When common practice buries common sense
Most problems aren't new, they're just dressed in different clothes
I was reading a book written in 1984 about a manufacturing plant in crisis.
It had nothing to do with marketing. Nothing to do with B2B SaaS. Nothing to do with pipeline / demand generation / attribution / revenue marketing / the latest Claude code post on LinkedIn making me feel behind / [insert any other thing that we read/watch/listen to every day as marketers].
Then I hit this line:
“The contribution of any single person to the organization’s purpose is strongly dependent upon the performance of others.”
🤯
I stopped reading.
I read the line again.
“The contribution of any single person to the organization’s purpose is strongly dependent upon the performance of others.”
This line stopped me in my tracks. It’s the GTM ecosystem synopsis I’ve been working through the past few years distilled down to one simple sentence.
…but it was written 40+ years ago about factory floors
…by a physicist (Eliyahu Goldratt)
…in a fiction book called “The Goal”
And this reminded me of a lesson I’ve long known + continue to be reminded of:
Most of the problems we come across aren’t new problems. They’re the same problems as before, just dressed in different clothes.
Sponsor: HockeyStack
Most ABM programs fail before they even start. I’ve been guilty of this myself + is why I’m approaching it differently this year.
In the past, we’d celebrate impressions served to target accounts like it was a business outcome, but we all know it’s a leading indicator at best. What actually matters is connecting ABM activity to the things that keep the business going - pipeline, revenue, and expansion.
This dashboard from ABM king Andrei Zinkevich + HockeyStack is the closest thing I’ve seen to what that looks like in practice.
The beauty of this dashboard is that it’s truly all-encompassing. It’s not just net new revenue or “impressions served to target accounts.” Just a few of the items you can see with this:
→ Net new revenue from ABM campaigns
→ Expansion revenue from ABM campaigns
→ Renewal revenue from ABM campaigns
→ Funnel metrics from current deals in pipeline
→ ABM penetration by stage
→ High-intent leads without deals
→ Account engagement by company
→ Website “high intent” account journeys
Ecosystems, not channels
When I wrote about ecosystems vs. channels, I defined GTM ecosystem success as:
“An ecosystem means all of these various touchpoints, from trackable to untrackable, work in harmony with one another to foster and drive the desired outcome. Ecosystems die if you remove certain aspects of them, or if they have too much of something, as there are upward and downward impacts of that element’s presence.”
The questions I was really trying to answer were things I’d experienced over the years + could feel, but never had the “hard data” to prove. Questions like:
Are BDRs more successful keeping a prospect on the phone if they’ve seen multiple ads first?
Are marketing emails more likely to be read if a peer mentioned the brand in a community first?
If an overly aggressive AE called a prospect last year, are they more defensive when a new one calls this year?
These are questions about interdependence. They’re about how the contribution of any single touchpoint can’t be separated from everything around it.
Goldratt was saying the same thing in his book about people, machines, + the fundamental nature of systems:
“The contribution of any single person to the organization’s purpose is strongly dependent upon the performance of others.”
Now just replace “person” with channel, campaign, team, etc. and cue the “aha”…
This is why channel-level optimization is the wrong frame. It’s optimizing a single channel in isolation (AKA solving for local performance) while ignoring system output (AKA global performance).
You can have a BDR team hitting every activity metric + ad campaigns delivering strong CPLs + email open rates that would make any demand gen manager proud…and still have flat pipeline.
And it’s because the result/goal we’re after doesn’t come from each part independently, but the interplay + cohesion (or lack of) them all together.
This is where the concept of force multipliers emerges from ecosystems. They don’t exist inside of individual channels or teams - they’re the coefficient that gets added in front of the GTM ecosystem equation.
Goldratt proved it in his manufacturing example back in 1984. Meanwhile, we’re still arguing about it in B2B marketing in 2026 + still don’t have a solution.
Common sense ≠ common practice
Most of us already know this intuitively because we’ve felt it.
To continue with the BDR example, I started by career as a BDR and can tell you firsthand the difference between how a call went with a prospect who’d never heard of us before compared to one who’d been consuming our content for months or had a peer tell them about us.
So why do we keep optimizing everything in isolation?
Goldratt has an answer for that too. There’s a dialogue in “The Goal” that I keep coming back to:
“We refer to something as common sense only if it is in line with our own intuition. When we recognize something as common sense, it must be that, at least intuitively, we knew it all along. Why is there so often the need for an external trigger to help us realize something that we already knew intuitively?”
“Probably these intuitive conclusions are masked by something else, something that’s not common sense.”
“What could that be?”
“Probably common practice.”
Now read that again.
Common practice is what buries common sense.
We’ve been told for years that the right way to run marketing is to track everything, attribute credit, optimize for CPLs and CTRs, and anything that can’t be measured…well, as long as the company is doing well “you can keep doing that cute podcast of yours,” but as soon as a bad month or quarter hits, that conversation quickly turns into, “Oh yeah, that little unattributable podcast” or “all that time you spend on LinkedIn - yeah that needs to go because it’s not showing up in my reports.”
That scenario has been repeated so many times across companies + people that it became the default due to the volume of it. It became accepted as “the way things are” in B2B because it became a shared experience by so many of us + what company leaders told us to do (because they’re the smart ones, right?…right?”)
Anyway - somewhere in this process, our intuitive understanding of how buyers (and ourselves) actually behave when making purchase decisions (AKA non-linear, messy, multiple people involved) got buried under the accumulated weight of common practice (AKA linear funnels, sequenced campaigns, decisionmaker is also the end user).
Enter: the Socratic method
There’s a second half of the dialogue I quoted above in the common sense vs. common practice section. After they came to the conclusion of common practice being what masks common sense, the character goes on to say:
“Jonah’s way of leading to the answers through asking questions, his ‘Socratic approach,’ is very effective at peeling away the layers — the thick layers — of common practice. I tried to explain the answers to others, who needed them as badly as we did, but got nowhere.
You know, it’s amazing how deeply ingrained those things are that we’ve been told and practiced, but never spent the time to think about on our own. ‘Don’t give the answers, just ask the questions!’”
This hit home for me as someone who’s spent years trying to get marketing, revenue leaders, + broader leadership teams to understand the GTM ecosystem philosophy.
The explanation doesn’t work with them. It hasn’t worked for me, + TBH it probably hasn’t worked for you either. You can show them the data. You can walk them through the logic. You can build the most compelling spreadsheet + presentation of your career about how channels work together + how the attribution model doesn’t account for the interplay. And you’ll get polite nods, a pat on the back for the time spent pulling it all together, + then we get to watch them go back to asking us to optimize CPLs + CTRs the next day.
This is because the common practice is the framework they use. It’s become their ingrained belief about how business growth + the world works. And unfortunately, we can’t argue someone out of a belief they hold dearly, especially one they didn’t reason themselves into in the first place so they feel defensive when asked to justify it.
But what we can do is ask better questions.
Since my time at Refine Labs, I realized I’ve been doing this for years without ever connecting it back to Goldratt/the Socratic method. Here are the questions that have consistently worked for me:
1) “Would you rather hit your lead goal, but miss your revenue goal? Or miss your lead goal, but hit your revenue goal?”
This is my favorite question to ask (sorry, no gradual build in in this list, I’m starting out HOT) + does more work than any slide deck or data ever can. We aren’t arguing that leads are a bad metric. We’re asking them to say out loud, in their own words, what actually matters here. And when they do, we’ve guided them to the conclusion themselves.
2) “Tell me about the last purchase you made for the business. What brought it to your attention? How did you go about the path to purchase?”
Take your time with this one. Let them actually walk through it. You should hear things like:
A podcast they listened to
A peer who mentioned the product/service to them
A LinkedIn post from the CEO
A Google search/LLM conversation three months later when they heard we were struggling with XYZ
The beauty of this is that by sharing all of this, they’re listing out the non-linear, partially untrackable, ecosystem-driven journey they just told us doesn’t exist. This realization lands best when it comes from their own story.
3) “What’s the most important instrument in an orchestra?”
Ask a conductor this + they’ll look at you like you’ve lost your mind. Ask it to a room of revenue leaders debating whether marketing or sales or BDRs deserve credit for a deal + watch the room go quiet.
Once we get past the tackiness of the question, it helps reframe the GTM ecosystem in something they can easily visualize + already understand.
Everyone knows an orchestra doesn’t have a single most important instrument. The magic of it is the interplay + harmony that comes from the aggregate.
Remove any single instrument + the output degrades. Same thing happens with our GTM motion.
In the book, Jonah didn’t explain the theory of constraints to the factory manager. He asked questions until the factory manager could see + understand it himself. The solution was always there, just buried under years of common practice + the questions he asked simply cleared the path to the factory manager arriving at it himself.
And that's the job of anyone who actually understands how GTM works. We could go in front of leadership/the board and talk about how we’re right about XYZ and that the current way is “wrong,” but I think we both know how that will go for us. Our job is to ask the questions so that they can arrive at the same conclusion + have the same core understanding of how the system operates, regardless of what “common practice” metrics say about it.
Goldratt wasn’t writing about marketing. He was writing about physics applied to operations (and if you really want to get meta, he did the same thing there by bridging physics to manufacturing as we are this book to marketing).
This is why I love reading books + learning from other disciplines outside of marketing. We think we have these unsolvable problems or that new questions are coming up in our space, but the reality is that most of the problems we come across aren’t new problems. They’re problems that have been encountered before, just dressed in different clothes.
A physicist looked at a factory floor in 1984 and saw something most operations managers had stopped being able to see…
Book quote of the week
I think you know what the book quote of the week already is based on this week’s newsletter topic :)
See you next Saturday,
Sam