# Zach Murphy

Zach Murphy writes about B2B marketing and go-to-market strategy, with a focus on helping teams understand buyer problems, reduce friction in stalled deals, and align marketing with sales.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/zach-murphy/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/murphy-zach
- LinkedIn followers: 3,025
- Topics: sales, go-to-market-strategy
- Based on 13 dated posts, latest 2026-09-23

## Summary

Zach Murphy is most useful for a diagnostic working session and content audit with a B2B revenue team.

- Best for: A B2B SaaS revenue team working on pipeline conversion and sales-marketing alignment.
- Not for: A consumer brand or demand-generation agency seeking high-volume sponsored content and guaranteed reach.
- Check first: Confirm audience demographics, per-post engagement, and documented session outcomes before booking.

### Takeaways

- Sell to situations, not funnel stages.
- A persona is not the decision-maker; the problem is.
- The funnel leaks in the middle, and the leaks never show up as losses.

## Main ideas

- **Sell to situations, not funnel stages**: Murphy argues that funnel stages — top, middle, bottom — record where a marketing team thinks a buyer stands, while the buyer faces concrete internal obstacles. Because content is mapped to stages and behavior rather than those obstacles, marketing teams generate interest but struggle to help buyers reach a decision. Murphy calls the result "the illusion of progress": activity looks healthy on paper while nothing moves. The fix is to start with situations buyers describe in conversations and build content that removes the specific friction in each one. A funnel, Murphy argues, gives buyers more homework instead of helping them get to yes.
- **A persona is not the decision-maker; the problem is**: Job titles, demographics, and pain-point lists create what Murphy calls an illusion of insight: the avatar in the document is not the person deciding. Buying decisions turn on urgency in a specific situation, so Murphy shifts the question from who the buyer is to what they need to accomplish and how pressing it is. They borrow the Jobs to Be Done framing to distinguish urgency from mere interest and describe the marketer's job as becoming a "confidence architect" — someone who helps a buyer get a decision approved rather than handing them another asset.
- **The funnel leaks in the middle, and the leaks never show up as losses**: Murphy's colander image makes a claim about where pipeline is actually lost. Deals drain out through internal pushback, budget hesitation, legal red tape, and the inertia of staying the course, and tend to fade rather than be recorded as lost. The standard remedy — more leads, more ads, more content — treats a middle-funnel leak as a top-of-funnel volume problem, an approach Murphy calls "panic in a blazer." The argument gives revenue teams a vocabulary for slippage that conventional win/loss reports understate, and a reason to audit the quiet middle rather than the visible top.
- **Sales holds the buyer lens that marketing builds without**: Murphy separates metrics from what they call the buyer lens: which objections are real, which competitors actually come up, why deals stall, and what closes them. Sales has that information; marketing generally does not, so marketing builds campaigns and guesses why they do not land. The proposed fix is not a better CRM but agreement between the two teams on what customer-centric means in their business, so both look at the same buyer, hear the same objections, and name the same patterns. Until then, Murphy argues, a CRM is an expensive system for storing assumptions.
- **Marketing should be judged on business outcomes, not marketing metrics**: Murphy takes a Gartner finding — that 72% of business leaders do not see their marketing function as instrumental to the company's business evolution — and reads it as a question about how marketing presents itself, not a verdict on its capability. The recommended moves are to translate marketing into business outcomes instead of marketing metrics, act as a strategist rather than a service provider, own customer intelligence, lead cross-functional enablement, and demonstrate growth impact. Murphy frames the stakes plainly: does a marketing function that cannot show up as a growth engine deserve to be excluded?
- **A publishing rhythm built on one sharp contrast feeding a weekly piece**: Murphy's posts follow a repeatable structure: an opening line states a single contrast — stage versus situation, persona versus problem-state, funnel versus colander — followed by short supporting claims and a pointer to a longer weekly treatment. That piece is called "The Illusion of Progress," and the article link typically sits in the comments. The format means the short post presents the argument in compressed form; the full breakdown is elsewhere.

## Work to read

- [Stop Selling to Stages. Start Selling to Situations.](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/murphy-zach_heres-something-we-dont-talk-about-enough-activity-7356653813522415616-T5-B)
- [You don't sell to a persona. You sell to a moment.](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/murphy-zach_you-dont-sell-to-a-persona-you-sell-to-activity-7358554559046119426-omaH)
- [Your funnel isn't a funnel. It's a colander.](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/murphy-zach_your-funnel-isnt-a-funnel-its-a-colander-activity-7361017466698821632-hjyR)
- [Sales has data marketing doesn't.](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/murphy-zach_sales-has-data-marketing-doesnt-not-metrics-activity-7454972881387712512-iTSE)
- [72% of business leaders say marketing is not instrumental to business evolution](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/murphy-zach_72-of-business-leaders-report-their-marketing-activity-7321577452344930304-NOB7)

## Brand relationships

- **The Illusion of Progress** (mention)
- **Gartner** (mention)

## Partnerships

Zach Murphy’s seven posts offer no described partnership, sponsorship, or commercial collaboration format. They focus on B2B go-to-market topics and promote only their own work: the newsletter and article series The Illusion of Progress, with article links in the first comment rather than the post body. No sponsor disclosure, partner mention, media kit, rate information, or commercial inquiry route appears in the posts. Buyers interested in a sponsored placement, co-produced piece, or paid workshop should ask through the LinkedIn account listed on this page and confirm terms, deliverables, and disclosure expectations before budgeting.

## Alternatives

- Evan Goldberg: Choose Evan Goldberg when the need is narrower than cross-team pipeline diagnosis and centers on the seller-facing asset itself: the pitch deck a champion has to carry into an internal approval meeting. Goldberg argues that today's cybersecurity buyer arrives already convinced they have a problem, having researched it, talked to peers, and evaluated competitors before accepting the call. So the deck should not re-diagnose the problem; it should reframe it, show the moat, and give the champion ammunition to sell it internally. That is a better match when sellers have the story but the deck was built for 2018, and when the category is one where buyers arrive pre-educated. Goldberg also addresses alignment directly: marketing wants a narrative, sales wants a tool that moves a deal forward, and the modern buyer narrows that gap because both jobs now start with a buyer who has already done the homework.
- Andrew Wright: Choose Andrew Wright when the leak sits inside the sales conversation itself rather than in content or shared deal data. Wright starts with the numbers only long enough to learn something is wrong, then turns to actual buyer conversations: are reps asking enough questions, uncovering the real problem or presenting too early, where does the buyer lose interest, and which objections keep repeating? Repeated objections are treated as information about what the buyer is not seeing, rather than a line to memorize. Weak follow-up means follow-up that gives the buyer no reason to continue, not simply too little contact. For a revenue team whose stalled deals trace to rep question quality, vague next steps, forecast honesty, or second-half planning, that is a closer match than Murphy's content-and-alignment framing. Choose Wright when you want the sales motion fixed first.
- Amir Faizan Malik: Choose Amir Faizan Malik when the deliverable is the conversion asset itself rather than the diagnostic session. Malik's work is direct-response copy with reported testing: an audit of twenty-three DTC landing pages where nineteen made the same mistake of speaking to everyone; headline rewrites with before-and-after conversion numbers, including one page that moved from a 2.1 percent to an 8.4 percent conversion rate; an email sequence for a tile installation course reported at a 55.6 percent average open rate, 8.23 percent click rate, and 22 calls booked in four weeks; and a Meta ad test that ran six hooks and doubled down on the winner. When a team needs a landing page, email sequence, or ad copy rewritten around one specific person's specific problem—and is comfortable with consumer or creator-economy audiences—Malik's process is the more direct match: research first, clear positioning, human-sounding copy, measure and iterate. Choose Malik if the answer to a leaking pipeline is that the asset is weak and the copy needs fixing and testing.

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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/