# Nate Stoltenow

Nate Stoltenow shares practical advice on B2B sales, sales leadership, and revenue operations. The posts focus on improving follow-up, coaching, lead handling, and the conversations that move deals forward; Nate also says they help sales leaders rebuild their teams’ core sales practices.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/nate-stoltenow/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/natestoltenow
- LinkedIn followers: 37,037
- Topics: artificial-intelligence, sales, revenue-operations, ai-in-sales
- Based on 11 dated posts, latest 2026-09-03

## Summary

Nate Stoltenow is most useful for practical B2B sales process, sales leadership, and revenue operations content.

- Best for: A B2B sales consultancy wanting co-delivered sales process and RevOps content.
- Not for: A general consumer campaign for app installs or lifestyle audiences.
- Check first: Confirm whether sponsored placements are available and ask for audience breakdown.

### Takeaways

- Review proposals on a call to clarify language, get feedback, and find approvers.
- Audit inbound lead handling at the form and in the first hours.
- Guard a salesperson's calendar for buyers; everything else is prep or cleanup.

## Main ideas

- **Emailing a proposal is where deals go quiet. Review it on a call instead**: Nate Stoltenow argues that proposals fail in the inbox, not in the negotiation. Internal shorthand reads as jargon to a buyer who will never say so; an email cannot answer back; and the buyer must work out how to purchase on their own. Moving the proposal to a 25-minute review call addresses all three problems. A seller can ask whether the proposal hit the mark, hear the real reaction, and find out who else needs to approve the purchase. The post states the test bluntly: if someone will not give 15 minutes to review a proposal the team spent hours building, that is probably not a good partnership. Stoltenow frames the costly outcome as silence rather than refusal: the deal that neither closes nor gets turned down.
- **Audit lead handling at the form and in the first hours, not the pitch**: Stoltenow's diagnosis of a leaky funnel starts at the inbound form. The team audited more than 40 companies on HubSpot in a year and found the same gaps on the response side: no booking step after sign-up, no automated emails, no required calls, no texts, and no notification to the sales channel. On the rep side, follow-up happens when the rep feels like it, is often a single manual email, includes a call only when a manager is watching, waits hours, and marks leads close-lost far too early. Companies spend money generating leads that die on arrival in their own CRM. The loss is operational and visible before any conversation with a buyer takes place.
- **Guard a salesperson's calendar for buyers; everything else is prep or cleanup**: Stoltenow reverses the usual complaint about wasted time. Salespeople quickly protect their calendars from CRM updates, follow-up emails, and cold calls, but those are not the job: a salesperson is paid to be in front of a buyer, asking questions, moving deals forward, handling objections, and creating opportunities. Everything else is preparation or cleanup. The provocative framing—that salespeople should waste more time—means that hours spent with buyers can look unproductive on a calendar while being the only place value is created.
- **Sales atrophy shows up in leading indicators long before it reaches the forecast**: Writing to sales leaders, Stoltenow argues that staying current in 2025 is not hard, but becoming obsolete is easy. The signs are mundane: missed follow-ups, weak introductions, average outbound. The problem is not laziness but reps running plays that worked two years ago. Those habits lead to coaching that gets ignored, reps avoiding cold calls, a drying pipeline, and missed quota, with the forecast as the point where the problem becomes undeniable. The fix is not a CRM or technology change but better openers, sharper follow-up, modern coaching, and activity tied directly to revenue. That makes this a leadership and practice issue, not a tooling one.
- **Fix the basics before chasing AI, and treat the business as one connected line**: Recapping a podcast with Andrew D. Henke and David Askvig, Stoltenow sets out three positions. First, fix the basics before AI: software will not repair leaking funnels, messy handoffs, or a lack of visibility into why deals stall. Second, a business is an assembly line, not a set of silos. Lead generation, qualification, closing, onboarding, and collections run as one chain, but most agencies repair a single piece and leave the rest broken. Third, ideas are worth little without execution: a strategy can be written in minutes, but nothing implements it or holds a team accountable. The post also describes the people Stoltenow works with and why.

## Work to read

- [Don’t send proposals — walk the buyer through them on a call](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/natestoltenow_dont-send-proposals-i-just-got-off-a-call-activity-7450569080945704961-jVmD)
- [Auditing inbound lead handling after the form fill](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/natestoltenow_sales-b2bsales-coldemail-activity-7344726301334740992-DZTZ)
- [Salespeople should waste more time with buyers](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/natestoltenow_salespeople-should-waste-more-time-its-activity-7490461994693644289-Kw6S)
- [Sales atrophy shows up in the forecast](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/natestoltenow_sales-salesleadership-b2bsales-activity-7325224148631179264-1ef5)
- [Partners, RevOps basics and execution over AI](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/natestoltenow_building-a-business-with-the-right-partners-activity-7391514236947980288-ntmW)

## Brand relationships

- **HubSpot** (mention)

## Partnerships

Nate Stoltenow’s posts describe business collaboration, not sponsorships or paid partnerships. One post says they are building a company alongside two named operators, Andrew D. Henke and David Askvig, combining their roles in scaling and revenue operations and the work they take on together. Calls to action focus on sales-team consulting; the closest thing to an inquiry instruction is a post asking sales leaders with struggling teams to send a message about rebuilding their outbound and follow-up. A brand considering co-marketing on sales process and RevOps content should ask directly about terms and format, since the posts publish no media kit, rate card, sponsored-format description, disclosure policy or dedicated partnership contact. Any collaboration would need to be negotiated rather than selected from a published package.

## Alternatives

- Andrew Wright: Choose Andrew Wright over Nate Stoltenow when a campaign needs a diagnostic angle rather than a fixed playbook. Wright's posts describe walking into a sales team and listening to recorded conversations before changing anything: how reps open, where buyers lose interest, whether follow-up gives buyers a reason to reply, and which objections keep repeating. Wright also frames the second half of the year as the moment to fix the process instead of adding more activity, and lists specific leaks to close: vague next steps, proposals with no decision path, and soft buyers held over month to month. A consultancy selling sales-conversation review, call coaching, or objection analysis can build a co-marketing piece around that method. For a reusable asset with steps a sales leader can run directly, such as the 25-minute proposal review call and the inbound follow-up audit, Nate Stoltenow is the stronger choice.
- Bryan Higgins: Choose Bryan Higgins over Nate Stoltenow when the campaign promise is faster response and follow-up execution rather than process fundamentals. Higgins' posts describe an outbound system running while the operator is away, with reported figures: 32,300 touches, a sub-1% bounce rate, a 7.28% reply rate, 187 opportunities, and 125 appointments booked without human interaction. The second post argues that AI SDR tools fail when companies automate a broken process and succeed when AI is trained on the company's own messaging, ideal customer profile, objection handling, follow-up sequences, and qualification framework. It names AiDA as the product built for that. A consultancy selling outbound rebuilds or AI-assisted pipeline work has a direct hook in that material. For campaigns focused on fixing funnels, handoffs, and deal visibility before adding tools, Nate Stoltenow is the stronger choice; that is their stated position.
- Tim Nilsson: Choose Tim Nilsson over Nate Stoltenow when a campaign needs to focus on rep-level skills and team enablement rather than process design. Nilsson's posts are structured for that audience: ten habits top salespeople share, each with a short practice attached, covering storytelling, active listening, emotional intelligence, handling rejection, pipeline awareness, finding insight, real networking, organization, coachability, and understanding how buyers decide. The companion post takes a BCG breakdown of AI agents in B2B sales and turns it into adoption steps teams can act on, including starting with prep and follow-up, building confidence before workflow, and mapping the actual sales process before inserting a tool. A consultancy selling sales training, coaching programs, or an AI adoption rollout has a natural joint asset in that material. For a campaign built around a shared working session on one concrete revenue problem, Nate Stoltenow is the stronger choice: the proposal review call and inbound audit each offer a single, testable task.

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AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/