by Christina | Sep 15, 2026 | 2026, Marketing
CMOs once asked agencies to prove their value. AI could force them to answer the same question about their own teams.
Marketing has brought capabilities in-house before. AI is making the case for doing it again — faster, cheaper, and at a scale previous waves couldn’t match.
The problem is what happens after the tools are adopted. Previous in-house pushes exposed hidden costs around talent, culture, and technology. This time, the test could come when boards ask whether all that AI-driven efficiency is actually producing better marketing results.
As the famous warning goes, “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Marketing is entering its third major push toward in-housing, and the first two offer a warning: The promise of efficiency can outpace the reality of building and managing the capability yourself.
The first two in-house waves came with hidden costs
The first came during the Great Recession of 2008-2009. Facing budget cuts, companies like Intel brought services, especially media, in-house to preserve budget, hiring creative talent to execute campaigns directly.
The second came during the mid-2010s digital boom. As transparency concerns grew, especially with social platforms, CMOs lost trust in their data and programmatic media partners. As internal teams’ skills grew, so did CMO confidence in them. The ANA reported that the share of members with in-house agencies jumped from 42% to 78% by 2018.
CMOs assumed that competitive salaries would lure top agency talent in-house, and some did jump. But especially in B2B, creative talent got bored. Agency life offered variety: a scrappy startup one week, a Fortune 500 rebrand the next. Brands struggled to build that creative culture, and much of the talent drifted back within a year.
In-house agencies also never got a seat at the leadership table. They became order-takers stuck on repetitive production work.
Then there was the cost. CMOs saw agency hourly rates and assumed they could save millions, overlooking what it actually takes to run an internal department. Software licenses and Martech stacks that agencies had spread across a whole client roster now had to be absorbed by a single company.
AI is creating a different in-house problem: proving performance
AI is changing the in-house equation. Pressure from boards and executive teams is pushing CMOs to integrate AI into everything, recognizing that work once delivered by agencies can now be done in-house. Generative tools make it easy to develop content, build ABM programs, and handle more creative internally.
Agentic AI is streamlining workflows and absorbing mundane tasks. But we’re about to reach the point where executives start asking about performance.
The efficiency case for AI in marketing isn’t in question. Content moves faster, campaigns launch quicker, and mundane work disappears. But efficiency was never what CMOs promised the board. They promised results. That’s where the third wave starts to echo the first two.
Start with performance. Duke University’s 2026 CMO Survey asked marketing leaders to rate their organizations’ marketing technology activities on a 7-point scale. No martech activity scored above 5, including “generating ROI from marketing technologies.” Adoption has outrun the organization’s ability to turn that investment into measurable results. The tools are running. The proof isn’t there.
That gap shows up sharply at the board level, too. Comviva’s 2026 Global CMO Survey found that 86% of marketing leaders had been asked to justify AI spending at the board level, while only 16% felt confident defending those investments with clear business evidence. That’s a remarkable admission: most CMOs pushing AI into their organizations can’t yet show their own leadership what it’s buying them. This isn’t a messaging problem — it’s an accountability gap opening up in real time, with boards now asking CMOs the question CMOs used to ask their agencies.
Then there’s the number that should worry marketers most. The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025 report, produced by MIT NANDA, found that 95% of organizations were getting no measurable return from enterprise genAI, despite $30 billion to $40 billion in enterprise investment.
Buried in that finding: sales and marketing absorbed the largest share of that budget, precisely because it was the easiest use case to pitch internally. Operations and finance pilots, which got less funding and less attention, actually produced better returns. Marketing got the biggest slice of AI spend and the weakest evidence to show for it.
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 14, 2026 | 2026, Blog, Business Trends
Your deals aren’t won or lost on product alone. Learn why personality, politics, culture, and unseen stakeholders often determine the outcome.
Every sales and marketing effort comes down to the same goal: getting someone to take action – register for a webinar, download a case study, attend a dinner, request a demo, make a decision. Simple enough on paper, so why is it so hard?
The honest answer is one most sales and marketing teams don’t want to say out loud: Buying isn’t purely rational because of forces we almost never talk about. Those hidden forces shape every buying decision, yet they rarely factor into how we build sales and marketing strategies.
Most sales and marketing models start with a person – a buyer persona, a decision-maker, a champion. We study their role, budget authority, and pain points. That’s not wrong, but it’s dangerously incomplete.
The moment you put that person inside a real organization, everything changes. What looks like a willing buyer turns out to be someone navigating a minefield of forces unrelated to your product.
- Politics.
- Fear.
- Timing.
- Precedent.
- Corporate culture.
- Competing priorities.
We know this. We experience it every day in our own jobs. We’ve sat in meetings where the right decision was obvious, and nobody made it. We’ve watched a deal die not because of price or features, but because of something invisible. We know it’s true. We just don’t build our go-to-market strategies around it.
The hidden layers around every decision
Think about what’s surrounding your buyer right now, not their stated requirements or their RFP, but the invisible context that shapes everything.
Regulatory and compliance pressures that restrict what they can even consider. Corporate culture that rewards caution and punishes bold moves. Workplace rituals that slow decision velocity – the quarterly planning cycle, the approval chain, the “we always do it this way” reflex.
Peer competition. The colleague who wants a different vendor. The team lead protecting their turf. Group dynamics that make the right individual decision the wrong political one. A work persona that has nothing to do with who your buyer is as a person.
Work-life balance concerns that make taking on a new initiative sound exhausting. An economic outlook – inside their company, their industry, and the broader economy – that colors every conversation about risk.
This is what we call the hidden buyer journey. It’s the path they navigate inside their own organization – the one you can’t see, but that determines every outcome.
Why personality matters more than you think
Layered on top of all this is something even more personal: the buyer’s own personality and behavioral style. The way they process risk, build trust, seek consensus, and make commitments.
DISC profiling, now enhanced with AI, is one of the most validated frameworks in behavioral science. It tells us that people fall into distinct patterns.
- Dominant types want control and results.
- Influential types want recognition and relationships.
- Steady types want stability and harmony.
- Conscientious types want accuracy and process.
Same product. Same price. Same ROI story. Four completely different conversations.
The problem is that your buyer doesn’t show up as their authentic self at work. They show up in a work persona shaped by their organization, role, and the pressure to be seen. Who they are as a person and how they behave in a buying group are often very different.
If you know who they are as people, you have a meaningful advantage to connect and communicate in a way that lands.
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.
