Stop the BS: What top revenue leaders are doing differently in 2025

If there’s a single thing every revenue leader is desperate for these days, it’s this: less sales fluff, more straight answers. 

Anyone who’s spent a minute in a modern sales organization knows the pain. Too many playbooks, too many gurus, and not enough honesty about what actually pushes deals over the line. 

That’s why the recent Revenue Rebels: Stop the BS (Bad Sales) webinar with Alex Mickle (Director of Sales, Existing Business, GetAccept) and Alexander Stefansson (VP of Sales, Hello Retail) made a difference. It was honest, opinionated, and (refreshingly) more interested in sharing real talk than reciting the usual sales mantras.

Revenue leaders, let’s be honest. You don’t need another LinkedIn listicle rehashing “discovery call best practices”. You need practical insights you can apply next week, and maybe even a bit of permission to challenge how things have always been done. 

The session made it clear that today’s B2B sales environment is chaotic, unpredictable, and unwilling to reward mediocrity or box-ticking.

So in this article, we’ll serve up the session’s best thinking. We’ll challenge broken models, call out the real difference-makers, and give you examples to survive (and thrive) in today’s unpredictable revenue world. 

Consider this your shortcut to skipping the sales BS, straight from one revenue leader to another.

The most overhyped sales beliefs

Some of the loudest dogmas in sales are also the most misleading. Take “sales is a numbers game,” for example. Alexander Stefansson called this out explicitly as the biggest sales BS he heard this year. 

Sure, metrics matter, but pounding the phones or spamming more sequences isn’t a strategy. It’s a recipe for irrelevant, low-converting outreach. This is old thinking, desperately clinging to life in a buying world that has moved on.

Likewise, the worship of technology for technology’s sake. During the session, Alexander labeled AI as the “most overhyped” sales tech of our age. There’s nuance here – they’re not saying tech doesn’t help. But there’s a huge difference between using the right tools to amplify your process and believing that the next shiny thing will save a weak team, win trust, or build a relationship. Technology can speed up what you’re already good (or bad) at, but it’s not a substitute for hustle or brains.

Here’s a quick reality check. If you’re still evaluating sales performance or building a process purely around volume, automated cadences, or the illusion that tech can replace the individual, you’re aiming for the wrong target. 

The modern buyer is skeptical, overwhelmed, and starved for relevance. Without dialing back the BS about what actually matters, you’re just another voice in the digital crowd – one that buyers will happily ignore.

Human first: Why great sellers beat great technology

No matter how many tools or hacks you stack in your tech arsenal, sales is still a deeply human game. 

It’s connection and curiosity that set the best sellers apart. You can’t have technology build rapport. You can’t have technology understand non-verbal cues. Buyers don’t remember the perfect pitch. They remember the person who listened, not just for quota, but to truly understand what would make their life easier.

What does that look like in real terms? 

Think of curiosity as your compass. As Alex Mickle described, working “like a scientist” means actively experimenting – testing approaches, digging deeper into buyer motivations, and always hunting for better ways to solve problems. 

That’s the stuff you can’t fake or automate. The best reps aren’t just reading off scripts. They’re obsessed with finding new angles, discovering what matters, and staying genuinely interested in their buyers’ worlds.

Want to flex your “human advantage?” Try this today:

Understand your buyer – don’t assume, ask

One of the biggest mistakes sellers make is assuming they know their buyer just because they’ve built a shiny persona. 

Too many teams waste energy guessing, or worse, making up facts based on what they saw on LinkedIn or in a sales tool. The cure? Go straight to the source. Sit in on CSM calls, ask customers why they made a purchase, probe what worried them during the process, and keep the feedback honest.

This simple (but rarely practiced) approach delivers two main wins. First, it drills right to the truth of what your buyers find valuable – no more shadowboxing with imagined objections or randomly touting features. Second, it means you’re sourcing insights from real-world conversations, not sanitized survey data or assumptions from HQ. 

As they put it, “buyers have all the answers.” Your job is to stop guessing and start listening.

Pulling insights from real buyers might look something like this:

Buyer journeys are messy, your sales funnel should be flexible

Forget the neat, tidy sales funnel. The real buyer journey isn’t linear, and pretending otherwise just ties you up in knots. 

As Alexander Stefansson said, the old-school B2B funnel isn’t “dead” per se – it’s misunderstood, used more for internal comfort than real-world accuracy. Today, buyers don’t pass smoothly from one stage to another; they loop back, disappear, bring in new stakeholders, or ghost vendors for weeks at a time.

Buyers today want control. Studies cited in the session showed that sellers are present for only a tiny fraction – just 17% – of the buying process, and that gets split among all competing vendors. Most of the meaningful conversation, influence, and decision-making happens behind closed doors, with sellers nowhere near the room.

So, what should you do? Enable buyers to self-educate, surface the right content internally, and allow for nonlinear progression. 

Ask yourself: where can you reduce friction, and what can you streamline or remove entirely? Make the buying process feel more like an invitation – one that flexes to fit the buyer’s context, not the other way around.

Forecasting and pipeline: Embracing the mess

If messy, hard-to-read pipelines are keeping you up at night, take heart: you’re in good company. As discussed in the webinar, the old methods of forecasting – assigning arbitrary close percentages to deal stages or relying on rep “gut feel” – just don’t cut it anymore. With only 17% of the process in your direct control, and multiple vendors vying for the same sliver of attention, the best anyone can offer is an educated estimate, not a certainty.

So, how do you make this work? For starters, prioritize proof over hope. It’s not about how excited your rep sounds about an opportunity. It’s about what the buyer actually says and does. 

Every meeting should be recorded (with consent), not just for compliance, but so leaders can review body language, tone, and real feedback – those non-verbal cues that make up 93% of communication. If your reps are using “I feel like” or “I hope” to describe a deal, you don’t have a qualified opportunity.

Quick checklist for qualifying deals in the current climate:

How to stay relevant and actually move deals

Moving deals now is less about brute force and more about meeting buyers where they are – on their terms, according to their timeline. 

Both Alex and Alexander stressed that the fastest way to lose a deal is failing to engage the right stakeholders, making overconfident assumptions, or resorting to the classic “feature dump.” 

Instead, the sellers who break through are those who spend more time on prep than blast volume and approach calls with genuine empathy for the buyer’s internal hoops.

If you want a practical punch list, start here:

Remember: today’s buyers aren’t persuaded by “being sold to.” They’re convinced by relevance, clear value, and the sense that you’re making their job easier – not harder.

Internal alignment: Sales is a team sport

Here’s the truth that gets swept under the rug in most sales kickoffs: mediocre sales numbers are rarely just a sales problem – they’re an organizational problem. 

The best teams don’t silo pipeline management or treat deal progression as a purely “frontline” task. Instead, they pull in resources from product, legal, customer success, and beyond to support a truly collaborative buying journey.

Legal reviews, information security questions, and unique “buyer steps” can sink a deal if they catch you unprepared. That’s why winning teams proactively map out not just the buyer’s journey, but the internal support needed at every critical step. 

Anticipate friction before it stalls momentum – being able to say, “We’ve got that DPA or SOC 2 report ready,” or, “Our CS team can address onboarding concerns on a moment’s notice.”

To break down barriers and get everyone rowing in the same direction, a few simple steps help:

Conclusion: Keeping it simple, keeping it human

In a world swamped with tools, processes, and purported shortcuts, simplicity and genuine human insight still win. 

Stop trying to cram buyers into clunky models or force outcomes on your schedule. Instead, prioritize relevance, deep understanding, and the courage to do less – so you can do what matters more.

If you’re leading a revenue team (or aspire to), your battle plan for the next quarter should revolve around three things:

• Make your team obsessed with getting inside the buyer’s world (not just going through the sales motion).
• Prioritize stuff that matters, kill steps that clutter.
• Build company-wide support for buyers, not just deals.

That’s the straight talk you need to build momentum in this never-normal revenue world. 

Ditch the BS, keep it simple, and don’t forget: the best tech in the world can’t replace one honest conversation, one well-placed question, or one moment of real human connection. 

That’s how you’ll win.