A note on this page. It replaces a URL carrying a third party's ranked list of individuals. That list is not reproduced: it is someone else's editorial judgement, it is years old, and republishing it would present stale rankings as current. Ideas last longer than rankings, so this covers those instead.
What held up
Specialisation of the SDR role. Separating prospecting from closing was the foundational idea of modern sales development, and it survived. It works because prospecting and closing are genuinely different skills, which is why teams that collapse the roles usually degrade both. Salesforce still frames the split the same way: SDRs open conversations, account executives close them.
The account as the unit of work. Moving from lead-level to account-level thinking changed targeting, measurement, and messaging. It holds, with the caveat in ABSD: it only pays when tiering actually changes what a rep does.
Cadence as design rather than persistence. The insight that timing and channel mix are decisions, not defaults, remains the most under-applied idea in the field. See cadence design.
Funnel arithmetic. Working backwards from a revenue target through conversion rates to daily activity turns "we need more pipeline" into a capacity question with an answer.
What did not hold up
Volume as a strategy. The assumption that outbound scales with activity was reasonable when sending was cheap and deliverability was forgiving. It is now actively counterproductive: high per-number call volume triggers carrier spam labelling, and high sending volume damages domain reputation. See why nobody answers your calls.
The linear buyer journey. Stage models assumed buyers move forward through defined steps. They loop, stall, restart, and involve people who never appear in your CRM.
Personalisation as a first line. The idea degraded into a personalised opener bolted onto a generic body, which readers detect immediately. The durable version is a message that could only be sent to this account.
Intent data as a buying indicator. It says someone at a company read something. See intent signals.
How to tell the difference
The tests are the same ones for choosing who to learn from:
- Does the idea come with a constraint? Advice with no trade-off usually
delivers nothing.
- Is there a number, with a definition and a sample?
- Has the person said when it failed?
- Do they still do the job?
Expanded in who to follow.
Where this sits
The ideas that held map onto the Tenbound Pipeline Architecture Standard: specialisation and the account as unit are Market and Motion, cadence design is Motion, funnel arithmetic is Measurement. The ones that did not hold were mostly attempts to solve a Market or Signal problem with more Motion.