I closed $2.1M in new business last year doing the opposite of what every b2b sales guru on linkedin tells you to do
I've been in b2b sales for 11 years now, the last 4 running my own thing selling into mid market companies in the $50M to $500M revenue range, and I have to say the gap between what actually works and what gets posted on linkedin every day has never been wider than it is right now in 2026.
I closed $2.1M last year as a solo operator, no SDR, no marketing team, no inbound, just me and a list and a calendar, and almost every single thing I did to hit that number is something the sales influencer crowd would tell you is wrong or outdated or unscalable, so I figured I'd write up what's actually working before someone tries to sell you a course on it.
The first thing is that I stopped doing discovery calls entirely about 18 months ago and my close rate went from somewhere around 22% to just over 40% in the following two quarters, which still kind of blows my mind when I think about it. The reason discovery calls don't work anymore is that buyers have already done the discovery on themselves before they ever get on a call with you, they've watched the demos, they've read the g2 reviews, they've talked to three of your competitors, and when you sit there and ask them about their current process and their pain points and their goals you are literally wasting the only resource they actually care about which is their time. What I do instead is I show up to the first call having already done my own research on their company and I open with a hypothesis, something like "based on what I'm seeing from the outside it looks like you're probably dealing with X and Y and the reason I asked for this call is I think we can fix Y in under 60 days, am I reading this right," and the energy of the call completely changes because now you're a peer who did their homework instead of a vendor running a script.
The second thing I want to talk about is follow up because everyone gets this wrong and it's costing them seven figures a year easily. The standard advice is to follow up 7 to 12 times with a mix of value adds and check ins and that whole playbook is dead, it stopped working maybe two years ago and nobody updated the script. What works in 2026 is what I call the 3 and done approach, which is you send a real follow up 48 hours after the initial conversation summarizing what you discussed and proposing a concrete next step with a specific date and time on it, then if they don't respond you send one more 5 days later that's just a single sentence saying you're going to assume the timing isn't right and you'll circle back next quarter, and then you actually do that, you don't send 4 more emails pretending you have a new insight to share. The reason this works is that prospects in 2026 are drowning in follow up, they get 40 of them a week, and the person who respects their inbox by not adding to the pile is the person who gets remembered when the timing is actually right.
The third thing and this one is going to get me yelled at in the comments is that I stopped using a crm for the first 8 months of my agency and I genuinely think it's part of why I grew as fast as I did. When you have a crm you spend 90 minutes a day updating it and pretending that's sales work, when the truth is the only thing that matters is whether you spoke to a qualified prospect today and whether you're speaking to one tomorrow, and you can track that on a single sheet of paper. I eventually moved to a proper crm at around the 80 customer mark because I had to, but I genuinely believe most solo operators and 2 person teams would close more deals if they deleted their crm tomorrow and just kept a list of who they talked to this week and who they're talking to next week.
The fourth and probably most controversial thing I'll say is that I don't qualify on budget anymore and haven't for about two years. The whole BANT framework that gets pushed in every sales book was designed for an era where buyers had budgets allocated in advance and procurement was a real gate, and that's just not how mid market companies operate now, budgets get found when the pain is real enough and the roi is clear enough, and asking someone in the second call whether they have budget allocated for this is a great way to lose a deal that would have closed if you'd just kept selling the outcome. I qualify on pain and timeline and decision making authority but I leave budget completely out of the conversation until we're actually negotiating the contract, and my close rate on supposedly "unqualified" deals is something like 35% which tells you everything you need to know about whether budget qualification was ever real.
The fifth thing I'll mention because I think it gets overlooked constantly is that the highest leverage activity in b2b sales in 2026 is not prospecting or follow up or closing, it's writing, specifically writing the proposal and the follow up summary and the contract redlines in a way that makes the buyer's internal champion look brilliant when they forward it to their boss. About 70% of my deals are won or lost based on what the champion shows their cfo or ceo on a friday afternoon when I'm not in the room, and the agencies and reps who understand this are spending 3 hours on a proposal while everyone else is spending 20 minutes copy pasting their template, and that gap is where the deals get won.
Anyway that's what's actually working for me right now. Happy to get into any of these in the comments if people want, and I'm genuinely curious whether anyone else is seeing the discovery call thing because every time I bring it up at events people look at me like I've lost it, but my pipeline says otherwise.