by Christina | Apr 14, 2026 | 2026, Marketing, Sales
Back when I was a client-side marketer, I noticed a pattern slowing our team down: the habit of holding onto work until it felt perfect.
To break that cycle, I led the team through what I called the “Embrace Your Suckiness” exercise – an honest conversation about what we were each great at, and where we genuinely fell short.
Out of that came the CRAP process: Create, Refine, Act, Perfect.
The rule was simple: if you got stuck at any stage, you passed it to someone else. It increased our speed to market and later that year we won an internal award for the best performing department.
We borrowed IBM’s 70% rule – get it to 70% and go. Let the market, the audience, the world complete the other 30%. Then we refined the campaign.
Fast forward many years, and I applied that same process to a book I just finished – three years in the making.
I sent the first draft to friends and family. What came back was hard to hear after all those late nights and weekends.
But that’s exactly the point.
The people who matter most told me: “It’s good… but it’s not good enough.” Good, because they appreciated the work and effort that went into it. Not good enough, because they respected me enough to push me further.
That feedback is a gift. And it only comes from people willing to tell you what you don’t want to hear.
If you’re early in your career, here’s the most important thing I can share: Surround yourself with those people.
Not people who echo your worldview.
Not people who validate everything you do.
People who are honest – even when it’s uncomfortable.
We live in a time that makes it dangerously easy to only hear voices that agree with us.
Don’t fall for it.
Here’s the truth: Everyone is great at something, and everyone sucks at something. That’s not a flaw – that’s just being human.
You may only have 70%. That’s okay. That’s why you need the right people around you to help you find the rest.
Embrace your suckiness. It just might be your greatest strength. 💪
To learn more about The Hidden Buyer Journey click the link https://carbondesign.com/the-hidden-buyer-journey/
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 Christina | Sep 4, 2025 | 2025, Blog, Marketing
What if you ignored your “high intent” signals – didn’t follow up, didn’t call, didn’t email – just to see if leads would self-identify and reach out to you?
It sounds counterintuitive, but if a lead is really interested (at least according to your scoring tools), they should eventually fill out a form or call you, right? That’s the experiment we’ve been running.
For the past six weeks, we’ve been quietly tracking web traffic and running a test we know many of our clients would love to try but can’t. No outbound, no follow-ups – just observation.
The Setup
Using Warmly, we set our parameters around ICPs, buyer personas, and first- and third-party intent signals. For this experiment, visitors had to meet two criteria:
● Spend at least 28 seconds on the site
● Visit at least 2 web pages
The Results
After filtering out competitors and consults, 15 visitors from the last 45 days fit the criteria:
➖ 10 Moderate confidence lead
➖ 3 High confidence lead
➖ 2 Very high confidence lead
(“Lead” comes from the platform, not us. )
Our “highest intent” visitor came back to the site 24 times over two weeks, spending a total of 26 minutes across pages like Team, Services, Solutions, and Blogs. That person sounds like a qualified lead, right? We’re still waiting on a form submission.
So… Why Haven’t They Converted?
We dug deeper and found a few possible reasons:
1. Bad Data – when we looked into the contact records, some were miscategorized – for example, individuals associated with a company but are no longer employed there.
2. Wrong Personality Fit – using our proprietary personality profiling tool, we found that some visitors’ motivations were likely exploring on behalf of someone else, or just passively learning.
3. The Nature of Our Business – we don’t sell widgets. We offer services – thoughtful, consultative, relationship-driven solutions. Our sales cycle is longer and leans heavily on word-of-mouth. It takes time, trust, and timing.
Now let’s play this out and say we did hit the button on pushing them into Hubspot as a lead, as many organizations do every day.
The “leads” would make their way over to sales and be assigned to SDRs for follow up. Here’s the dirty little secret that marketing and sales knows but they don’t talk about.
Marketing knows those leads aren’t qualified but has a “lead target” to hit so off they go. Sales also knows that marketing knows those leads are qualified, but they have SDRs that need to be fed. This is the game that is being played across sales and marketing organizations every day.
Marketing with an increasingly vast number of tools and ways to capture anyone who merely glances at a website or email are able to capture more contacts than ever before. Tool providers using the wrong term “lead” for what is maybe at best a “response” are complicit in this charade.
Sales, which in the past would ignore (and still do in some ways) these non-qualified responses are now stuck with sales capacity they need to make productive. They’re using reps to qualify “leads” that aren’t leads, in the hope of making them leads. Sounds ridiculous right, because it is.
Even though they know the chances of a conversion are low, I’ve never met a sales manager that will give up sales resources voluntarily. The mentality of “the more reps I have, the better shot I have of making quota” is pervasive.
All of this to hopefully expose the charade so that sales and marketing can have a candid conversation about how ineffective the game is and finally take steps towards realistic performance goals.
The winner in all of this? Potentially everyone – marketing, sales and most importantly prospects who are just trying to learn who you are. and what you do, or to simply just read some content that you have posted.
Just because you can track every visitor doesn’t mean you should hand them off. Let your prospects explore. Let them learn about your company, your services, and your value – at their own pace. Let them raise their hand when they’re ready.
It’ll save your team time, effort, and energy – and likely lead to better conversations when the moment’s right.
by scott.gillum | Feb 1, 2022 | 2022, Insights
As previously published on 1/26/22 in The Drum
by Scott Gillum
Estimated read time: 5 Minutes
Does the answer to improving B2B marketing success tie back to a problem discovered during World War II? Perhaps.
The B-17 plane was quick and inexpensive to build with a goal of “blackening the sky” over Europe. The problem with that strategy was because they were designed to be quickly built they ended up being easily shot down. In fact, soon after entering the war, the B17 was getting shot out of the sky faster than they could be built.
Recognizing that something had to be done to keep them in the air, the decision was made to assemble a group of engineers to study the returning planes, and assess where to add armour.
The team was about to submit their findings when Abraham Wald, a lead engineer on the project, pointed out that they were thinking about the problem the wrong way. Instead of putting armour on areas that were damaged by bullets, they should be thinking about adding armor to the areas where there were no bullet holes, because those areas were most vulnerable.
This phenomenon, known as “survivorship bias,” can be seen all over B2B marketing. Survival bias is a type of selection bias. It’s a logic error that occurs when focusing on things that survive rather than looking at things that didn’t. By selectively leaving data out of the analysis it can cause one to make the wrong conclusion, like putting armor on the bullet holes of returning planes.
In B2B marketing, there are signs of this bias in almost everything we do. We try to scale and “optimize” a 3% response rate or 10% open rate. Focusing on the “returning planes,” missing the opportunity to assess, and understand, how to improve on the 90%+ of our effort that didn’t return a result.
This myopic view on scaling the “3%” drives us to an endless cycle of investing in new technologies. Providing a momentary boost in performance which quickly dissipates. This stacking more tools on the “stack” has now put us at the top of the yield curve. Essentially, marketing tools are now being shot out of the sky faster than they can be built.
Scale has become the enemy of the good. Remember this for 2022. Volume will not necessarily get you to your goals. For example, according to Hubspot’s 2021 Industry Survey (over 100K companies) email performance dropped by 30% from the previous year, which was historically low. So what did companies do? They sent even more emails, increasing by over 120%. (I believe that is commonly referred to as the definition of insanity.)
For years, I searched for an answer for why marketing performance continued to be poor, despite advancement in new technologies. Stumbling upon survival and selection bias helped to explain some things but what I’ve concluded is that at the core, it’s a motivational issue. Confusing activity for performance is convenient. Searching for, assessing and acquiring new tools offers hope and can feel like you’re making progress.
It’s time to stop looking external for a solution and turn our efforts internally. The answer to improving performance lies in the insight from the missing data.
To win the war on poor performance will require a commitment to thinking differently, like Wald. Not everyone will be willing, or able, to make this journey, but as another WWII hero, Winston Churchill once said; “To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.” Onward soldier!
by scott.gillum | Oct 1, 2021 | 2021, Marketing, Sales
Scott was a guest speaker at the WVU Marketing Horizon podcast, a sub-series of WVU Marketing Communications.
Marketing Horizons is forward-thinking, looking ahead, through the front windshield and beyond, into the marketing future. Hosted by Cyndi Greenglass and Ruth Stevens, Horizons is a podcast dedicated to looking ahead to the new ideas, technologies, tools and strategies that are emerging to help marketers navigate over the marketing horizon.
Listen here. https://bit.ly/2ZNfYpC
