How personality, culture, and hidden stakeholders decide your deals — while your CRM watches from the sideline.
The funnels, the stages, the CRM fields, the lead scores — they're a story we told ourselves. Built for efficiency, they treat every buyer as interchangeable and track actions without ever understanding the motivation behind them.
Buying is not rational. It never has been. The assumption that we make business decisions without influence from personal experience, motivation, and belief is the single most expensive mistake in the history of B2B sales and marketing.
The result: we are training AI on systems with a 90%+ failure rate, optimizing for signals that don't explain decisions, and slowly replacing the one selling relationship that actually closes deals.
"Trust built commerce. Migration disrupted it. Technology scaled it. And somewhere along the way, we confused having more data with actually understanding the person on the other side of the deal."
The B2B landscape has fractured into four distinct relationships. Three are scaling. One is quietly disappearing.
Organized in three parts — How We Got Here, Building a Better Way, and Making It Happen — this book doesn't just diagnose the problem. It gives you the framework, the data, and the tools to act on it immediately.
Part One traces how we arrived at a broken system. Part Two introduces the frameworks that make a different approach possible. Part Three shows you exactly how to use them — deal by deal, buyer by buyer. Every chapter ends with a practical exercise you can apply before your next call.
Developed by William Moulton Marston in 1928, DISC reveals not who people are at their core — but how they behave in professional situations, exactly where buying decisions get made.
The book carries a foreword from Pat Spenner, co-author of The Challenger Customer, who sees this work as the essential next chapter in understanding how buying groups actually make decisions.
"If The Challenger Customer helped the industry understand the structural complexity of buying groups, this book helps illuminate the psychological complexity within them. Different stakeholders are motivated by different things. These differences shape how decisions unfold inside organizations, and ultimately whether consensus forms or fractures."
"Everything shifted once we truly understood their daily reality. We made our messaging more precise, more human, and more relevant to the buyer. The impact was immediate — a steady flow of 2–3 sales meetings every week."
"The biggest impact was in customer expansion — 15%+ increase in net revenue retention and 8x growth in large accounts. Understanding not just who we were selling to, but why those personas cared, changed everything."
"The pitch started with a statement about our values which aligned with the corporate culture of the company. They immediately said they could see the synergy. The cultural connection gave us the advantage."
"Once we realized our operations audience was largely conscientious buyers, we shifted how we communicated. They trust what others say about us more than what we say ourselves. That insight changed our entire content approach."
"Most salespeople are chasing a buyer journey they can see..." This sentence captured the reality of our GTM strategies. We fail to recognize that we aren't seeing or understanding what's really going on with buyers. But when we take the time to do this, the relationships change, trust builds, and we focus on what is most important to the customer. Scott's book both opens your eyes, and provides a clear guide on how to put these ideas in place.
Keeping the human decision maker at the center of how we sell and market has never been more important. This book makes a compelling, data-backed case that every leader needs to hear right now, and turns it into a practical playbook for the AI era.
One of the toughest aspects of B2B business is the simple reality that businesses don't make decisions, people do. More precisely, it's unique individuals working with other individuals. Understanding how those individuals are wired, how they interact, and how to manage those dynamics is a seemingly mysterious mix of science, process, art, and best guesses. Unless you read Scott's book. Then it's a powerful, replicable, and practical strategy anyone can follow.
Scott Gillum has cracked open the black box of B2B buying behavior in a way that's both practical and immediately actionable. The frameworks in this book — particularly around corporate culture profiling and late-stage buyer visibility — are tools I've applied directly in building demand gen programs. This isn't a theory. It's a playbook.
Scott Gillum has done something the industry has needed for years — connected the psychology of the buyer to the science of the sale in a way that is both rigorous and immediately actionable. If this book doesn't change your go-to-market strategy, read it again.
The Hidden Buyer Journey challenges the assumption we make about the buyer and brings the human side of decision-making back into focus. Most sales books tell you how to create a playbook, deliver value, adopt a process and replicate "best practices." Scott Gillum shows you who your buyer actually is — beneath the title, the role, and the professional mask they wear in every meeting. This book offers a fresh perspective on how buyers buy and how successful teams can achieve market dominance.
Available in hardcover, paperback, and digital. Bulk pricing available for sales teams, revenue organizations, and corporate training programs.
Signed copies available — contact the author at scottgillum@carbondesign.com
Scott delivers keynotes, workshops, multi-day training sessions, and executive sessions for B2B sales and marketing leaders. Built on the same research as the book — grounded in data, immediately applicable, designed to challenge what teams think they know about buyer behavior.
To discuss availability, formats, and customization for your event or organization, reach out directly.
scottgillum@carbondesign.comShort-form videos and articles built around the core frameworks in the book. Apply the thinking to your next deal, your next campaign, or your next conversation — before you've finished the last chapter.
Every tool below is drawn directly from the book's research. Download them, use them on your next deal, and see the difference before you've finished reading.
The AI coaching tool built on the book's core framework. Enter a buyer's details and get a full coaching brief — DISC profile, style clash warning, opening email, talk tracks, and a live chat coach. All tailored to who you're actually selling to.