Brent Keltner

Those decisions depend on the industry: buying committees, use cases, expansion potential, and access differ by vertical.

Keltner compares selling software to hospitals, manufacturers, and financial-services firms. Hiring, leadership changes, or funding may signal activity in all three, but they say teams should assess each vertical separately for account fit, potential value, and access to its buying committee.

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Teams need information that helps them prioritize and act, with AI-sourced evidence clearly distinguished from sales observations.

In a post about Chris Galloway’s CRM rebuild at Motivforce, Keltner describes removing fields that were not being used or changing decisions.

• The team’s design stores AI-sourced information as discrete, dated, sourced evidence alongside sales information.
• Galloway’s experience is the example; Keltner frames the recommendation around making the CRM support a next action.

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Companies gain credibility by contributing to a useful conversation, which can also support more than one piece of content.

Keltner describes a WCG webinar with Merck about supporting clinical-trial sites as trials become more complex.

• The session focused on the industry challenge and the organizations’ approach to sponsor-site engagement, rather than opening with a WCG product pitch.
• Ashley Schwalje’s quoted view about the credibility of customer experience is hers, not Keltner’s.

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They favor role- and segment-specific journeys, practical evaluation resources, and thought leadership that helps buyers make a case internally before speaking with sales.

Keltner’s 2026 buyer-journey report post says the study examined 102 mid-market companies across five sectors against capabilities including distinct positioning, multi-threaded journey design, segment-specific content, and middle-funnel support. They summarize the strongest performers as connecting these elements into a coherent buyer experience.

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Their staged approach starts with surfacing useful calls, moves toward skill-specific feedback, and treats real-time coaching as a later step rather than a starting requirement.

A roundtable post lays out four levels, from efficient call review to real-time or simulated coaching; it says no participant had fully reached the fourth level.

• In a separate profile of sales leader Aaron Verasammy, Keltner describes daily coaching recommendations and repeated practice of a few skills at a time.
• Verasammy and the roundtable participants share their own experiences.

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This short, self-contained argument names a customer and a webinar and includes concrete numbers, giving newcomers a chance to judge the point of view on its own.

Keltner argues that a company's most credible thought leader is often a customer, not an employee.

• They recount a conversation with Ashley Schwalje, VP of Product Marketing at WCG, who describes the shift in the room when a customer speaks: "It's no longer just WCG explaining what we believe works.
• It's someone in the industry sharing what they've actually learned by doing the work."
• The method is specific: start with the problem, not the product.
• WCG's "Moving Trials Forward" webinar focused on a shared industry problem—clinical trials getting more complex and sponsors needing to support sites better—rather than WCG's capabilities.
• The session paired Merck's Kate Boneck with WCG's Kari Lotsberg and Amy Thue to explain how a relationship-first sponsor-site engagement model scaled to roughly 400 sites in more than 25 countries.
• Keltner distinguishes this from a testimonial: the customer teaches the market as a practitioner, while the company earns credibility by hosting the conversation.
• They also highlight the reuse potential: one customer conversation can supply far more than one piece of content, lending marketing borrowed trust as a form of air cover.

For brands planning a campaign

Useful for a brand that wants a customer-advocacy or customer-led thought leadership programme but keeps producing product-first webinars. The post offers a tested format—problem-first framing, a customer-company pairing and an enterprise-scale proof point—that can become a campaign angle without inventing anything.

Read it before the CRM or roundtable pieces, which assume familiarity with fit, value and reachability.

Keltner opens with a concrete test case: a software company selling into hospitals, manufacturers and financial services firms.

• Intent indicators look nearly identical across the three verticals—hiring patterns, tech stack changes, funding events, leadership changes and third-party intent data—but everything after intent diverges.
• They analyse accounts through three lenses.
• Fit covers firmographics (industry, size, revenue and geography) and the buying committee, which looks different in a hospital deal than in a manufacturing or financial services deal.
• Fit should reflect both your strongest customers and whether you can connect with the right people.
• Value potential covers use cases, land-and-expand potential affecting initial deal size, and strategic value, such as referenceability or the value of a logo in breaking into a priority sector.
• Reachability asks whether you can identify and access the right buying committee at all; that depends on existing relationships, executive peer introductions and how opaque the org chart is.
• The goal, Keltner concludes, is not to find more accounts showing intent but to identify the verticals where fit, use cases, expansion potential and access combine best.

For brands planning a campaign

A ready-made structure for a martech or ABM brand showing why one outbound message does not fit every vertical. The three-lens breakdown can inform a workshop, assessment tool or webinar series without new framing.

It shows their interviewing style and the four-principle structure that recurs across the set.

Keltner builds the piece around John A.

• Hope, described as a revenue leader at higher education companies including Academic Analytics and Ready Education.
• Hope argues that relying on one buyer hurts new sales as well as renewals and expansions.
• They describe a buying committee in which provosts and presidents make decisions, while faculty leadership and research teams identify needs.
• Four principles follow.
• Strategic mindset in each call: ask what is working well, who else at the account cares about those objectives, what you can help accomplish that they cannot do alone, and how to validate prior success and look for expansion.
• Personalization to each buyer: presidents and provosts care about research excellence and faculty retention; deans and faculty leaders about grants and support for underrecognised faculty; VPs of research about data uniqueness and workflow fit.
• If those buyers do not see themselves in website messaging and content, they engage less.
• Committing to discovery: "Our product should only enter the conversation once we fully understand what the customer is trying to achieve."
• Finding a real change agent: someone with enough authority and internal credibility to influence the budget and bring the buying committee together.

For brands planning a campaign

Works well as a briefing-style asset for a brand selling to committee-driven education or enterprise buyers, and as a template for turning a customer interview into four named principles rather than an anecdote.

Read it to see how they handle technical detail without losing the argument.

Keltner recounts a conversation with Chris Galloway, Head of Product and Marketing at Motivforce, about rebuilding a Creatio CRM to support target account work.

• The core point: most companies do not lack account data; they lack usable account intelligence, with signals scattered across CRM records, sales notes, call transcripts, marketing platforms, intent tools and AI platforms.
• Three details stand out.
• First, removing fields mattered more than adding them: Galloway's team analysed field fill rates and cut fields nobody used.
• "If a field wasn't getting filled in, or filling it in wasn't changing what anyone did next, it was just noise."
• Second, the data model combines fit (size, industry, geography and ICP criteria), engagement (web activity, content, campaigns and sales conversations), and AI-surfaced intelligence from websites, annual reports, press releases and earnings calls.
• Third, AI-sourced intelligence is stored in its own discrete, sourced and dated Evidence record alongside sales information, rather than overwriting it.
• That lets users trace an insight to its source and distinguish it from something a rep verified first-hand.
• Keltner's practical test: open a priority account and see why it matters, what engagement exists, what sales learned, which external signals count and what to do next.
• If that takes five platforms and six months of notes, you do not yet have actionable account intelligence.

For brands planning a campaign

Strong for a CRM, revenue operations or data brand explaining why AI summaries alone do not fix account prioritisation. The provenance point—keeping AI-surfaced intelligence sourced, dated and separate from verified rep notes—is a distinctive angle worth developing.

Read it to understand how their roundtables become published frameworks.

Keltner opens with the coaching gap: one hour a week of skills dosing can drive 15 to 20 percent performance gains, yet 77 percent of teams say they do not do enough, largely because managers lack bandwidth to review every call.

• From a peer roundtable Keltner draws a four-level maturity model.
• Level 1, efficient call review: use AI to surface the calls and moments that matter.
• Mark Guthrie, who leads a matrixed sales team at Verisk and has used Gong for about a year, built an AI-scored brief tracking how reps acknowledge, clarify, and resolve objections, and advises starting small - "Pick three things... guide your AEs based on the briefs and the scoring... spoon-feed them as you climb the ladder."
• Level 2, targeted skills coaching: Keltner describes an engagement where Keltner's team built eight skill-specific rubrics inside a call-recording platform, with reps tagging calls so managers get a skill-by-rep view.
• Level 3, an owned intelligence layer: Aaron Verasammy, a chief sales officer, built a data warehouse rather than relying on one vendor, producing a daily command centre that scores calls, flags objections, checks CRM updates, and shows managers where to focus, with reps getting their own summaries before one-to-ones; reported results include increased outbound volume, higher close rates, and shorter cycle times.
• Level 4, real-time and simulated coaching: nobody on the call had fully reached it.
• Keltner notes that Tess Jenkins, VP of Sales at Campus ESP, was still building scorecards and call-review discipline, and Keltner's conclusion is that most gain comes from moving deliberately from Level 1 to Level 2 rather than leaping ahead.

For brands planning a campaign

A mature piece for a sales enablement or conversation intelligence brand seeking buyer education rather than product claims. The maturity model lets a vendor meet buyers wherever they are and offers a defensible structure to reuse in a webinar or assessment.

It is the only piece in the set built on a stated sample and a named scoring framework.

Keltner announces a research report examining how well B2B companies help buyers navigate the digital buying experience before the first sales conversation.

• The study analysed 102 mid-market companies across HealthTech, HR, K-12, SaaS and Higher Education, scoring each on five capabilities Keltner calls Journey First: unique positioning, multi-threaded journey design, ICP segment versioning, thought leadership across the journey and middle-funnel conversion.
• Their summary: most organisations have invested heavily in content and digital experiences, but few have connected those investments into a cohesive journey that builds confidence and guides buyers to a next step.
• The strongest performers shared identifiable traits: a clear value proposition for specific buyers, distinct journeys for different audiences, personalisation by role and segment, and evaluation support through practical resources rather than product information alone.
• Keltner presents the report as a practical framework for benchmarking and prioritising improvements, not just industry benchmarks.

For brands planning a campaign

The clearest hook for a brand that wants to co-publish or cite original research on buyer-journey quality. The five-capability scoring model can inform a diagnostic offer, webinar or benchmarking lead magnet.

Where the other pieces describe strategy, this one answers a specific logistics question—who should get an expensive seat—with three tests readers can apply immediately.

Keltner starts from a market observation: as buyers become harder to reach through email, calls and digital ads, marketing teams are returning to smaller in-person formats such as executive roundtables, VIP dinners, localised roadshows and interactive workshops.

• They name the catch—these activities are expensive—and argue that filling every seat is the wrong goal.
• The opportunity is to treat each event as part of an ongoing peer community, where the right people return over time and the company shapes and reads intent.
• They offer three qualification lenses.
• Similar mindset: look for people already writing or speaking about issues where you have a distinct point of view, and note that AI makes it easier to assemble public signals such as articles, conference talks and blog posts.
• Past engagement: a former client, prior interaction or intent data showing other people at the organisation engaging with your content.
• Shared connections: a more manual route through LinkedIn or CRM relationships that builds trust before the event begins.
• Their closing instruction is blunt: do not give away an expensive seat simply to raise attendance.

For brands planning a campaign

Useful for a brand running executive events or building an invite-only community, and a natural fit for content on event qualification, field marketing or intent-based invitation criteria.

They group those decisions into three tests: which accounts fit, where the greatest value can be created, and whether the right buying committee is reachable.

• A companion argument against single-threaded selling adds four practices: approach every call with a strategic mindset, personalize to each buyer, commit to discovery before pitching, and find a real internal change agent.
• Sticking with one contact hurts new sales as well as renewals and expansion.

The verticalization argument presents an original framework.

• The multithreading post draws on a named practitioner interview with John A.
• Hope, a revenue leader at higher education companies including Academic Analytics, and turns his experience into numbered principles.

Both posts present reasoning and practitioner experience, not measured results. Ask for before-and-after data on either approach.

For brands planning a campaign

For a marketing technology brand building thought leadership on account-based strategy, these two frames give a campaign a usable spine: a prioritization model readers can apply to their own account list and a multithreading checklist they can act on. Keltner works through these operating questions with practitioners, making the material a fit for programs that need substance behind an account strategy message rather than a general endorsement.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2 · Source 3

The 2026 State of the B2B Buyer Journey examined 102 mid-market companies across HealthTech, HR, K-12, SaaS, and Higher Education against five capabilities: unique positioning, multi-threaded journey design, ICP segment versioning, thought leadership across the journey, and middle-funnel conversion. Companion HR-focused playbooks summarize standout personalization strategies, including self-solutioning tools such as ROI calculators and 2026 benchmarking dashboards, quantified customer stories, and research-backed thought leadership that gives buyers a reason to engage early.

The study audits company websites and digital journeys; the HR playbooks draw on interviews, digital audits, and benchmark analysis of solution providers.

Keltner's posts announce and summarize the reports rather than reproduce them. The underlying datasets, full report text, and company rankings are not published in the posts; check the primary documents before reusing specific statistics.

For brands planning a campaign

Keltner's posts announce and summarize the reports rather than reproduce them. Brands that want thought leadership anchored in benchmark data can use the five-capability framework to structure a report, webinar series, or sales enablement asset, with Keltner attached to the research and interpretation.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2 · Source 3

A CRM built for a target account strategy should answer one question: what should we do next with this account?

• Drawing on a CRM rebuild at Motivforce, they favor subtraction first: cut fields that are rarely filled in or do not change anyone's next action.
• They treat AI-surfaced information as separate, sourced, dated evidence records that sit alongside sales notes rather than overwrite them.
• Their practical test: can someone opening a priority account quickly see why it matters, what engagement has occurred, what sales has learned, what external signals exist, and what to do next?

Built from an interview with Chris Galloway, head of product and marketing at Motivforce, who describes analyzing field fill rates and eliminating unused fields.

Two entries in the corpus repeat this post's text verbatim; treat them as one observation, not two separate sources.

For brands planning a campaign

This is the closest overlap with a CRM or revenue-intelligence product story. Keltner can make the case for distinguishing traceable, dated account evidence from AI-generated summaries and discuss the design tradeoffs teams face when they rebuild account records around target accounts rather than activity.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2

One example pairs a pharma company leader with a clinical research organization in a webinar about supporting research sites as trials grow more complex, rather than the vendor's capabilities; the post says the relationship scaled to roughly 400 sites across more than 25 countries. A related post describes peer roundtables for a workforce-data company as a demand generation engine: 12 to 15 participants per session, timely topics such as AI adoption and employer demand for AI skills, a customer or practitioner in the room, and follow-up content that keeps the conversation going after the event.

Both posts draw on interviews with named marketing practitioners, using their quotes to carry the argument.

The scale figures and format details come from participants' own accounts in the post. Ask for event metrics or attendance data to verify them.

For brands planning a campaign

Useful for brands that sell on references and peer proof rather than feature comparison. The material supports a campaign built around customer-led conversations—webinars, roundtables, and recap content—with Keltner hosting and shaping the agenda around real industry problems so the customer's expertise does the persuading.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2

The post frames the gap as a manager-bandwidth problem, citing one hour a week of coaching as capable of driving 15 to 20 percent performance gains and saying that 77 percent of teams report doing too little.

• A companion post profiles a sales leader who built a data warehouse beneath a conversation-intelligence platform, giving managers daily prioritized coaching recommendations and reps their own scorecards before one-on-ones.
• The leader trains one major skill at a time, with discovery training lasting five weeks.

A roundtable synthesis maps several named sales leaders' experiences onto a staged model, alongside a profile of one organization's build.

The 15 to 20 percent and 77 percent figures are quoted in a roundtable discussion, not traced to a study. Ask for the underlying source; no participant had reached the model's fourth level.

For brands planning a campaign

A fit for brands in sales enablement, conversation intelligence, or revenue operations.

• The maturity ladder gives readers a diagnostic they can use to place themselves.
• Its emphasis on owning the underlying intelligence and making progress visible supports a message about data ownership and measurable behavior change, not tool adoption alone.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2

They offer three qualification lenses: whether someone already thinks, writes, or speaks about topics where you have a distinct point of view; whether they or their colleagues have engaged with your company before; and whether a shared connection can build trust before the event. A related post frames small, focused roundtables as content engines, with value measured by what happens after the session.

For brands planning a campaign

Relevant for field and event marketing programs where cost per seat is high. Keltner’s qualification lenses give campaigns a defensible reason to invite someone, while the community framing supports follow-on content and repeat engagement instead of one-off event reporting.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2

In an education example, provosts and presidents care about research excellence and faculty retention; deans and faculty leaders care about recruitment, development, and grant access; and research offices need to trust that the data integrates into their existing workflows.

• The HR playbook makes the same argument for buyers split across recruiting, employee experience, and cost mandates.
• It recommends self-solutioning tools, quantified customer stories filterable by region or use case, and research-backed thought leadership to help buyers build an internal case before contacting sales.

The role-by-role view comes from a practitioner interview with a revenue leader serving higher education institutions; the HR material comes from the playbook research process.

For brands planning a campaign

Supports campaigns about role-based messaging and buying-committee coverage. Brands can use Keltner’s examples to show why generic messaging stalls, then offer a practical framework for tailoring content by role, segment, and industry—the same structure they apply to the research.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2 · Source 3

Ask for their formal relationship with Winalytics.

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Posts on clinical-trial data ownership and decentralized-trial barriers show habits similar to Keltner's work: identify the structural gap, summarize the research, and explain what stakeholders should do next.

Stimola-Sposaro focuses on clinical research, bioethics, and patient data governance rather than commercial account strategy, CRM, or demand generation. Readers following Keltner for ABM and sales execution will find a different industry and audience, though the analytical, research-led format is similar.

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Their posts argue for making warm paths and relationship checks part of the sales process, overlapping directly with Keltner's case that CRM data should show what to do next with a priority account.

Roth is more product- and workflow-specific, writing about relationship-intelligence tooling and agents that surface introductions.

• Keltner tends to frame the same problem through practitioner interviews and account-prioritization principles.
• Roth emphasizes warm introductions and deal momentum; Keltner covers buyer journeys, coaching, and customer advocacy.

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Both argue that the advantage comes from diagnosing why deals move slowly, not sending more outbound.

Karuppanan writes as an operator, offering concrete AI skill stacks and HubSpot-specific execution steps, often with a direct service pitch. Keltner is more likely to build an argument from a named practitioner interview or benchmark report, leaving the tool stack implicit.

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Roth's posts describe a B2B tax software company that enriched roughly 10,000 target contacts with details such as ERP, billing provider, and current sales-tax setup, so warm paths surfaced inside the CRM.

• The company used those paths twice: first to book the meeting, then when an active deal reached negotiation.
• Roth also describes an all-hands asking every employee to connect their network, on the reasoning that colleagues hired from payments and adjacent vendors carry commercially useful customer relationships.
• For a brand whose product touches relationship intelligence, introduction data, or CRM stage design, this is closer to the product story than a benchmark-report series.

Keltner's posts don't show what research engine they bring: there is no published benchmark across named companies, no multi-practitioner interview series, and no audience or commercial detail.

• One of the two posts is a product announcement naming a vendor's go-to-market lead and linking to a recorded walkthrough.
• A series built on this material would therefore lean on one company's implementation and one advisor's argument, rather than an independent study the brand could cite.
• Roth's position is narrower: warm introductions and relationship scoring, not digital buyer journeys, ICP segment versioning, or middle-funnel measurement.
• For a campaign seeking original research and a range of named outside voices, Keltner covers more ground; for one sharp argument about where a relationship check belongs in the sales process, Roth gets there faster.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2

Karuppanan's posts lay out a concrete operating list for that audience: deal reporting that sorts accounts into cold, aware, engaged, and ready to pitch; audience targeting that suppresses accounts outside the ICP so ad spend stops funding them; account research that reads external signals before any pitch, on the principle that a funding round is a reason to study an account rather than an invitation to sell; field-marketing attribution that gives opportunity creation 90 days and puts sales time in the cost column; and stall diagnosis that ranks open deals by single-threading, lost champion, no compelling event, buying-stage mismatch, and sequence fatigue.

• One post describes an audit of 31 stalled accounts in which 17 had a trigger event in the last 60 days that nobody acted on.
• That is specific, checkable work practitioners can copy, and it speaks to CRM intelligence in practice rather than buyer-journey theory.

The two posts are not a published study.

• The figures come from Karuppanan's own programmes, not an audited benchmark, so a brand reusing them would be citing personal execution results.
• The tooling described is largely Karuppanan's own AI skills layered on HubSpot, making the content most useful to readers on that stack and less portable to teams without it.
• The framing is also a firm editorial position—that AI made B2B outbound worse and the top of the funnel is exhausted with AI slop—and the brand inherits that stance if it runs the series.
• Before committing, ask Keltner for audience, availability, and commercial details.
• Their posts offer fewer hands-on playbooks but stronger coverage of independent research and named external practitioners.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2