The Most Important First Step If you want to take an important step towards turning your sales organization into a sales machine, start by letting your Account Executives (the sales reps closing business) focus on what they do best: work active sales cycles and close. Let a different role, Sales Development Reps, focus on generating new qualified opportunities for your Account Executives. As a first step, dedicate a role (whether you begin with one person or a whole team) to ONLY doing outbound prospecting activities. Break it off from inbound lead qualification and from closing. This is so important that I mention it several times in this book: Specialize, Specialize, Specialize! Implement a Sales Development function to prospect for new clients to ensure a predictable, sustainable supply of qualified leads for the field and/ or telesales teams, and a Market Response function to qualify the leads that come into your website, through the telephone or other “inbound” channels. 1. Sales Development Reps prospect into cold or inactive companies who aren’t engaging with you already, to source new, incremental sales opportunities and pass them to quotacarrying salespeople.