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“A great meeting is not evidence of a progressing deal.”
That’s one of John Kwarsick’s laws, and if you’ve spent more than a quarter in B2B, you’ve lived it. Everyone nods. The champion is fired up. The rep walks out saying that went great. Then nothing happens for three weeks.
We’ve been digging into this with Personal ABM, and our research keeps landing in the same place; estimates suggest roughly 60% of deals end in no decision. No competitor won. The deal just stopped moving.
This week on Pipe Dreams, I sat down with John Kwarsick to dig into why. John has spent 40 years in enterprise technology, going back to selling the very first 128K Macintosh, with long stretches at Microsoft and Check Point. These days, he researches the human side of AI adoption and writes about it every Sunday on Substack.
He’s also a sales guy through and through, which is exactly why I wanted him on. Marketers talk about this problem a lot. But it really hits home coming from someone who carried a bag for four decades.
Educate, Build Consensus, Repeat
John’s model, which he calls the Kwarsick Corollary, comes down to two things: education and consensus building, back and forth until you reach the person who signs.
His version of education isn’t a pitch. It’s asking questions tailored to that buyer, then asking questions about their answers, until you’ve earned the right to plant one seed about what you do. Then the buyer has to go build consensus internally, without you in the room.
That’s where deals go quiet. John calls it latency, and he breaks it into three types:
Social latency. The people you met need to talk to each other, then to their boss. Your champion is now selling on your behalf.
Cognitive latency. It’s a new idea, and they need time to figure out where it fits.
Institutional latency. It lands on the CFO’s desk as a business justification with none of the context. “We haven’t been breached in three years. Why do we need this?”
Most reps handle latency the same way; another check-in, another “just following up.” John’s point is that by then you’re in a beggar position. The work has to happen before the silence starts.
The Justification Traveled Upward
My favorite line of the conversation: “The justification traveled upward. The understanding did not.”
By the time a deal reaches the CFO, what travels is a number and a paragraph. Everything the champion learned over three meetings stays behind.
John thinks marketing should help close that gap. Once a deal is in motion, build a decision enablement package for each persona in the account. A short FAQ with the hard questions they’ll get asked and the answers, written so the champion can forward it as their own. Something a busy CISO can read in a minute.
“Marketing is the enabler of understanding,” he said. I haven’t heard a sales leader put it that way before.
And it raises a question I’ve been asking for a while: Why do we invest so much time and money getting buyers into the funnel, only to largely disappear when they actually need help making the decision?
Marketing as the Concierge
I asked John how this actually gets operationalized, since the model at most companies is still marketing generates leads, hands them off, and walks away.
He said it has to come from the top, and he used a football analogy. If you’ve got a great wide receiver and you only ever hand the ball to the running back up the middle, you’re wasting your weapons. Marketing that only does lead generation is that running play.
He also called marketing the concierge of information for sales. Instead of a 15-slide corporate deck that reps either memorize or ignore, build a framework for discussion tailored to each rep’s strengths and each deal.
And he made a point I hadn’t thought about. Reps often see marketing as non-adversarial. We’re not the ones grilling them about the forecast. That gives marketing a way in with sales that sales leadership doesn’t always have.
There’s an opportunity here for marketing to become a much more valuable partner to sales, not by taking over the sales process, but by understanding what’s happening inside active opportunities and helping remove the obstacles preventing them from closing.
AI Makes It Easier to Say No
John’s take on AI in buying is interesting. By the time a buyer talks to you, they’ve often done most of their research, and AI makes it easier than ever to say no. No gives them control and buys them time.
Getting to yes now takes more than a single seller. Marketing, engineering, and sometimes the CEO all have to row in the same direction.
I shared where I’ve landed from the marketing side. The exciting part of AI for GTM, for me, is the inputs more than the outputs.
Five ebooks in an afternoon don’t help anyone if the message is wrong. Interrogating the CRM and call transcripts does.
Which deals stall? Are reps sticking with the positioning on calls, and do the ones who stick with it move faster? Should reps even be assigned by territory, or by the verticals where they actually win?
That’s where I think AI can make marketing substantially more valuable. Not just helping us produce more content, but helping us understand what’s actually happening in the business and what needs to change.
John’s Five Laws
John closed with the five laws behind the Kwarsick Corollary. Worth saving:
1. A great meeting is not evidence of a progressing deal.
2. The justification traveled upward. The understanding did not.
3. Personalize the explanation, not the underlying truth.
4. The hardest selling often happens when you’re not in the room.
5. AI accelerates information, but people still have to reach a decision.
My Take
I’ve been banging the “beyond the pipeline” drum for a while, so it was good to hear it from the other side of the table.
Marketing has always been on the hook for pipeline, and pipeline is great. You know what’s better? Closed-won revenue.
If the pipeline doesn’t turn into revenue, nobody wins long term. Not sales, not the business, and not marketing.
And yet, how many marketing teams spend more time reporting on pipeline created than understanding why that pipeline isn’t closing?
I’ve been guilty of it myself. As the first marketing leader at several startups, I spent plenty of time building demand generation engines, tracking conversion rates, and celebrating pipeline creation. But we didn’t always spend the same energy figuring out why opportunities stalled after sales accepted them.
Law four is the one I’d tape to my monitor.
If your champion can’t explain what you do to their CFO as well as your rep can, you’ve got a gap. And marketing is well positioned to help fix it.
That doesn’t mean marketing owns the close. Sales still owns the relationship and the deal. But marketing can help preserve the understanding, reinforce the business case, anticipate objections, and equip champions to sell internally.
If you want somewhere to start this week, pick one deal that’s gone quiet. Ask the rep what’s happened in that account since the last meeting. If nobody knows, start there. Find out what the champion needs to get the decision moving, and build something useful.
Then reply and tell me what happened.
🎙️ John walks through the full corollary, the three types of latency, and what a decision enablement package looks like in our conversation.
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Join Us Live Friday: The Happiness Advantage
Friday, November 6 | 10:00–11:00 AM ET | Free
AI is rewriting job descriptions, expectations keep climbing, and a lot of marketers are wondering where they fit. Most of us were taught that happiness comes after success. The research says it often works the other way around.
A review of 225 studies covering more than 275,000 people found that happy people tend to earn more and perform better at work. And Gallup found that thriving employees miss 53% fewer days to health issues.
For our first live Pipe Dreams, I’m sitting down with Mark Goldschmidt, founder of The Why and How of Happiness. Mark has shared his research-backed work on happiness, resilience and burnout prevention with teams at Charles Schwab, Mass General Brigham, Merrimack College and more.
We’ll get into managing uncertainty, avoiding burnout, keeping your footing when the job keeps changing, and the daily habits that actually help.
It’s live, so bring your questions. We’ll take them in the chat, and the session will be released later as a Pipe Dreams episode.
Registration is free and open to everyone, not just MarketingHQ members. Forward this to anyone who could use it.
Compare Notes on Deals That Stall
Deals that go quiet after a great first meeting come up in the MarketingHQ community all the time. If you’re trying to get marketing more involved after the handoff, that’s the place to compare notes with people working on the same thing.
It’s a free, private group for B2B marketers who know the job from the inside, from startup teams to marketing leaders at global enterprises. We’re over 100 in-house marketers now, with a Leaders Circle for heads of marketing, a Boston group and the jobs list every Friday before it hits this newsletter.
No vendors. No pitches. Just marketers helping marketers.
Career Up: Marketing Jobs This Week
Hand-picked roles from the MarketingHQ Job Board. Community members get them first, every Friday.
Leadership
VP of Marketing at Siro (New York)
VP of Marketing at UnitedMasters (Brooklyn / $225–265K)
VP of Marketing, Healthcare SaaS (via Hire With Jarvis) (Atlanta / $200–240K)
Chief Marketing Officer at Surgical Information Systems (Remote)
Senior Director, Demand and Digital Marketing at Elastic (New York)
Senior Director, Global Marketing Operations at PubMatic (New York / from $225K)
Product Marketing Director at Mongoose (Buffalo / from $144K)
Associate Product Marketing Director at Canary Technologies (New York)
Boston-area
Sr. Marketing Operations Manager, Process & AI at Skillsoft (Boston / $145–155K)
Digital Marketing Manager at Evident (Needham / $63–78K)
Product marketing, ops & growth
Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Department Solutions at Snowflake (Menlo Park / $202–266K)
Sr. Staff Technical GTM Product Marketing Manager, Access Security at 1Password (cyber) (Remote / from $180K)
Product Marketing Manager, Google Labs, Gemini and AI Marketing at Google (Mountain View)
Marketing Manager, Open Source Foundations at NVIDIA (Santa Clara)
Senior Product Marketing Manager at NICE (Saddle River, NJ)
Events Demand Gen Strategist at Keysight (Remote / from $122K)
Marketing Technology Manager, CRM Platform at Uphold (New York / from $150K)
Associate Marketing Operations Manager at BlackLine (Brooklyn / $112–140K)
Senior Event Marketing Specialist at Keeper Security (cyber) (Remote)
Event Marketing Manager at Rippling (New York)
Early career
Event Marketing Associate, Listings at Nasdaq (New York / $71–121K)
Digital Marketing Associate at The Hartford (Wayne, PA / $45–70K)
Digital Marketing Coordinator at Society19 (Boston)
Find many more roles on our MarketingHQ Job Board
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