Original source: Adem Manderovic | Closed Circuit Selling™ (CCS)
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This video from Adem Manderovic | Closed Circuit Selling™ (CCS) covered a lot of ground. 6 segments stood out as worth your time. Everything below links directly to the timestamp in the original video.
If your sales and marketing teams seem to be pulling in opposite directions, a single influential book from 2011 may be the reason why.
'Predictable Revenue' Book Severed Sales from Market Intelligence, Practitioners Argue
Aaron Ross's 2011 book "Predictable Revenue" reshaped B2B sales by reducing success metrics to meeting bookings — a change that, according to Adam Manderovic, quietly dismantled the feedback loop that had previously connected sales teams to real buyer intent. Before that shift, business development teams gathered live market intelligence: who prospects were buying from, when contracts expired, what they needed next. That data fed both marketing strategy and product roadmaps. After 2011, the only task that counted was booking a meeting, so everything else was abandoned.
"Everything that happened for the sales development or business development function to do market validations — to get the right timing, right accounts, right offer — all of these things that we used to give to marketing got completely washed out."
Meeting Incentives Drive Low-Quality Pipeline, Sales Practitioners Say
When salespeople are paid per meeting booked — regardless of buyer intent — they will do whatever it takes to secure that meeting, even if the prospect has no genuine interest in buying. Manderovic argues this incentive structure offloaded the job of identifying in-market buyers onto marketing teams, which were never designed for that role. The result is an expensive guessing game: marketers chase volume-based MQL targets, companies invest in costly go-to-market technology, and none of it substitutes for direct, first-party conversations with the market.
"We're just putting more and more expensive tech between us and actually doing this work."
Sales Teams Are Knowingly Closing Unserviceable Deals, Practitioners Warn
Because salespeople are compensated on closed deals rather than successful customer outcomes, Manderovic argues many are consciously pushing through contracts they know cannot be delivered — skipping the handover process that would expose those gaps. A salesperson who knows two on-site staff are needed but that the annual contract value won't cover them will close the deal anyway, because they still get paid. Venture capital funding structures compound the problem by sustaining companies that rely on inflated pipeline figures rather than commercially viable revenue.
"Sales will say absolutely anything to get the contract signed — not absolutely knowing that there's probably little chance that that can actually be serviceable, because they'll still get paid."
Sales Teams Should 'Catalog the Market' Before Pitching, Framework Argues
Rather than opening a sales call by pushing for a meeting, Manderovic advocates a prior step he calls cataloging: structured one-on-one conversations designed to learn who a prospect currently uses, what they like and dislike about that provider, and when their contract expires. That intelligence is then handed to marketing, which can build campaigns calibrated to the buyer's actual timeline rather than guessing. If a prospect has just signed a three-year contract, for instance, there is no reason to spend sales or marketing budget on them today.
"That enabled marketing to be more commercially viable by knowing when they're going to come into market — when we needed to build out what we needed to build out for their timing, not ours."
CRM-Stored Catalog Data and 'Live Quoting Days' Aim to Fix Pipeline Collapse
Catalog intelligence only has lasting value if it is stored in a standardised way inside a CRM — not in a salesperson's personal notes — so that when that person leaves, the organisation retains the data. Manderovic describes the next step as a live quoting day: a structured presentation where all key stakeholders and end users gather to align on a solution, surface any legal or credit blockers, and formally hand over a communication plan to the customer success team. Without those steps, he argues, pipeline figures become fictional — deals appear to be progressing but collapse at the legal or finance stage.
"If you look at the SaaS model that leans into predictable revenue, they don't actually have these steps — all of that will just become redlined at the end, and you realise that all of this pipeline is actually just hypothetical."
Cataloging Helped Close a Two-Year Stalled Deal in One Month, Practitioner Reports
A participant in Manderovic's CRO school program closed an account he had been pursuing unsuccessfully for two years — within a single month of adopting the cataloging approach. Selling Marketo services to marketers, a notoriously skeptical buyer group, he ran four cataloging sessions and used the low-pressure framing of understanding the market rather than pushing a product. Separately, another participant avoided wasting further budget after cataloging revealed that a target account needed features that would never appear on his company's product roadmap, saving him from a deal that would have lost money from day one.
"If you act as an account manager for an account you don't yet have, you're just giving them advice on what could help them win — you're not actually selling them anything."
Also mentioned in this video
- Himself and Adam, detailing his own background in demand generation and Adam's… (4:10)
- His collaboration with Adam, emphasizing Adam's cohesive, cross-functional… (8:43)
- The current model leads to staff burnout, upside-down deals, loss of commercial… (22:42)
- Traditional sales methodologies like SPIN, Challenger, and Miller Heiman only… (26:17)
- After a successful live quoting day, a mutual agreement is reached, and a live… (38:12)
- Contrasting the predictable revenue model's MQL chasing and demo spam, which… (40:49)
- Cataloging a new offering without an incumbent, Adam explains that it requires… (51:44)
- A commission-only sales position will typically only attract retirees or… (52:48)
- To engage companies that use internally built custom tools, Adam advises using… (54:01)
- Firsthand information gathered through cataloging is crucial for understanding… (55:08)
- While less experienced individuals can execute cataloging for very defined… (56:03)
- To implement organizational change for cataloging, it's essential to manage… (57:01)
- The solution, address questions, introduce the account management team, and… (59:03)
- New measurements for sales and marketing should focus on market validations:… (1:00:09)
- To engage potential clients for cataloging, particularly when selling into… (1:01:56)
- It?' or 'Is it okay if you just tell me what you like about it?' followed by a… (1:03:28)
- To address challenges like the absence of deposits, find out who is sweetening… (1:04:39)
Summarised from Adem Manderovic | Closed Circuit Selling™ (CCS) · 1:06:37. All credit belongs to the original creators. Streamed.News summarises publicly available video content.
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