Triple Threat: The death of sales-led growth, one tool to rethink your market, and why subtraction beats addition

The sales-led model is breaking down. AI is just giving it a faster funeral.

For years, the formula for growth was simple: push sales harder, raise quotas, and hope marketing kept the pipeline warm. That worked when buyers depended on sales to educate them. Today, 70% of the buying journey happens before a salesperson is even in the room. By the time a rep shows up, the decision is mostly made.

I’ve watched leadership teams try to respond by throwing money at the problem — AI pilots, new tools, bigger marketing budgets, sales incentives. The result is almost always the same:

That’s not strategy. That’s entropy.

AI won’t fix these cracks. It only makes them impossible to ignore. The companies that thrive now are shifting away from sales-first models and toward unified commercial systems. And increasingly, marketing is being given the keys because it already spans brand, demand, customer success, and the data that makes AI useful.

For you: If your business is still sales-first, you’re running on a model that no longer fits how buyers buy.

Too many CEOs keep operating inside the same assumptions: “This is how our industry works. Buyers care about X. Competitors are doing Y.” But often those assumptions are exactly what hold growth back.

That’s where Market Mindshift GPT comes in.

It helps CEOs surface entrenched beliefs, flip the narrative, and uncover new growth opportunities. It’s not built for tactics, it’s designed to help you rethink the system itself.

One client used this approach and realized their industry was stuck on “speed always beats quality.” They reframed their story around reliability, and opened a more profitable segment of buyers willing to pay for consistency.

What to try: Give Market Mindshift GPT a whirl and see what new insights you uncover. Input your industry or top competitor and ask: “What’s one belief holding this market back, and how could we reframe it to create new demand?” Bring the answer into your next leadership meeting.

Most leaders assume growth comes from adding: more campaigns, more tools, more people. But in my work with CEOs, I’ve seen the opposite. The fastest growth spurts often come from subtraction.

A mid-market manufacturer I advised was spending nearly $50K a month across agencies and tools, but sales dismissed most of the leads as unqualified. The CEO pulled the plug: agency contracts were cut, half the tech stack was retired, and the team rebuilt a leaner, AI-enabled system tied directly to sales priorities.

Within 90 days, marketing spend dropped almost 40%, lead quality improved, and for the first time in years, sales trusted what came through the funnel. The breakthrough wasn’t more activity. It was less waste.

It’s like carrying a heavy pack up a mountain. You don’t reach the top by stuffing in more gear. You get there by cutting the weight that slows you down.

The question to sit with this week: What could you stop doing that would make your growth system simpler, clearer, and more effective? Subtraction may be the real accelerator.