# Karl-Johan Lantz

Karl-Johan Lantz writes about B2B sales, focusing on how sellers can help customers make decisions rather than simply present information or track activity in a CRM.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/karl-johan-lantz/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karl-johan-lantz
- LinkedIn followers: 2,719
- Topics: sales, b2b-sales, sales-forecasting, crm
- Based on 10 dated posts, latest 2026-10-08

## Summary

Karl-Johan Lantz is most useful for Swedish B2B sales content on helping customers decide, not tracking activity.

- Best for: A Swedish B2B sales training workshop on consultative selling and pipeline reviews.
- Not for: A pipeline software vendor campaign claiming its platform fixes stalled deals.
- Check first: Confirm workshop delivery experience, live language and format, and audience data beyond LinkedIn followers.

### Takeaways

- Buyers research and compare vendors before meetings, so rehearsed presentations add little.
- Warm meetings may be verification of a preferred choice, not exploration of options.
- CRM stages can advance while the customer remains uncertain and has not moved.

## Main ideas

- **Information is no longer the seller's advantage**: Lantz's central argument is that sellers were once valuable because they held information a buyer could not get elsewhere. Buyers now search, ask an AI and compare several vendors before lunch, so a rehearsed presentation and prepared answers tell them little. What they cannot look up, they argue, is the path: how to get from where they are to where they need to be, what has to change, what can go wrong and what the change will demand of them. An algorithm can present faster than a person; moving someone is still the seller's job.
- **Warm meetings are often verification, not exploration**: A buyer who makes contact, has budget and asks for a meeting can look like an ideal lead, but Lantz argues that many such buyers have already chosen a favourite. They have read, compared, asked an AI and spoken to people who bought something similar; the meeting exists partly to show internal colleagues that alternatives were considered. A seller who presents and asks exploratory questions learns little, then hears a promise to follow up followed by silence. The useful questions are different: what does the buyer still need to see, and who else has to agree?
- **CRM activity is not the same as customer movement**: Two posts make one distinction: a deal can move through every stage of the seller's process while the customer remains uncertain — stuck at "that would be good" rather than reaching "we have to do this". CRM stages, booked meetings and logged activity measure the seller's process, not the buyer's. High activity feels like progress, which makes it dangerous in Lantz's account: it can keep a dead deal in the forecast for months.
- **The question a seller avoids is the expensive one**: Lantz's priority here is honesty about forecast quality. Hope, the post says, is the most expensive thing a seller can hold: it costs nothing to keep and everything to live on. A pipeline full of hoped-for deals feels better than a smaller one that can be trusted. Lantz recalls knowing roughly when a deal died and which question should have been asked, but not asking it — not because the question was hard to think of, but because they did not want to hear the answer. The proposed check is simple: ask the avoided question before moving the date again.
- **A thirty-year seller arguing against their own former advantage**: The posts present a self-reported change of position. Lantz writes that they prospered for thirty years by mastering information-based selling — being the person a customer had to meet because the information could not be found elsewhere — and that this was the whole of their value. They also connect that experience to the follow-up loop: for thirty years, they left deals in place because they did not ask the question. The argument against the information advantage comes from inside the practice it criticises.

## Work to read

- [You prepare for a week to tell the customer what they already know](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/karl-johan-lantz_faemrflyttning-faemrsaeuljning-activity-7477232735367966720-6Q9m)
- [It looks like the dream scenario](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/karl-johan-lantz_det-ser-ut-som-dr%C3%B6ml%C3%A4get-kunden-h%C3%B6rde-activity-7487386407603253248-HB7T)
- [The CRM says everything is moving—but nothing happens](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/karl-johan-lantz_faemrsaeuljning-vaeurdedriven-b2b-activity-7500786382798512128-evj0)
- [The system says things are moving, but the customer stands still](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/karl-johan-lantz_systemet-s%C3%A4ger-att-allt-r%C3%B6r-p%C3%A5-sig-men-kunden-activity-7478322876350287873-aEAo)

## Partnerships

The LinkedIn posts focus on B2B sales, not brand partnerships. They document no sponsorship formats, rates, collaboration examples or commercial inquiry route. Ask for those details before planning a campaign. For a sense of their subject matter, see the posts on customer progress versus CRM activity and helping buyers make decisions.

## Alternatives

- Sebastian Karlsson: Karlsson is the better choice if the training company wants the half-day to start with how a seller runs a deal inside a CRM rather than with the customer conversation. Their two posts offer a workshop two usable scenes that Lantz’s material does not cover. The first is a product launch inside Membrain, where the practical problems include finding companies of the right size and industry, identifying decision-makers such as the CEO, CRO or sales manager, pulling direct numbers and email addresses in one click, turning rough meeting notes into a summary, and getting guidance on the next step in the sales process. The second is a four-vendor race where the team judged its approach best, planned the kick-off and sent the contract, then lost the deal because the decision did not rest with the people in the room. For account managers who prospect inside a CRM and must sell to a group they cannot see, those scenes teach more per hour than Lantz’s four checks do.
- Stefan Kløvning: Kløvning is the better choice if the same account-manager audience needs the systems layer beneath the sales process, a layer Lantz treats only as the place where seller-side activity gets logged. The first post walks through a duplicated-record problem in plain steps: a customer is created in the CRM, the name, address and organisation number are copied into the finance system, more fields are entered when the deal is won, and a status has to be written back to the CRM when the invoice is sent or paid. It then distinguishes no-code, low-code and full-code integrations, with a rule of thumb for each and a warning that full code is not automatically better. The second post reads a Cloudflare outage across ChatGPT, Claude, Spotify and X as a lesson in third-party dependency, calling for mapped risks, backups, crisis protocols and rehearsed contingency plans. For a workshop that must explain why pipeline activity and customer progress diverge, and what to do about the systems causing the duplication, this is the closer material.
- John Nielsen: Nielsen is the better choice if the training company wants account managers to see how easily an outsider can reach a customer’s systems, something field sellers encounter every week. Nielsen’s first post recounts entering a client’s building through the main door, being nodded past reception, sitting down in an empty meeting room and plugging a network cable into the wall. The point: a receptionist’s friendliness should never be the only access control. The post distinguishes penetration testing, red teaming and security mystery shopping, then closes with three checks a company can run itself. The second post presents a measured survey: 663 of 798 Danish water-utility domains do not tell recipients to reject mail sent in their name, only 4% of municipal domains do, and 266 domains showed neither SPF, DMARC nor a DKIM key at the names checked. If the buyer’s real concern is that the sales team visits sites and handles customer data, that evidence lands harder than another questioning framework.

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AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/