Sales, Marketing, and the Decision Risk

Sales and Marketing aren't here just to educate or change minds. They need to make it politically safe for organisations to decide.

This is a real shift, and it’s the responsibility of both sales and marketing t get right.

In B2B deals today:

Minds are already made up individually, but decisions are made organisationally
Information isn’t an advantage and is available everywhere
Preference and incumbents already exist
Personal and organisational risk is the biggest barrier

What blocks progress isn’t persuasion; it's that no one wants to be the person who is exposed or blamed later. So deals don’t die because buyers aren’t convinced; they die because accountability feels dangerous.

Until recently, sales was there to convince or groups, transfer confidence, close the deal and get a yes. That responsibility cannot sit with one person anymore. Decisions are now:

Distributed
Audited
Justified after the fact
Reviewed by people not in the room
Data driven

Which means the responsibility to build trust has moved from the “external” salesperson to the “internal” buyer organisation.

Access to information is now universal, so salespeople are not needed to educate, and at the same time marketing messages can easily be filtered out. It’s a vacuum that sales and marketing must work together to fix.

The reframed responsibility split:

Marketing

Shapes what feels normal
Establishes legitimacy, social proof and brand promise.

Sales

Makes a specific choice survivable inside a specific organisation

Make decisions defensible to absent stakeholders
Translate in real time, marketing comms and content to the organisation, role and individual level

Removes personal downside from saying yes.
Identify and show how saying yes will benefit the careers of those involved.

Sales isn’t closing deals; it's making decisions safe enough to survive scrutiny.

The modern salesperson isn’t a persuader. They’re a risk engineer.