Last week I told you the messy middle guide was the most useful thing we’ve published this year. I also know that reading a 3,000 word guide is a lot to ask of any of my peers. So let’s do the abbreviated version. Three friction points. That’s it. If you only take away three things from the guide, take these.
I want to be upfront that none of these are exotic. You’ve seen all three. You just might not have had a name for them, and a problem without a name is a problem nobody owns.
Friction point one: buying groups expand
You get one engaged contact. They’re responsive, they get it, the conversation moves fast. Then, without much warning, that one contact becomes a group. Finance shows up. IT shows up. Someone from operations who has an opinion nobody asked for shows up.
This isn’t a bad sign. It’s usually a sign the deal is real. But it’s also where a lot of deals quietly stall, because your original champion doesn’t automatically have the standing, the time, or the material to bring the rest of the group along. They lose traction inside their own building. Not because they stopped caring. Because carrying a deal alone through a room full of new stakeholders is a hard job, and we rarely give them anything to help.
Friction point two: intent loses precision
Early in a deal, signals are genuinely useful. Someone downloads something, visits pricing, opens six emails in a week. That tells you interest exists. What it doesn’t tell you, and what we keep pretending it tells you, is whether the deal is actually progressing.
Interest and progression are not the same thing, and the gap between them is where a lot of pipeline math falls apart. A deal can generate a steady stream of intent signals for months while going exactly nowhere. If your read on deal health comes primarily from activity volume, you’re measuring motion, not movement.
Friction point three: we over-orchestrate progression
This is the one I find most uncomfortable, because it’s the one marketing is most responsible for. We’ve gotten remarkably good at automating motion. Nurture sequences, retargeting, cadences that fire on schedule regardless of what’s actually happening in the deal.
The problem is that real opportunities don’t progress in a straight line, and automation doesn’t know that. It keeps running the same playbook while the actual deal has stalled, restarted, or changed shape entirely. We built systems to create consistency, and then we act surprised when a consistent system fails to respond to an inconsistent reality.
None of these fix themselves
Here’s the connecting thread. All three friction points share the same root cause: they show up in the part of the funnel where the buyer is doing real, mostly invisible work, and we’re still treating that stretch like a scheduling problem instead of a support problem.
The fix isn’t more automation or more content. It’s diagnosis. Knowing which friction point you’re actually looking at changes what you do next, and that’s exactly what the guide walks through in detail, along with the four moves that create real momentum instead of more activity.
If you haven’t grabbed it yet, it’s live now. And if you have, next week I’m going deeper on the second one, because “measuring motion instead of movement” might be the most expensive mistake in B2B marketing right now.