Interview with Kari Ratkovich from OneTouchPoint

1. Per a Gartner survey, over 61% of buyers prefer a rep-free experience, while emphasizing that irrelevant outreach is what truly dampens this first impression. As buyer behavior evolves- in an unpredictable direction- what changes must modern sales organizations adopt, structurally and intellectually, to be able to capture or at least influence the dark funnel?

Buyers aren’t avoiding reps; they’re avoiding noise like generic pitches, cold blasts, and empty follow-ups

Sixty-one percent of buyers wanting a rep-free experience isn’t a rejection of sales, it’s a rejection of irrelevance. If a rep shows up with a generic pitch instead of a point of view that brings real value, of course the buyer would rather self-serve. The dark funnel isn’t a mystery to solve with more tracking. It’s a signal to build relevance before the buyer ever raises their hand.

I think that means we should stop measuring reps on outreach volume and start measuring them on the quality and value they are bringing to that first conversation. Building content and providing insights that a buyer actually finds useful is essential versus, collateral designed for the masses or solely to capture an email.

Intellectually, sales leaders need to accept that influence is happening before pipeline even exists. You don’t need more visibility into the dark funnel; you need to have earned a reason to be remembered when the buyer finally comes out of it.

2. With B2B buyers choosing to conduct the majority of the research before talking to an SDR, it has become crucial to outline proper metrics to track sales productivity- that highlight buyer value and not seller effort. While activity metrics keep sales teams accountable, where do you believe the gap is in activity-based management that sales leaders can’t seem to shake off?

The gap is that activity metrics are measuring effort, not value actually delivered. A rep can hit every call and email target in a week and still move zero deals forward. Leaders are keeping dashboards because they’re easy to build and easy to defend in a QBR, but what are they actually predicting?

The real fix isn’t abandoning accountability, it’s changing what people are being held accountable for.

This means tracking how a deal’s stage progresses within the defined buying process, instead of executing a defined number of calls or emails to get there. We also need to be measuring the quality of discovery. Discovery calls are vital to the progression of a deal, and if the rep cannot articulate the buyer’s business case after the call, there is work that needs to be done.

Sales leaders often times default to activity metrics because it’s the path of least resistance and moving beyond that requires building trust over simply tallying actions.

3. Structural fragmentation across hundreds of local field sites can hinder sales velocity, elevating the gap between local agility and organization-wide compliance. In enterprise tech buying, where trust is the essence of communication, how would you build buyer confidence from the ground up amid internal contradictions?

I think about this challenge often. How do you stay agile and maintain consistent messaging? It starts internally by building confidence and ensuring what the buyer hears is the same no matter what door they walked through or where they raised their hand.

There needs to be a single source of truth for positioning, pricing, and pain points that every single team is pulling from. This doesn’t mean there isn’t room to localize or tailor content so that it is relevant for a prospect; adaption like that will create value. However, there is zero room to adapt the facts. When a buyer sees a contradiction, like a key fact changing from one conversation to another, that’s not a messaging problem it’s a trust problem.

Trust isn’t built during the pitch. It’s built in whether the second and third interaction match the first.

4. The need for sales and marketing alignment has been one of the most deliberated topics of discussion. As buyers move non-linearly from one touchpoint to the other, any claims must align with the official positioning, collateral, and regional variations- its the overall messaging. From a sales perspective, how would you portray a genuine sales-marketing alignment, especially one that reflects both organizational and buyer realities?

Real alignment between sales and marketing isn’t a shared deck template. It’s agreeing on what’s true about the business, the current capabilities, the honest differentiation, the regional nuances, and both sides refusing to say anything beyond that, even under pressure to close.

From the sales seat, alignment looks like walking into any deal and knowing the story I am telling matches what marketing put in front of the buyer three touchpoints ago regardless of if I even saw that specific piece of collateral. Throughout each touchpoint, the messaging should feel cohesive and not like three different companies.

A true partnership between sales and marketing builds the credibility that sales relies on when talking with a new prospect. That means a shared understanding of never letting the need to close a deal get in the way of the truth about our platform and our business.

5. Talking of buyer realities, there’s an observable disconnect between what digitalization promises and the experience buyers actually end up receiving. At this intersection of strategic and operational tensions, what role can sales leaders like you play in ensuring that the last-mile realities [read: experiences] remain consistent?

This is where I feel sales leaders check out too early. They treat the sale as the finish line instead of the starting line. Promises fail buyers in the execution, not the pitch. My job does not end at the signature. If I sell a solution, I own making it a reality by ensuring the buyer’s experience is the same on day-90 as it was on day-one.

In our organization, that means staying close to the account through implementation and beyond. When reality starts drifting from what is promised, it’s my responsibility to raise the flag instead of waiting for the client to notice. The latter damages the trusted partnership.