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 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 Christina | Apr 3, 2026 | 2026, Marketing, Sales
After 7 years of research – analyzing hundreds of buyer journeys, profiling the personalities of thousands of decision-makers, and tracking what actually drives B2B deals – I finally finished the first draft.
Unlike other books in the sales and marketing space, this is not survey driven. We didn’t ask buyers for their preferences, we observed their behaviors in the data.
The work took longer than I ever expected, but every extra year added a layer of insight I wouldn’t trade. The 📕 title: The Hidden Buyer Journey.
Here’s what I discovered that changed everything:
● 85% of buyers influencing your deals never make it into your CRM.
● Most personas are built for selling, not buying.
● Corporate culture predicts deal velocity better than any other factor.
● Although there are a dozen or more buyers involved in the journey, only 4-5 make the deal happen.
● Reps can sabotage deals by not adjusting their style to fit the buyer’s personality.
These aren’t just interesting data points – they represent a fundamental shift in how modern B2B sales needs to be approached.
The book explains why win rates aren’t improving, why sales cycles are stretching, and why “personalization” isn’t working. More importantly, it shows exactly what to fix…and how.
I’ll be sharing more over the next few weeks. If any of this resonates with challenges you’re facing right now, follow along. You won’t want to miss what’s coming.
To learn more about the book and to reserve your copy visit https://carbondesign.com/the-hidden-buyer-journey/
by scott.gillum | Mar 20, 2020 | 2020, Opinion
by Scott Gillum
Estimated read time: 3 Minutes
Making Working from Home, Work
Barking dogs, crying babies, toddlers toddling, welcome to the reality of working from home.
Since our founding 3 years ago, our teams have been living this life. Here are 3 tips to help you make the adjustment.
- Get used to and learn how to live with working odd hours. If you’re accustomed to a routine of “working hours” in the office, you can kiss that goodbye if your children are at home.
Channel your “inner Gandhi” for patience and flexibility. Work when you can find the calm. Early mornings, evenings, and quiet moments in between.
Managers be flexible on your expectations on deliverables and due dates. You may see your team disappear during a good portion of the day.
- Count on technical issues, unplanned and spontaneous interruptions, and scheduling issues with conference calls.
In fact, you may be better off adopting the attitude that something will go wrong as the default.
- Everyone on camera for video calls…except when someone feels like they don’t want to be.
I’ve seen some posts that organizations mandate it, but the reality of our situation is that you, and/or your home office, may be a complete sh*t show at some point during the day. It happens…and we can deal with you not being seen on a call.
Part II – Now that you’ve been at this for a couple of weeks here are a few other things to consider.
- Wall clock to body clock work hours – You may be aware that your energy level and passion vary based on the time of day, now that you’re out of the office you can do something about it. Instead of reaching for another cup of coffee, go for a walk (and take the dog with you) change your work location — it’s spring now and the weather is great for working outside. Working will become more feel driven than time driven.
- Listen to your body – also by this point you may have noticed that your makeshift office isn’t exactly ergonomically designed. Pay attention to how long you sit and/or have your head in one position. Don’t worry if you forget, your body will remind you the next day.
- Reboot your modem and wireless router – you may have also noticed that your bandwidth has slowed. Consumer Reports recommends rebooting once a month, especially if you have added devices to the network.
- Update your work office – now that everyone is out of it, how could you use this time to your advantage. It could be a great time to paint, reorganize the furniture, update the lighting, etc.
Good luck and stay safe!
Making Working from Home, Work…
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by scott.gillum | Jan 21, 2020 | 2020, Sales
by Scott Gillum
Estimated read time: 8 Minutes
“The best sellers are the people who make the product,” said my son as we were walking out of a store in a quaint town in Los Cabos, Mexico.
It was an interesting comment made after I had just purchased a pair of earrings for my wife in a jewelry boutique. The buying experience turned out to be an interesting “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” sales story, or in our case, the “Tourist and the Four Brothers.”
A few nights prior, after enjoying dinner in town, we walked the streets visiting local shops. The first jewelry store we visited was run by one of four brothers, all jewelry designers who had followed their father into the business. Each brother had their own style, which was reflected in their jewelry, shop decor and personalities.
The first brother’s store was white and teal, very similar to Tiffany’s. The display cases were decorated with high-end tequila bottles sprinkled among the jewelry, which immediately caught my eye. My wife, perusing the counters, settled in an area with rings while I chatted with the clerk behind the counter about the family and their business.
In working with my wife the sales person failed to realize that he wasn’t selling to a naive tourist but rather a very knowledgeable buyer who at one point in her career had managed a jewelry department for a high end retailer. A mistake often made by sales people who fail to do research on their potential buyers. As he pitched her on a ring she had intentionally requested to see, he failed to notice she was wearing one similar.
When buyers are in an unfamiliar environment, like we were, they will seek to find a frame of reference or an “anchor.” Something that they can connect to their knowledge base to aid in decision making. Being new to the store, and pricing in pesos, my wife “anchored” on a familiar ring. Trying on the ring she was able to assess that it was roughly twice the price and half the weight as hers. Now that she had a reference point, she determined that the store markup was about twice that of a US store.
The second brother’s store was bigger and had a vast selection of jewelry (and no tequila). The clerk, a niece of the designer, greeted us and carried around her calculator while following us around the store. A not so subtle message that she was ready to make a deal.
My wife found an area of rings and picked one out. As she asked questions, the store clerk mentioned they were having a promotion. She then tried to discount to close the deal which kept falling as we were walking towards the door. By the time we left, the price had fallen 40%, with an offer to call her Uncle to get maybe an even better price.
The last store we visited was white, simple and elegant. It didn’t contain a lot of inventory, in fact, one of the display cases was completely empty. The person working behind the desk was not a sales clerk, but an assistant designer who introduced us to the youngest brother in the family and owner of the store. He was the designer and told us about his creations apologizing for the lack of inventory.
We talked about his life, his education in London, and the fact that he didn’t want to get into the family business, but his love of designing drew him in. His real passion was designing furniture which he hoped to start retailing soon.
My wife found a pair of earrings and tried them on. As she did he explained the process used to give the silver hoops their shimmer along with the details about the gems used to enhance them. He brought over other silver earrings and pointed out the differences in the design process.
Deciding to purchase the earrings, we asked if they had a “promotion.” He said that Visa or Mastercard were offering a 10% discount on a purchase. The card companies, not him, offered the promotion.
As we were paying, I noticed a unique bottle of tequila sitting behind the desk. A dark blue bottle with carved symbols of the tequila making process along with the history of the Los Cabos area. He said it appealed to him “because as a designer” he appreciated the craftsmanship of the bottle. I loved the story (and the taste) of the tequila and he offered to connect me with the owner who lived locally to secure a bottle.
The first store tried to position itself as the Mexican version of Tiffany’s. The problem was, we had no prior exposure to the brand, so the brand promise and value were empty. The second store offered choice and price but made us question it’s authenticity and quality. (Given the amount of products offered we suspected the owner couldn’t have designed everything, and the discount made us question if the stone used in the ring was natural or man made.)
Later that night, I got a text from the store owner where we made our purchase, sharing the price and location to pick up the tequila. He didn’t have to follow up with me after we made the purchase but he did. It wasn’t an empty promise made to close the deal which happens far too often, but a genuine gesture.
In the end, my wife received a piece of jewelry she loves and I got a unique bottle of tequila but what we really bought, was the owner of the store. For the 20 minutes we spent in the store, a connection and relationship were formed through storytelling. It was both authentic and passionate, building a foundation of trust.
The experience made me reflect on the effectiveness of our sales and marketing efforts. What if we could train our sales people to act like “owners” or “designers” of the product; how might that impact their success? That question prompted another one which was, how many sales people ever receive training by the product group, or really know or understand the story behind the product or service they sell.
We can’t give the passion that comes with the pride in ownership, but we can train them to be storytellers, because as we experienced, buyers don’t buy from you, they buy into you.
As for the fourth brother, his store never opened. Guess it’s true, showing up is half the battle.
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