+ of discovery calls on the buyer's situation, pain, and success criteria — not pitching features. Buyers who've felt deeply understood are dramatically more likely to tolerate a higher price point and a longer onboarding.

**Real-time intent signals.** Reps who can see when a target account is actively researching on their website (pricing page visits, comparison-page views, documentation reading) convert 2–3× faster than reps working cold. This is the core value prop of visitor-identification tools like Bullseye.

**Sales-marketing alignment.** Revenue teams where sales and marketing share an ICP, target-account list, and weekly pipeline meeting outperform siloed teams on nearly every metric — win rate, cycle length, CAC, and net retention.

**MEDDIC / MEDDPICC** — Metrics, Economic buyer, Decision criteria, Decision process, Identify pain, Champion (plus Paper-process and Competition in MEDDPICC). Gold standard for enterprise qualification; enforces discipline around mapping the buying committee early.

**BANT** — Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline. Classic but often criticized as too rep-centric (the buyer doesn't care if you qualify them). Still useful as a lightweight filter for SDR conversations.

**Gap selling** — focuses the discovery conversation entirely on the current-state vs future-state gap, and quantifies the cost of inaction. Works well for categories where the status quo has real pain but buyers don't perceive the urgency yet.

**Command of the Message (Force Management)** — trains reps to articulate the product's differentiation in terms of required capabilities and business outcomes. Particularly effective in crowded categories where competitors all sound the same.