The B2B Playbook #213: Why the Funnel is Breaking Your Go-To-Market - and why Closed Loops are the Answer (Closed Circuit Selling)
Closed Circuit Selling: Why the Funnel Is Breaking Your GTM
Most go-to-market teams aren’t failing on effort. They’re failing on architecture.
In this episode, we sit down with Charles Needham (co-author of Cold Call Algo) alongside Adem Manderovic (CRO School) to break down why the linear funnel is the biggest sacred cow in sales, and why Closed Circuit Selling is the better model for modern outbound.
We unpack incentives, silos, CAC payback insanity, and why “meetings booked” became a broken religion. Then we get practical. How to run outbound as market learning. How to capture timing signals. And how to build feedback loops that actually make marketing, sales, and customer success stronger together.
Tune in and learn:
+ Why buyer journeys are non-linear, and funnels create blind spots
+ How to shift from meetings quotas to conversation-driven market validation
+ Why intent data can’t replace first-party conversations
If you’re a B2B marketer or revenue leader, this is the blueprint for building a GTM system that compounds instead of churns.
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00:00 The “Sacred Cow”: Why the Linear Funnel Breaks Reality
01:00 Who’s Charles Needham (And Why He Thinks Like a Quant)
04:30 From Mortgage Bonds to CRMs: Seeing Sales as a Database
07:00 The Moment He Realised “Meetings Booked” Is a Trap
09:10 Closed Loop Continuity vs Funnel Checklists
11:40 What Silos Destroy: Feedback Loops That Never Make It Back
14:10 CAC Payback Madness: When “Growth” Becomes Insanity
17:10 The Conversations Model: Comp People for Learning, Not Meetings
20:05 Predictable Revenue Misread: “Market Development” Got Lost
21:00 VC Algebra vs Real Buyers: “The Customer Doesn’t Exist”
28:10 The 2008 Analogy: Incentives Create Fragile Systems
32:20 Intent Data Hot Take: “Or You Could Call Them”
36:00 The Guitar Demo: What “Cataloguing” Really Means
39:00 “Talk to Everybody”: The Outbound Belief Most CROs Don’t Hold
41:45 Fixing the Root: Change Comp, or Nothing Changes
48:10 Market Validation vs Cataloguing: The Language Problem
56:35 AI Didn’t Fix Outbound. It Scaled the Spam Cannon
59:30 What Works Next: Follow the Underpriced Channel (Then Move)
1:06:00 Cold Call Algo: The “Unplanned Communication” Thesis
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S07 E213 - The B2B Playbook
#b2b #b2bmarketing #digitalmarketing #demandgeneration #outboundsales