De Revolutionibus Orbium Emptoris — Libri III (Chapter 1)

GTM HERESY: Measure Buyer Confidence, Not Funnel Metrics

I know people don’t want to hear this, but we’re measuring the wrong thing. We’ve built entire revenue organizations around measuring the performance of our tools instead of understanding the journey of the customer. We can tell you open rates, reply rates, stage velocity, pipeline coverage, renewal cohorts, expansion ARR, and the ever-mystical “influenced pipeline.” We have dashboards that could guide a spacecraft. Meanwhile, the customer journey—the actual lived experience of buying—gets treated like weather: something that happens around us, occasionally inconvenient, and mostly outside the scope of our quarterly planning.

This isn’t because teams are incompetent; it’s because the way we’ve built modern go-to-market makes fragmentation almost inevitable. Marketing has its stack, Sales has its stack, and Customer Success has its stack, and the overlap between them is usually managed with duct tape, meetings, and a Slack channel called something like #revenue-alignment (which is the organizational equivalent of naming a boat “Unsinkable”). Each team optimizes for its own metrics, and each system defines the world differently. Then we act surprised when the customer experience feels like a relay race where nobody practiced the handoff.

Here’s the twist: AI—used well, not used as a glitter cannon—offers the first real promise that we can fix this. Not because AI will write more emails (we are doing… fine… on emails), but because AI can help us observe and respond to the buyer’s path across systems rather than inside them. It can connect signals that are currently trapped in silos, and it can increasingly mediate how customers discover information in the first place. Gartner’s research is pointing in the same direction: buyers want to do more independent research through digital channels and often prefer a rep-free experience for large parts of the journey.¹

But before we can “fix” the journey, we have to name it. We need a way to describe what the customer is doing that doesn’t collapse into CRM stages or org charts. That’s what D3C is.

D3C stands for Discovery → Create Confidence → Commit, and the simplest way to say it is this: D3C is not a funnel. It’s a lens. It’s a way of seeing buying as a sequence of human jobs the customer is trying to complete, regardless of how we’ve arranged our internal handoffs.

The Copernican shift (without the astronomy degree)

Most go-to-market models are seller-centered by default. They describe what we do: generate leads, qualify, demo, negotiate, close, onboard, renew. That’s not inherently bad—it’s just incomplete. It’s like describing a restaurant by listing the kitchen appliances: “We have a convection oven, a sous-vide, and a really serious blender.” Great. Are the customers eating well? Do they trust the menu? Do they feel good coming back? The appliances don’t answer those questions, and neither do stage definitions.

D3C begins with a contrarian assumption: revenue moves when a human being becomes confident enough to act, not when a record updates in Salesforce. The CRM can reflect the decision, but it doesn’t cause it. The cause lives inside the buyer: their understanding, their risk posture, their social context, their fear of regret, and their ability to defend the decision to other people who will absolutely have opinions.

When you take the buyer seriously as the center of the system, a stable pattern shows up across industries and deal sizes. Buyers are always trying to do three things. They are trying to find a solution to a business problem (Discovery). They are trying to reduce uncertainty enough to move (Create Confidence). And they are trying to commit in a way that won’t make them regret the decision (Commit).

Those are the three jobs. That’s D3C.

1) Discovery: Finding a solution to an existing business problem

Discovery is the process of finding a solution to an existing business problem. Most business problems, at the highest level, boil down to three primary outcomes: increase revenue, decrease cost, or reduce risk. Underneath those outcomes sit the use cases and initiatives that make them real: improve conversion, reduce churn, shorten onboarding, prevent incidents, enforce policy, increase forecasting accuracy, accelerate product cycles. In the middle of the organization, the language gets more tactical—because it has to—but the buyer is still trying to solve a real business problem that maps back to those outcomes.

This matters because it reframes what the buyer is actually doing. In Discovery, they are not “consuming content.” They are assembling a solution strategy. They are asking, implicitly or explicitly: What kind of problem is this? What approaches exist? What categories of solutions have worked for other people? What tradeoffs are unavoidable? Who has earned trust in this space, and who is mostly vibes?

And here’s the part most vendors don’t want to admit: the vendor does not control Discovery.

Discovery has always been driven by word-of-mouth, but “word-of-mouth” in B2B doesn’t mean your neighbor leaning over the fence. It means analysts, peer review sites, reference calls, LinkedIn threads, conference hallway conversations, private communities, Reddit, comment sections, and the entire chatterbox of the internet. Gartner has even called out that buyers value third-party interactions more than digital supplier interactions, because third-party sources provide “value affirmation” and help buyers feel confident.² That’s a polite way of saying: we trust other people more than we trust you.

There’s also a widely quoted Gartner statistic (commonly repeated in B2B circles) that 60% of first-time visitors to a B2B website have already decided to buy.³ Whether you treat that as precise measurement or directional truth, the implication is the same: by the time a buyer hits your website for the first time, they’re often not starting Discovery—they’re validating and triangulating something they already believe.

Now enter LLMs. LLMs didn’t invent this behavior; they automated it. Buyers used to stitch together “what other people say” manually across dozens of sources. Now they ask an LLM: How do I make my AI workflows enterprise-safe? What do people recommend? What should I watch out for? The model returns an answer built on the shape of public conversation—analyst coverage, documentation, posts, reviews, examples, commentary—plus whatever experience it can infer from patterns.

That means the strategic requirement for vendors changes. If Discovery is fueled by “what others say,” and LLMs increasingly mediate how “what others say” gets retrieved, summarized, and recommended, then you need to manage your word-of-mouth like never before. Not as reputation theater, but as a core input to how buyers discover solutions.

A modern Discovery example: “How do we make AI workflows enterprise-safe?”

Picture a team that has deployed a few AI workflows. The pilot worked. The productivity gains are real. Leadership gets excited, because it’s hard not to get excited when something makes smart people faster. Then the grown-ups arrive.

Security asks where the data goes. Legal asks what you’re promising customers. Compliance asks how you audit decisions. The model changes, behavior shifts, and suddenly someone asks a question that quiets the room: “Is this enterprise-safe?”

That question is Discovery in its purest form. They’re not vendor-shopping yet. They’re trying to define the problem: is this governance, auditability, privacy, policy enforcement, data containment, accountability, or all of the above? They’re trying to understand what “good” looks like and what “failure” would cost. And they’re going to ask other people—and now LLMs—long before they ask your homepage.

2) Create Confidence: Emotional safety, empathy, and “will they be there for me?”

Create Confidence is the phase most organizations underestimate, and it’s where deals most often die without anyone being able to explain why. A deal that ends in “no decision” rarely ends because nobody made a decision. It ends because the buyer decided that moving forward felt more dangerous than waiting.

The reason is simple, and it’s the reason B2B “rational purchase decision” language can be so misleading: B2B buying is highly emotional. It’s emotional because it’s tied to identity, status, and livelihood. If a consumer purchase fails, you’re out a few dollars and mildly annoyed. If a B2B purchase fails, you can lose credibility, lose political capital, lose your job—and in the darker versions of the story, you start picturing the entire country-song montage: the truck, the house, the dog, and somehow your kid’s college fund gets dragged into it too.

This is why Create Confidence cannot be reduced to features, ROI calculators, and proof points. Yes, those matter. But the deeper question the buyer is asking is: Do these people get it? Will they be there for me? Will they protect me when things go wrong? Because things will go wrong. Not because anyone is bad at their job, but because enterprise reality is messy by default.

That old expression, “Nobody got fired for buying IBM,” wasn’t really about product superiority. It was about institutional safety. The buyer wasn’t just buying technology; they were buying cover. They were buying the feeling that when scrutiny arrives, the decision will still feel defensible—and the vendor won’t vanish the moment the ink dries.

This is where empathy becomes a commercial advantage. Bob Kocis talks about this explicitly: empathy isn’t softness; it’s accuracy about what the buyer is carrying, what they fear, and what success actually means in their world. When you demonstrate that you understand the risk and the stakes—and you don’t wave it away—you create the kind of emotional confidence that turns interest into motion.

And there’s a story that, for me, permanently defined what Create Confidence really is.

A Create Confidence story: Why I bought Sprinklr at Microsoft

When I was CMO at Microsoft, I evaluated a long list of social media management tools—seventeen, if memory serves. Plenty of them looked “better” on paper. Plenty of them had the right slides. Plenty of them did the thing where you raise a hard question and they respond with the corporate equivalent of a head pat: “No problem.”

But Microsoft is not a normal environment. It’s one of the most complex organizations on earth, and complexity has a funny habit of turning “no problem” into “this will be your problem, specifically, at 2:00 a.m. on a Tuesday.”

The issues I cared about weren’t superficial. They were governance, privacy, and security—the deep enterprise constraints that aren’t optional. When I posed those concerns to most vendors, they waved their hands and assured me it was all fine.

When I asked those same questions to Ragy at Sprinklr, he leaned forward, looked me straight in the eye, and said: “Those are very, very hard problems. We started Sprinklr to solve them, but I’m not going to sit here and tell you it’s easy.”

That was it. He had me at “hard.”

Not because I wanted difficulty for its own sake, but because his response proved he understood the reality I lived in. It told me he wouldn’t trivialize the hardest part of my job. It made me believe that when things got messy—and they did—Sprinklr would be there for me. And they were.

This is the most important thing in B2B selling, and we pay almost no attention to it. We teach people how to demo. We teach people how to handle objections. We teach people how to negotiate. We teach people how to “create urgency.” We do not teach them how to create the emotional confidence that says: I understand the risk you’re carrying, and we will carry it with you.

3) Commit: The marriage, not the wedding

Commit is where most companies act like the story ends because the contract is visible, measurable, and makes everyone feel productive. But the contract is not the commitment; it’s the ceremony.

Commit is the marriage.

It’s what happens when the buyer goes from decision to operational reality and starts living with the consequences. It’s the moment the solution has to survive real life: adoption friction, implementation delays, stakeholder shifts, policy changes, org changes, and the inevitable “well, this wasn’t in the deck” moment. Commitment is sustained when outcomes appear (revenue increases, costs drop, risk reduces) and when the vendor experience feels coherent and supportive over time. Commitment fractures when success is treated as “post-sale” and therefore somebody else’s job.

This is also where the silo problem becomes painfully visible. If Marketing promised one world, Sales sold another, and Success delivers a third, the customer doesn’t experience that as internal complexity. They experience it as mistrust, which is another way of saying confidence begins leaking again.

In our AI example, commitment is what turns “cool pilot” into “operational system.” It’s when guardrails are real, audit trails exist, policies are enforced, ownership is clear, and incident response is procedure instead of panic. It’s when the buyer stops proving the concept and starts proving the decision.

The diagnostic question

A good lens changes what you notice. D3C changes what you notice by making one thing central: confidence.

Confidence is what converts Discovery into motion. Confidence is what prevents “interested” from becoming “no decision.” Confidence is what sustains commitment when reality gets messy. And confidence is exactly what gets shredded when the customer experience is stitched together across siloed systems that were never designed to feel like one coherent journey.

Where, exactly, does confidence get created in your customer’s journey—and where does it quietly disappear?

If you can answer that honestly, you can start designing around the buyer instead of around the tools. And if AI is going to be the thing that finally lets us stitch the journey together across silos, D3C is the thing that ensures we’re stitching toward the right human outcome: buyers who can discover a solution to a real business problem, feel emotionally safe enough to choose, and commit long enough to realize the value they came for.

Sources

Gartner press release on B2B buyers preferring rep-free buying experiences.
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Gartner press release on B2B buyers valuing third-party interactions for value affirmation.
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Commonly repeated industry citation of a Gartner-attributed “60% of first-time visitors have already decided to buy” stat (as referenced in this discussion).
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