Where It All Began
The Pattern I Couldn't Ignore
In 2019, I was sitting in a board meeting for a company I was advising, watching them present their go-to-market strategy. The slides were impressive - attribution models, multi-channel orchestration, product-led growth motions, community-driven advocacy programs, and customer intelligence platforms. Their marketing team had completely reimagined how to create and capture demand. Their customer success team had built predictive health scores and expansion playbooks. Their product team had embedded growth loops and viral mechanics.
Then we got to the sales slides.
Linear sales process. Stage gates. Discovery, demo, proposal, negotiation, close. BANT qualification. Single-threaded relationships. Activity metrics. The same fundamental approach I'd learned when I started selling in 2006.
That's when it hit me. While every other aspect of go-to-market had undergone radical transformation, sales remained frozen in time. We were running 2006 sales playbooks in a 2019 market. We had built Formula 1 race cars, but were still teaching drivers how to ride horses.
The disconnect was staggering. Marketing had evolved from batch-and-blast to account-based precision. Customer success had transformed from reactive support to proactive value creation. Product had shifted from feature factories to experience orchestrators. But sales? Sales was still trying to control a linear process in a world that had become fundamentally non-linear.
The Evolution Gap That's Breaking Everything
Over the next few years, I studied this pattern across dozens of companies. The data was consistent and damning. Companies were investing millions in modern go-to-market infrastructure - intent data platforms, conversation intelligence, revenue operations teams, customer data platforms - but their actual selling motion remained stubbornly traditional.
Here's what I discovered: While go-to-market strategies had evolved to match modern buyer behavior, sales execution was still based on assumptions from a different era. We were essentially running two different operating systems that were increasingly incompatible.
💥 The modern go-to-market engine assumes:
Buyers self-educate before engaging
Multiple stakeholders evaluate in parallel
Decisions happen in channels we don't control
Customers expect continuous value delivery
Growth comes from expansion, not just acquisition
Trust is earned through transparency, not persuasion
⚠️ But our sales processes still assume:
Sellers control information and education
We can manage a linear progression
Decisions happen in meetings we schedule
The sale ends at signature
Growth comes from hunting new logos
Trust is built through relationships </aside>
This misalignment wasn't just causing inefficiency - it was causing systematic failure. Companies with sophisticated go-to-market strategies were seeing declining sales productivity. Advanced attribution showed marketing sourcing 70% of pipeline, but sales couldn't convert it. Customer success identified expansion opportunities that sales couldn't capture. Product built viral features that sales didn't understand how to leverage.
The Three Revolutions Sales Missed
As I dug deeper, I identified three fundamental revolutions that had transformed B2B buying while sales methodology remained static: