by Christina | Aug 25, 2026 | 2026, Blog
Here’s a question almost nobody asks about a deal: not “who’s involved,” but “who shows up first, who shows up last, and why does it matter?”
Turns out it matters more than almost anything else in your pipeline.
Across nearly a decade of research and more than 10,000 personality profiles, a pattern kept surfacing. It wasn’t random. The same personality types kept showing up at the same points in the buying process, playing the same roles, for the same reasons. Once you see the pattern, you can’t unsee it, and you definitely can’t sell the same way to all three moments in the journey.
The Beginning: Influencers Bring the Idea In
Every deal starts somewhere, and it’s rarely with the person who signs the contract.
It usually starts with an Influencer. They’re the one who found your webinar, forwarded your content to six colleagues, booked the intro call with genuine excitement. They’re driven by recognition and relationships, being the person who discovered something first, who gets to say “you should look at this.”
Here’s the catch: their enthusiasm is real, but their ownership isn’t. Influencers open doors. They don’t push deals through when things get hard. In the research, we call them Teachers – curious, analytical, motivated to bring new ideas into the organization and share what they’ve learned. They’re the reason you got the meeting. They’re rarely the reason you win.
If an Influencer is your only contact three weeks before a decision, you don’t have a deal. You have an introduction.
The Middle: Dominants Take Ownership (and Steadies Quietly Stall Things)
Once an idea clears the door, someone has to carry it. That’s a Dominant.
Dominants are the Go-Getters, results-driven, decisive, motivated by winning and looking good doing it. They ask “what’s the bottom line” and move fast once they’re bought in. In a Life Sciences deal we tracked, an Influencer CEO brought in his CMO, who happened to also be an Influencer, but the deal actually moved because two Dominants on the team, a VP and SVP, saw a personal opportunity to own a new capability in-house. That personal stake is what carried a 15-month sales cycle to close.
But the middle of the journey has a second, quieter character: the Steady. If your primary contact is a Steady, brace yourself. Steadies are relationship-focused, risk-averse, and genuinely helpful – but they will not advocate for you under pressure.
They need to know the group is aligned before they’ll move, and most deals that go quiet in the pipeline have a Steady sitting at the center of them. Push a Steady too hard and you don’t get a yes. You get radio silence, or worse, an email cc’ing someone else who’s “probably better positioned to help.”
The lesson from the middle stage: find your Dominant and give them a personal reason to champion this. Don’t mistake a Steady’s warmth for momentum.
The End: Conscientious Skeptics Show Up Late – and Vet Everything
This is the stage most sales teams never see coming because most of these buyers were never in the CRM to begin with.
Across more than 50 accounts and 27 sales opportunities, 85% of the buyers actively involved in the late stages of a deal – demos, trials, final presentations – weren’t in the selling company’s database. Not in marketing. Not in sales. Nowhere. They show up in predictable waves: five to seven new stakeholders at the demo stage, another three to five at trial setup, and procurement and finance walking in for the first time at the final presentation.
And disproportionately, the people who show up last are Conscientious (aka the Skeptics). Detail-oriented, data-driven, deeply distrustful of hype. They didn’t participate in the early relationship-building because they weren’t there for it. They arrive with fresh eyes and a mandate to find the risk everyone else missed.
We watched this play out in a South Korean pharmaceutical deal. Thirty contacts engaged for nine months – webinars, white papers, events, all the right signals. Then, eight months in, the actual decision-maker entered: a highly skeptical Conscientious Executive Director who had been invisible the entire time, consistent with a hierarchical culture where junior staff do the research and senior leaders make the call.
She started unbundling the deal, questioning complexity, looking for risk. It closed, at half the original value because nobody knew who she was or what she needed until it was too late.
Compare that to the deal where a late-arriving Dominant CEO searched “cash flow” 35 times in two weeks. Because that CEO had been entered into the database, the team caught the signal, rebuilt the final presentation around it, and won a six-figure competitive takeaway against a rival that had beaten them ten times running.
Same late-stage moment. Two completely different outcomes. The only variable was visibility.
Why This Matters More Than Your Funnel Stages
Your CRM tracks funnel stages. It doesn’t track who’s walking through the door at each one. But the personalities do, predictably, whether you’re watching or not:
- Beginning: Influencers bring the idea in. They won’t carry it.
- Middle: Dominants drive it forward if there’s something personal in it for them. Steadies quietly stall it if left unchallenged.
- End: Conscientious Skeptics arrive last, often after the deal feels basically done, and they decide whether it actually closes – and at what value.
The two most important stakeholders in any new-solution deal are the Teacher who brings you in and the Go-Getter who carries you forward. When urgency is high, it shifts: the Go-Getter and the Skeptic become the pair that matters most, because someone still has to vet the thing you’re rushing toward.
Miss any one of these three moments and you’re not losing to a competitor. You’re losing to a person you never saw.
The Hidden Buyer Journey: How Personality, Culture, and Hidden Stakeholders Decide Your Deals is available now on Amazon.
by Christina | Jul 17, 2026 | 2026, Uncategorized
Over half our deals never make it to a decision. And in most of those cases, we have no idea why.
That’s one of the reasons we studied buyer behavior for The Hidden Buyer Journey.
Here’s what we found. The moment you put a person into a role, inside a buying group, inside a company, inside an industry – things get complicated fast. But behind the complexity, there’s a pattern.
We have no tools to pick up internal signals when a deal is at risk. We don’t coach reps to read group dynamics. And we don’t really understand how corporate culture shapes the decision underneath the decision.
When someone takes a job, they pick up a work persona. That persona may or may not reflect who they are as a person. What doesn’t change is the behavior tied to their actual personality.
Know that personality type, and you can predict – with real probability – how someone will act in a given situation.
This is where the research got interesting. Birds of a feather really do flock together. Personality doesn’t just shape how someone works — it shapes the role, the company, and the industry they end up in
We call it the Two-Thirds Rule. In any given industry and role, two personality types make up at least two-thirds of the people in it
Over half the people who work in the airline industry worked in an operations role. The people in those roles skew heavily as Conscientious personalities (they are analytic and data driven). At Frontier, for example, it’s over 73%. Once you know it, you can plan for it
Now put the two ideas together. Personality predicts behavior. And that behavior is concentrated in specific roles, companies, and industries you’re already targeting
The Hidden Buyer Journey is the map for the things happening inside the deal that we’ve never been able to see or predict. Now we can
The graphic below shows why: a person alone is easy to read. Bury them in a role, a buying group, a company, an industry — and they disappear into the org chart
Win the deal by finding your way back to the person underneath. That’s where decisions actually get made.
by Christina | Jul 10, 2026 | 2026, Blog
The insights in The Hidden Buyer Journey come from studying the personalities of 10,000 buyers across 15 industries over seven years. Why?
Because if you know a buyer’s personality type, you can predict their preferences, motivations, and behaviors.
No two buyers are alike — but their personalities might be. More than 50% of the time, buyers in similar roles in the same industry share the same personality type.
That’s because personality drives your degree, your profession, your company, even the industry you land in.
Take Chief Information Security Officers: 65-75% share the same personality type, depending on industry — skewing higher in Financial Services, lower in Professional Services.
Why does this matter?
You can target your messaging and value proposition to match that preference.
You can read intent signals correctly, because you know the motivation behind the action.
You can spot false positives before they waste your sales team’s time.
And you can pick the right channel — CISOs, for example, trust human and third-party recommendations over anything self-serve.
Personality isn’t a soft metric. It’s the variable your CRM has never measured — and the one that’s been driving the decision the whole time.
by scott.gillum | Jun 9, 2020 | 2020, Marketing
by Scott Gillum
Estimated read time: 3 Minutes
Episode 5: Getting Sales to Buy Into Inbound Marketing with Special Guest, Matt Stevens
Supporting Sales with Inbound Marketing. Matt Stevens, former head Digital Marketing at Gartner and CEB, faced a significant set of challenges in building out an inbound marketing engine that would deliver sales. Scott and Matt discuss how he was able to get the sales organization to accept Inbound Marketing as a solution to increase their productivity and make quota.
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by scott.gillum | May 12, 2020 | 2020, Opinion
by Scott Gillum
Estimated read time: 3 Minutes
I was out for a run this weekend and heard the footsteps coming from behind me. Soon, he was on me, and then past me. At that point I increased my pace as the competitive instinct kicked in when the words “run your race” ran through my mind.
It’s a lesson I learned many years ago while training for 10 milers. After many months of training, planning my race strategy, and setting time goals, I’d be thrown off my pace early in a race, as soon as someone in my age group was passing me.
Chasing them, I thought, was pushing me to a better end result. At least, the competitor in me believed. In reality, it only drained my tank causing me to be out of gas later in the race, resulting in a poor time and disappointment. All the months of training wasted because I ran someone else’s race.
Unemployment is now at its highest level since the great depression which has touched all of us in some way. It’s an incredibly difficult time that can easily be made more stressful by how we now measure ourselves, and our success.
It’s easy to become a victim of the trap I fell into running races. Comparing ourselves to others, feeling like you’re falling behind or being passed by your peers. It’s a feeling all too familiar. In the first 2 years of marriage, my wife and I were laid off a combined total of 4 times.
The first, a month after we put a deposit on a house. By the fourth “downsizing,” my parents were helping us pay our mortgage and my wife’s parents were bringing us groceries.
So first know this, this is not your fault, it’s not something you did. You’ve hit a very challenging and unplanned part of the course.
Second, no one remembers where you started or how many people passed you during the race, only the end results will be remembered. And most importantly, the only thing that matters about the results will be how you will feel about them.
By the third or fourth race, I had developed the discipline to stick to my race plan. My performance improved, but more importantly, so did my sense of accomplishment. I also noticed another thing even more satisfying, the guys who passed me earlier were now being passed by me later in the race.
Our lives are made up of a series of marathons. There are still many miles and difficult stretches of road to cover. Keep your head up, eyes focused forward, and run your race.
