Speaker: R. Scott Gillum, Author of The Hidden Buyer Journey, Founder and CEO, Carbon Design
Your CRM is telling you a story. It is fiction. The stages, the lead scores, the intent signals, the neat little funnel you review every Monday. All of it was built to measure activity, not to explain a decision. So we keep optimizing the part of the journey we can see and losing deals in the part we cannot. Scott Gillum spent seven years and 10,000 buyer profiles across 15 industries proving how bad the gap is. Across 50-plus accounts he studied, 85 percent of the people who decided the deal late were nowhere in the data. Not in marketing. Not in sales. Not anywhere.
Here is the part that stings. Buying was never rational. We have spent two decades building systems that assume it was, and now we are training AI on those same systems. Scott argues that the variable everyone skipped is personality. How a person is wired to decide drives what they read, who they trust, what proof they need, and whether they move or stall. Four types. Every buyer behaves like one. The same pitch that closes a Dominant in one call quietly destroys a Conscientious buyer who noticed the inconsistency on slide four.
- Scott will walk us through what he found and what to do with it:
- Why two personality types make up 65 to 75 percent of any industry audience you sell into, and what the two-thirds rule lets you do about it
- How to read a company's leadership page as a personality map before your first call
- How to identify, by name, who in a buying group will move a deal versus who will happily talk to you for six months and never sign
- Why high intent scores from certain buyers are often false positives
- What happens to personas, ICP, and personalization once you stop defining humans by their job title
About the Speaker:
Scott is a buyer behaviorist. He has spent 30 years at the intersection of sales, marketing, and behavioral science, including a decade as Senior Partner at MarketBridge and a run as Office President at gyro, now Dentsu, one of the largest B2B agencies in the world. He founded Carbon Design to do the work almost nobody else was doing: figuring out how buyers actually decide, instead of how our systems wish they would. His book, The Hidden Buyer Journey, is the result. He writes for MarTech and teaches the next generation of sellers as a Senior Fellow at UT Dallas's School of Professional Sales. This is a practitioner conversation, not a pitch. Bring a deal you cannot read and a persona you no longer believe in.
