B2B teams have become dangerously reliant on sales and marketing methodologies to fix problems they were never designed to solve.
Frameworks like Challenger, SPIN, and Gap selling promised to help sales reps close more deals. And in many cases, they did. But as go-to-market teams chased these tactics, they unknowingly created deeper issues – breaking the commercial alignment between sales, marketing, and customer success.
This breakdown has been accelerating since the rise of Predictable Revenue. When meetings booked became the primary metric, strategy was replaced by speed. Marketing turned into a lead-gen engine. Sales became obsessed with activity over outcomes. And customer success was left to pick up the pieces.
In this article, we explore why sales methodologies alone are no longer enough to scale B2B growth, and what it takes to build a true revenue alignment system instead. We’re drawing on a powerful conversation we had with Adem Manderovic, co-founder of Chief Revenue School and the architect behind Closed Circuit Selling – a modern system for aligning your entire go-to-market motion.
If you’re tired of siloed teams, short-term fixes, and a lack of commercial clarity, keep reading. This guide will help you rewire your revenue engine with the architecture needed for long-term, scalable success.
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The Collapse of Commercial Acumen Post-Predictable Revenue
When Aaron Ross published Predictable Revenue, he gave B2B sales teams a formula they could finally measure. The problem? Everyone started measuring the wrong things.
Meetings booked became the benchmark for performance. Not pipeline quality. Not revenue contribution. Not commercial effectiveness. Just meetings.
“Since the book by Aaron Ross, Predictable Revenue, what became easy to measure were the meetings… then all commercial acumen got washed out of the market”
Adem Manderovic – The B2B Playbook
This shift wasn’t just theoretical—it became operational. Tools like Salesforce and HubSpot embedded it into their systems. SDRs were measured on meetings. AEs were measured on conversion. And CMOs were measured on MQLs that meant nothing to anyone downstream.
The result? A complete breakdown of how B2B teams worked together.
Adem described how most C-suite leaders today – even those in senior CRO roles – have never actually seen what true commercial oversight looks like.
“They can’t envision all of those moving pieces… because they’ve only ever seen inside of the model that’s been enhanced and built on the backbones of Aaron Ross’s work”
Adem Manderovic – The B2B Playbook
We’re now in a situation where marketing, sales, and CS are all running their own race. Nobody’s rowing in sync. And commercial strategy has been replaced with pipeline theatre.
If you’re going to fix it, it starts with recognizing that sales methodologies were never meant to lead go-to-market. They were only ever a single component of the system.
Sales Methodologies Are Useful – But Incomplete
Sales methodologies aren’t inherently bad. In the right context, they help reps run more structured calls and close more deals. The issue is they were never built to drive revenue alignment across teams. And now, they’re being treated as if they were.
“They’re only really working on how to close an open opportunity to a closed opportunity… but it doesn’t talk about or cover what needs to happen after the fact”
Adem Manderovic – The B2B Playbook
That’s the catch. They ignore everything before the sales conversation begins, and everything that happens once the deal is done. That leaves marketing and CS completely disconnected from the process.
Adem calls them “a bandaid solution”. And he’s right. These frameworks can be powerful within the sales silo—but they do nothing to solve the root problem, which is a lack of end-to-end commercial oversight.
We’ve seen it time and time again. Teams over-invest in training AEs on SPIN or Challenger, while ignoring the fact that marketing is still running lead-gen campaigns optimised for MQLs. Or CS is being handed customers with no insight into what was promised during the sale. The result? A system that’s internally efficient, but externally broken.
So yes, use sales methodologies. But don’t confuse them with go-to-market strategy. They’re just one cog in the machine. The system is what matters.
What True Revenue Alignment Looks Like
If sales methodologies are just a cog in the machine, then revenue alignment is the system that machine plugs into. It’s the architecture that connects every commercial function – marketing, sales, and CS – around a shared objective: generating revenue efficiently across the full buyer journey.
And here’s the kicker: most teams have never experienced what proper alignment actually feels like.
Adem explained that the CRO role used to be about “commercial oversight”—not just managing sales. That included “commercial management, financial tooling, marketing… sales… and market validation into customer success”. It was one function overseeing the whole GTM engine.
But today, that view is rare. And it shows in the metrics. Most teams are still optimising for individual KPIs. Marketing chases MQLs. Sales pushes to book meetings. CS is left out of the conversation until it’s time to clean up post-sale.
True revenue alignment means breaking those silos and reconnecting the loop – before, during, and after the sale. It’s about creating a system where each department’s role is defined by how they contribute to actual revenue, not vanity metrics.
When that alignment happens, marketing can start shaping demand instead of just capturing it. Sales stops torching the 95% of the market who aren’t ready to buy today. And CS gets the context they need to deliver on what was promised.
That’s why we built Chief Revenue School and why Closed Circuit Selling exists—to help teams build this architecture from the ground up.
Sales-Led CROs Are Often Unqualified for Commercial Oversight
A big reason this alignment is missing comes down to who’s in charge. Most CROs today don’t come from a background of holistic commercial strategy. They come from sales. Specifically, SDR or sales management tracks.
That’s not a problem in itself – but it becomes one when they’re asked to oversee marketing and customer success, without having walked a day in those shoes.
Adem makes the distinction clear:
“If they’ve been elevated from becoming an SDR manager or VP of sales development… does that mean they know what the links are between marketing and CS? No”
Adem Manderovic – The B2B Playbook
Their version of a “sale” is booking a meeting or signing a contract. But revenue alignment demands a broader definition – one that includes activation, onboarding, and long-term value delivery.
“The Chief Revenue Officer was always meant to be someone who understands what the account manager needs, what CS needs, what the commercial pack looks like pre-sale”.
Adem’s own story proves the point. He started in customer success. He had to understand legal approvals, credit assessments, onboarding flows—before he was even considered for a BD role. That experience gave him the commercial fluency needed to lead full GTM alignment later in his career.
If your CRO doesn’t have that kind of visibility, they’re flying blind. And your go-to-market system will always reflect that.
Predictable Revenue’s Ripple Effect on B2B Marketing
Predictable Revenue didn’t just change how sales worked – it completely rewired the role of marketing. And not for the better.
Before, marketers were responsible for educating the market, building familiarity, and creating demand over time. But once meeting volume became the goal, marketing got boxed into one job: feed the SDR team.
“All of a sudden we were reduced to this lead-gen function… shoveling leads across and using expensive sales resources to find a needle in a haystack”.
George Coudounaris – The B2B Playbook
The shift from strategic storytelling to lead count hit marketing hard. It severed the feedback loop between marketing and sales. MQLs became the goal, not qualified opportunities. And as George put it, “Sales ended up hating marketing because we were just shoveling crap over to their side”.
But this isn’t just a marketing problem, it’s a commercial one. Because that dysfunction creates massive inefficiencies in how you acquire and grow customers. Your sales team is chasing unqualified leads. Your CS team is onboarding misfits. And your marketing team is judged by a number that has no connection to actual revenue.
If we want marketing to play a bigger role in driving revenue, we need to measure them differently. Bring them back into the full system. Align their work with real buying signals and customer journeys, not arbitrary handoffs and MQL quotas.
Because when marketing is plugged into a system of revenue alignment, it can finally go back to doing what it does best: building trust, educating future buyers, and driving demand that converts.
The Broken Link to Customer Success
The downstream effects of misalignment don’t stop at marketing and sales – they’re hitting customer success too. And hard.
Customer success used to be a continuation of the buying journey. It was tightly linked to what was sold and how. But now, in many businesses, CS is forced to react to deals they had no context on—because the handover process no longer exists.
“We’re now seeing reactivation requirements at customer success,” Adem said, “because there’s no longer a link between what business development used to do… and what they do now”.
And it’s not just about fixing churn. The whole GTM process is missing a vital step: serviceability. No one’s stopping to ask, “Can we actually deliver this?” Deals are pushed through demos and buy buttons without thinking about post-sale success. That context gap leaves CS in the dark – and the customer feeling like they’ve been baited and switched.
Adem used to manage ops in financial services. Back then, there were formal commercial handover packs, legal reviews, and account manager briefings before a customer even onboarded. That structure ensured alignment across the full lifecycle. It wasn’t just about closing the deal, it was about setting CS up to deliver long-term value.
Today, most teams skip that step entirely. It’s a short-term win at the expense of long-term revenue.
The 95/5 Rule and the Problem With Today’s Outbound
Most outbound strategies today are designed to catch the 5% of the market that’s ready to buy. The problem? That means they’re alienating the other 95%.
We talk a lot about the 95/5 rule—only 5% of your market is in-market at any given time. But sales teams, pressured by short-term KPIs, keep running outbound plays that treat every prospect like they’re ready to buy. (We cover the 95:5 rule in more detail here when discussing our demand gen framework)
Adem summed it up perfectly: “You’re just torching them… rubbing ’em up the wrong way… even if your product is the best fit”.
This is where misaligned metrics become dangerous. SDRs are told to book meetings. So they push. They overreach. And even if they do catch someone in-market, the other 95% now have a negative association with your brand.
Contrast that with a buyer-centric approach. “Just ask: when does your contract end? What do you like or not like?”. That line of questioning doesn’t close a deal today—but it opens the door for a better one tomorrow. It also helps marketing shape the right message at the right time. That’s the foundation of true demand generation.
Outbound should build relationships, not just pipelines. It should earn attention—not demand it. If your sales team is torching the market for short-term metrics, you’re going to run out of market sooner than you think.
Cataloging vs. Cold Pitching: A Better Way to Sell
The solution isn’t to stop outbound altogether. It’s to change how we do it. And that starts with a simple shift: from cold pitching to cataloging.
Cataloging is what Adem calls the practice of gathering insights from the market—not to book meetings, but to build context.
“Even if someone’s just bought HubSpot,” he said, “you ask when their contract ends, what they like, what they don’t… then seek permission to circle back”
Adem Manderovic – The B2B Playbook
It’s a different posture. You’re not trying to pitch. You’re trying to learn. And ironically, that approach gets you further, faster. Because instead of torching the 95%, you’re mapping the 100%—and prioritising the 5% when the timing is right.
That intel doesn’t just help sales. It gives marketing real data on what to say, when to say it, and who to say it to. It helps CS prepare for what’s coming. And it builds a pipeline of buyers who actually trust you.
Best part? It’s scalable. When done right, cataloging feeds your content, informs your messaging, and aligns the entire GTM team around the voice of the customer.
Outbound doesn’t need to be pushy. It needs to be purposeful. Cataloging is how you make that shift.
Why Most Teams Can’t Operate This Way
Even if your team wants to move towards alignment, most can’t. And it has nothing to do with intent—it’s the measurement systems holding them back.
When Aaron Ross introduced Predictable Revenue, it wasn’t just a sales model – it rewrote how success was defined. “What became easy to measure were the meetings… that then became the behaviour, and then all commercial acumen got washed out of the market”.
Think about that for a second. It wasn’t just a philosophy change. CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot adopted this model and embedded it into how revenue teams operate. Your sales team is judged by meetings booked. Your marketing team is judged by how many contacts they can generate. And your CS team is judged purely on retention, often without context on what was promised to customers in the first place.
Adem summed it up bluntly:
“That became the measure—how many contacts could I get from George’s team in marketing, to how many meetings could I set, whether they took them or not…”
Adem Manderovic – The B2B Playbook
This is how we’ve ended up with fragmented teams, chasing conflicting goals. It’s not that sales, marketing, or CS are lazy – it’s that the system they operate in is broken by design.
To move forward, you have to rebuild those measurements. Redefine what a good opportunity looks like. Start scoring marketing by revenue contribution, not lead count. Judge outbound by market insight, not just bookings.
Without changing the way you measure success, you’ll keep getting the wrong outcomes, even with the right people.
Australia’s Precision Model: A Better GTM Approach
In Australia, we never had the luxury of playing the volume game.
With a population the size of Texas and far fewer total addressable accounts, we’ve always had to go to market with surgical precision. That constraint turned out to be a blessing. It forced us to think in systems, not just sequences.
“If you’re going to the market with a predictable revenue model… you can burn through it really fast. You don’t get a second chance,”
George Coudounaris – The B2B Playbook
And that’s why many of the worst outbound habits: spam cannons, over-automation, and aggressive cold calling – never fully took root here. “We couldn’t send the 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 emails a day… that would be our whole market”.
Because the stakes were higher, we were forced to align earlier. We had to think carefully about how we approached the market, and make sure our messaging, timing, and customer experience were spot on.
That model is now becoming a blueprint for other regions, especially as saturation and competition increase globally. The difference? What used to be “best practice” here is now becoming “required practice” everywhere else.
Why Competition Is Killing the Predictable Model
If the Predictable Revenue model ever worked, it’s because buyers weren’t flooded with noise.
But that’s no longer the world we live in. Every vertical is saturated. Technology has lowered the barrier to entry. Everyone’s tech stack looks the same. And buyers are being pitched the same thing from 100 different vendors—all using the same playbook.
“Across every industry, every product, every service… the competition just keeps getting more and more intense,”
George Coudounaris – The B2B Playbook
And when everyone’s running the same sales methodology, the message becomes indistinguishable from the noise.
Put yourself in the buyer’s shoes. “They’re getting the same thing again and again and again,” he added. That pitch that worked 5 years ago? It’s now buried under a pile of identical outreach.
That’s why old-school outbound is becoming less effective even in large markets. You can’t blast your way to success anymore. You need a better approach: one that creates differentiation in how you sell, not just what you sell.
That’s what Closed Circuit Selling enables. By focusing on timing, context, and value-first engagement, it helps your team stand out in a sea of sameness—without burning the very market you need to grow.
What Revenue Alignment Actually Requires
Revenue alignment isn’t a “nice to have” or a fluffy leadership concept. It’s a system. A structure. And most importantly, it’s built deliberately—not assumed into existence.
To align go-to-market teams properly, you need three things: shared measurements, shared incentives, and shared feedback loops. Most teams are missing at least two of the three.
You need to have the measurements in place. You need to have the incentives in place. You need to have the actions and feedback loops in place.
This isn’t about running a RevOps function or calling your VP of Sales a CRO. It’s about building an actual operating model that links marketing, sales, and CS to a single commercial goal. One where marketing feeds the pipeline with quality insights, sales activates the right opportunities at the right time, and CS delivers the value that was promised.
That’s what Adem’s Closed Circuit Selling was designed to solve. It’s not just a methodology—it’s a revenue alignment architecture. It connects every role, metric, and action across your GTM system.
Adem puts it simply: “Closed Circuit Selling and the 5 BEs framework… that’s the way forward. But where you learn to actually do that is Chief Revenue School. That’s the dojo”.
If your current system doesn’t have alignment built into it, then no amount of sales training or marketing attribution tools will save it. You need to fix the structure first.
Introducing Chief Revenue School: Where Teams Learn Alignment
Chief Revenue School isn’t another course that teaches you how to run better sales calls or generate more MQLs. It’s where go-to-market teams learn how to operate as one system – by design, not by accident.
As Adem explained, “This is the only program that teaches revenue alignment architecture from end to end. It is unique to this one program”.
It’s built for CROs, aspiring CROs, and founders who are tired of being held hostage by siloed departments. People who want to understand the full commercial picture—so they can actually lead it.
It teaches Closed Circuit Selling, the 5 BEs, and how to implement them together. More importantly, it shows how to operationalise these concepts with your existing team, without needing to burn everything to the ground.
“If this is a founder and you don’t want to be held over a barrel by departments that know more than you, then this is for you,”
Adem Manderovic – The B2B Playbook
The playbooks, processes, and tooling in Chief Revenue School aren’t theory. They’re built from decades of cross-functional GTM experience. If you’re serious about fixing alignment across marketing, sales, and CS—this is where you learn how.
Time to Build a System That Actually Works
Sales methodologies have their place. They can help reps run better meetings, ask sharper questions, and close more deals. But they were never built to align an entire go-to-market function. And when they’re treated as a silver bullet, they cause more harm than good.
Predictable Revenue didn’t just introduce a new tactic: it reshaped how marketing, sales, and CS are measured. And in doing so, it broke the loop that used to tie these teams together. Today, most GTM teams are still operating inside that broken structure—chasing metrics that reward activity, not impact.
What we’re calling for isn’t radical. It’s just a return to systems thinking. To commercial oversight. To a model where each part of your GTM function contributes to a shared outcome, not a siloed KPI.
If you want real alignment, here’s where to start:
- Redesign how you measure success across marketing, sales, and CS
- Align outbound and content around what your buyers actually want
- Create a feedback loop that informs strategy—not just execution
- Train your leaders in full commercial architecture, not just functional excellence
And if you want to move faster, check out Chief Revenue School here. It’s where teams go to learn how to build alignment into their go-to-market system—step by step.
Because the answer isn’t better sales scripts. It’s a better system. One that gets everyone rowing in the same direction.
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