Should AEs do their own cold calling?

It's a staple of almost every AE job description: must be comfortable with outbound prospecting. It's repeated so often it has become received wisdom - almost religious in its certainty. (And as we'll see, sometimes the answer really is "god, yes" 😉)

But like most things in sales, the real answer is: it depends. And getting it wrong is an expensive mistake in either direction.

Startups: yes, unambiguously

If this is your first AE hire in a B2B startup, they almost certainly need to be doing their own prospecting. Inbound is minimal, there's no SDR function yet, and someone has to go and find the business.

But it's worth being clear about what you're actually asking for here. A founding AE isn't just someone who can make cold calls - they need to operate effectively in conditions of chaos. Shifting positioning, an undefined sales process, content that doesn't quite exist yet, a product that's still finding its feet. Prospecting ability is key, but is one requirement among many. Hire accordingly.

True enterprise: yes, but differently

If you're going after a small number of high-value named accounts, your AEs need to be relentlessly focused on opening doors - cold calls, conferences, personal networks, every channel available. At this level, the economics justify it. An AE targeting $1m in new ARR, closing perhaps ten deals a year, needs roughly thirty serious opportunities to get there. The time investment required to create those opportunities is entirely reasonable given the return on each one.

Successful outreach can't be fully delegated - cold-calling is king. AI and automation have their place, but genuine enterprise relationship-building requires the AE to be front and centre.

Mid-market: probably not

This is where received wisdom most often leads companies astray. If you're selling $10-20k deals, running three or four calls per win, with a strong inbound pipeline driven by marketing - having your AEs do their own prospecting is likely inefficient, not industrious.

Take a look at the economics. A mid-market AE closing $500k in new ARR needs a much higher volume of opportunities than their enterprise counterpart. Cold calling and prospecting take roughly the same amount of time regardless of the deal size at the end of the road. Spending that time on calls that might yield a $15k deal, when a BDR or a well-run inbound channel could be generating those conversations instead, is a poor use of an expensive resource.

At this point, your job as a sales leader is to fill your AEs' diaries through more efficient means - BDRs, paid and earned media, events, partnerships - and let them focus on what they do best: converting opportunities into revenue.

The point

There's a version of every sales organisation that sits somewhere between these three archetypes, and the right answer will be specific to where your business is and where your customers are coming from.

But the wrong answer is to default to "AEs must prospect because that's what everyone does”. Getting this wrong is inefficient - including the opportunity cost of an AE spending time on the wrong activity, and a pipeline that never quite reaches the volume you need.

Work out what your business actually requires. Then build your channels - and your hiring criteria - around that, not around conventional wisdom.