Zach Murphy

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.

The situations are specific and internal: "I have to justify this to my CFO," "Legal's going to kill this," "We've tried something like this before… it flopped," "If this adds complexity, I'm out," and "We're still mid-contract with another vendor." Murphy concludes that internal friction, stakeholder doubt, and unanswered risk questions stall more deals than competitors do.

The reframe recurs across several posts, with a stable core and rising emphasis: earlier posts cast it as a content-mapping error; later ones, as the main threat to pipeline.

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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.

Murphy contrasts "Jessica, the Marketing Manager," a persona that is not real, with a real marketing manager who is behind on pipeline and whose budget has just been cut.

• That person, Murphy says, is not in a funnel but in a fire drill: the title does not stall the deal; fear does.
• Internal politics — not demographics — make buyers go quiet.

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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.

Murphy points out that deals lost to internal pushback or inertia rarely appear as "lost" in a CRM; they simply fade. Pouring in more leads therefore leaves the number of closed deals unchanged.

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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.

A rep logs a deal as "lost to budget," so marketing builds ROI content — while the rep believes the real cause was a champion who could not sell the purchase internally. One dropdown nobody questioned conceals two different strategies.

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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?

The post tests whether the story works by asking whether a CFO would fund the team based on what it says in quarterly business reviews — a line the post puts in quotation marks as the standard to meet.

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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.

The persona post previews a specific episode agenda: why persona work creates an illusion of insight, the shift from demographics to problem-states, how Jobs to Be Done reveals urgency rather than interest, and what it means to become a confidence architect. The full piece arrives Thursday.

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Newcomers should start here.

Murphy argues that marketing teams are good at generating interest and poor at helping people decide.

• The post lists what buyers are actually dealing with — justifying a purchase to a CFO, getting past legal, remembering a previous project that failed, resisting added complexity, waiting out a contract with another vendor — and concludes that these pressures stall more deals than competitors do.
• The phrase used for the common result is "the illusion of progress": everything looks good on paper, but nothing moves.
• The proposed shift is from selling to stages to selling to situations, on the grounds that a funnel gives buyers more homework rather than help getting to yes.
• The post points to a longer article, "Stop Selling to Stages.
• Start Selling to Situations," which is not included here.

For brands planning a campaign

For a campaign aimed at pipeline conversion, use this diagnosis to build a talk or workshop: pick one stalled deal, list the internal objections the buyer faced, and check whether existing content answers them. It also gives you a measurable claim to test in a campaign: whether mid-funnel content addresses buyer situations rather than stage labels.

The post opens by contrasting a fictional "Jessica, the Marketing Manager" with a real person trying to justify new software to a skeptical CFO.

• Murphy's point is that detailed persona documents can create the feeling of insight without explaining why a deal stalls or a buyer goes dark; the decision is made by the buyer's problem, not by their job title or demographics.
• The suggested replacement is to work from problem-states and use the Jobs to Be Done framework to find urgency rather than interest, and to act as what Murphy calls a Confidence Architect.
• The post is a teaser for an episode of a series called The Illusion of Progress, described as publishing on Thursday.

For brands planning a campaign

Brands whose targeting rests on persona documents can use this piece to make the case for a problem-state messaging test: rewrite one persona-led sequence around a specific buyer situation and compare responses. The "Confidence Architect" idea also suggests a talk on what sales enablement content should do — reduce the buyer's internal risk — rather than what it should say about the product.

Murphy's claim is that the problem is not lead volume but leakage.

• Deals drain out through internal pushback, budget hesitation, legal red tape, and the inertia of staying with what already works.
• These losses often do not appear as "lost" in a CRM; they simply fade, which is why the standard responses — more leads, more ads, more content — miss the cause.
• The post describes that response as "panic in a blazer" and locates the real enemy of growth in the middle of the funnel rather than the top.
• It ends by announcing a teardown on the same subject.

For brands planning a campaign

Use this to build a campaign or workshop focused on late-stage enablement rather than demand generation: audit where deals go quiet, check whether each stage has content addressing the specific internal obstacle, and report the leaks. Cite it when a brief assumes more top-of-funnel spend will fix conversion.

The post distinguishes metrics from what it calls the buyer lens: which objections are real, which competitors come up, why deals stall, what closes them.

• Its example is a deal logged as "lost to budget," after which marketing builds ROI content — while the rep believes the actual cause was a champion who could not sell the idea internally.
• Two different strategies sit behind one dropdown that no one questioned.
• Murphy's conclusion is that customer-centricity is a discipline rather than a value, and that without shared buyer language a CRM becomes "an expensive system for storing assumptions."
• An article is referenced in the comments, but no link to it appears in the post here.

For brands planning a campaign

For a campaign aimed at sales-marketing alignment, use this to frame a workshop where reps and marketers classify the same set of lost deals and compare reasons, building the shared objection language the post describes. It also suggests a content-audit trigger: check any piece built from a CRM loss reason against what reps say actually happened.

Murphy cites a Gartner finding that 72% of business leaders do not see their marketing function as instrumental to the company's business evolution, and asks whether that reflects a limit on marketing or simply that leaders have not seen it drive change.

• The post lists five moves: translate marketing into business outcomes rather than marketing metrics; show up as a strategist rather than a service provider; own customer intelligence; lead cross-functional enablement; and demonstrate growth impact.
• It quotes the test of whether a CFO would fund the team based on what the team says in quarterly reviews.

For brands planning a campaign

For engagements with marketing leadership, this post frames a session on how the function is perceived and what evidence could change that perception. It also suggests an internal campaign: replace metric reporting with a business-outcome story and test whether leadership responds differently.

Buyers, in this account, face pressure: getting a decision past a CFO, moving legal faster, finding a win this quarter, avoiding a repeat of a purchase that previously failed, or waiting out an existing contract.

• Their alternative is to organize content and outreach around named buyer situations or "problem-states" — the specific internal obstacle in front of a decision — rather than around stage mapping, behavioral scoring, and nurture sequences.
• The goal is to help a buyer reach yes, not deliver another content asset.

The argument contrasts stage with situation in short posts that preview a longer breakdown, letting buyers quickly assess the reasoning before requesting the full treatment.

For brands planning a campaign

A revenue team assessing Murphy for pipeline-conversion work should expect them to rewrite buyer definitions and content mapping around concrete situations, such as a champion who cannot sell the purchase internally. Ask them to produce an initial list of the team's real situations from recent deals, then judge the proposal by how specific those situations are.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2 · Source 3 · Source 4

A marketing manager behind on pipeline whose budget just got cut is not behaving like an avatar, and treating the title as the target leaves deals stalled and quiet.

• Drawing on Jobs to Be Done, Murphy shifts the question from who the buyer is to what they are trying to accomplish and how urgent it is.
• They describe the marketer's job as becoming a "confidence architect" who helps a buyer get a decision approved.

For brands planning a campaign

Best suited to teams with substantial persona documentation that still lose deals after the first meeting.

• For a practical evaluation, give Murphy one current persona and ask them to rewrite it as a small set of problem-states, with the internal pressures attached, using the team's own accounts.
• This could also work as a workshop module for product marketing and demand generation staff.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2

Deals drip out through internal pushback, budget hesitation, legal red tape, and "stay the course" inertia, and tend to fade rather than be recorded as lost.

• Their criticism of the standard response — more leads, more ads, more content — is that it treats a middle-funnel leak as a top-of-funnel volume problem.
• They call that panic rather than strategy.
• The argument gives teams a vocabulary for slippage that never surfaces in a win/loss report.

Murphy notes that stalled deals often do not appear as "lost" in the CRM, so conventional win/loss reports may understate the problem they propose to fix.

For brands planning a campaign

A brand can ask Murphy to run this as a diagnostic: compare CRM loss reasons with what reps say in conversation, then identify deals that stall without being marked lost. It also sharpens the hiring need by setting an initial measurable target — slippage in the middle stages rather than lead volume.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2 · Source 3

Their example is the "lost to budget" deal stage: the rep may know the champion simply could not sell the purchase internally, while marketing reads the dropdown literally and produces ROI content.

• In Murphy's framing, the fix is not a better CRM but an agreement between both teams on what customer-centric means in their business, so a loss code means the same thing to everyone.
• Without that, they say, the CRM is an expensive system for storing assumptions.

For brands planning a campaign

Directly relevant to the sales–marketing alignment half of a GTM need.

• A workable deliverable would be a shared objection and loss-reason taxonomy, plus the buyer-interview loop that keeps it current.
• Ask which existing CRM fields Murphy would change first: they consider the current data unreliable, not merely incomplete.

Examples: Source 1

Their prescriptions are to translate marketing into business outcomes rather than marketing metrics, show up as a strategist rather than a service provider, own customer intelligence, lead cross-functional enablement, and tell a story that would survive a CFO's funding test in a quarterly review. They close by asking whether marketing should be excluded if it cannot show up as a growth engine.

For brands planning a campaign

For a talk or workshop aimed at revenue leadership, Murphy's likely opening is a business-outcome narrative in place of channel metrics. Ask which format they deliver — keynote, working session, or written strategy — and which executive audiences they have addressed; the posts state the argument but do not establish the delivery record.

Examples: Source 1

"The Illusion of Progress" is the recurring name for that weekly treatment, which breaks down the same themes in more depth.

For brands planning a campaign

A brand commissioning or sponsoring Murphy should plan for two linked assets: a short LinkedIn argument that tests the idea publicly and the longer weekly piece behind it. A co-produced campaign should expect a distinct point of view and a specific reframe rather than a neutral explainer; briefs should state which reframe the brand wants to own.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2 · Source 3 · Source 4 · Source 5 · Source 6 · Source 7

Posts introduce them with “this week on The Illusion of Progress, we break down...” and promote a fuller article published later in the week.

View example

The post cites Gartner as a data source; it shows no commercial relationship.

View example

Like Murphy, Goldberg treats stalled deals as a communication and alignment problem rather than a volume problem, arguing from a specific reframe rather than a generic best-practice list.

Goldberg's material sits inside cybersecurity, where the examples are pitch decks, differentiators and internal champions.

• Murphy's frame is the funnel itself — stages versus situations, personas versus problem-states.
• Goldberg also mixes in first-person career reflection about a role turned down and the reasoning behind it, a more personal register than Murphy's argument posts.

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Wright argues that sales performance data tells you something is wrong but not what to change; the real diagnosis comes from listening to actual buyer conversations, the questions reps ask, where interest drops and which objections recur. Both treat the pattern behind a stalled deal as the unit of analysis and write short first-person posts built around one conclusion.

Wright's vantage point is sales leadership and rep coaching — better questions, stronger next steps, coaching versus more activity — so their unit of change is the sales conversation.

• Murphy stays on the marketing and go-to-market side, focusing on how content is mapped and how marketing presents itself to executives.
• Wright is also explicitly retrospective and process-oriented, while Murphy leads with a reframe.

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Both use before-and-after contrasts — Malik with generic versus specific headlines and real conversion numbers, Murphy with a persona avatar versus a buyer whose budget was just cut. Both also teach by showing a rewrite rather than describing one.

Malik is a conversion copywriter whose evidence is campaign results for DTC brands, coaches and course creators, and who closes with a direct service offer.

• Murphy writes about B2B buying committees, internal approval friction and sales-marketing alignment.
• The audience and commercial setting differ, even though the underlying argument about specificity overlaps.

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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.

The tradeoff is scope.

• Murphy's central move is diagnostic: compare a lost-to-budget code with what the rep says actually happened, replace the persona document with a situation library built from the team's own stalled deals, and set one shared loss-reason taxonomy so both teams code the same deal the same way.
• Goldberg's approach sharpens one asset.
• Expect a better seller-facing deck and a clearer internal-champion story, not a rebuilt targeting reference or a shared deal code.
• The method evidence is thinner: one argument carried across two posts, the second a personal career reflection about turning down a role rather than GTM method, with no documented client engagements.
• Ask for examples of past work and the scope of any engagements before contracting.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2

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.

Murphy covers ground Wright's content does not.

• Wright works entirely from the sales side—coaching, call listening, and pipeline review—and shows no marketing or content work, campaign asset, or cross-functional loss taxonomy, which is half of the need to align marketing and sales.
• Murphy's emphasis is the opposite: reps hold buyer data marketing lacks, and two different strategies can hide behind a single deal-loss dropdown nobody fought over.
• That argument pays off only when marketing and sales change their shared records together.
• If the job is to align both teams, expect Wright to improve the sales motion and leave the marketing content gaps to someone else.
• Wright's posts focus on one theme and describe no past client engagements or outcomes; ask for examples before hiring.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2

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.

This is a different job for a different buyer.

• Malik's posts focus on DTC, coaching, and course offers sold direct to consumers, not B2B SaaS revenue teams; the work is copy production, not sales-marketing alignment, buyer-situation modeling, or pipeline diagnosis.
• The second post is partly a sales pitch, ending with a direct-message call to action and an explicit filter for who will be taken on.
• Its performance figures are self-reported client outcomes with no verification shown, so check the claims before relying on them.
• For a B2B SaaS revenue-team working session on sales-marketing alignment, Malik is the wrong person to lead it and would add most value afterwards, producing assets that answer the situations the session identified.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2