
Twenty ('ish) years ago B2B sales and marketing began a journey that has trapped it inside a numbers-first machine. Pipelines swelled, dashboards multiplied, and companies celebrated “activity” as if volume alone produced revenue. The playbook became: blast more emails, run more sequences, generate more MQLs, make more calls, hire more SDRs, stand up more RevOps dashboards, and assume that scale equaled success.
But is the market changing? Will companies wake up to the uncomfortable truth that the entire quantity-driven model is a fraud? Response rates are collapsing, CAC is rising, data quality isn’t just deteriorating but is at an all-time low, and sales conversations have never been weaker, more scripted, or more instantly forgettable. Do leaders know this, and if they do, do they care to admit it? Their dashboards reflect it, even if those dashboards can’t explain why it’s happening. Will quality vs. quantity become the new strategic battleground.
The Quantity Era: How We Got Here
The obsession with volume didn’t happen by accident — it was engineered. Everyone became enamored with technology Cinderella stories of vast fortunes and fame. Many said “we want that”. In order to grow fast and furiously, technology (specifically SaaS) business models demanded predictability and scale, so companies built go-to-market engines believing “everything” could be measured (not withstanding that everything “can’t” be measured), automated, and repeated. CRMs grew bloated with fields that were outdated the moment they were entered. Marketing automation platforms turned personalization into a mail merge. Sales engagement tools encouraged reps to send 500 messages they didn’t understand rather than five that mattered.
Much of this was justified as “data-driven decision making.” Academic thinking, drilled into all those MBAs. But most companies lacked the one thing data-driven models genuinely require: enough real data. A handful of partial CRM records and scattered email touches are not enough to predict buyer intent, deal probability, or message effectiveness. Yet the dashboards kept getting prettier, and the addiction to activity kept getting stronger.
The quantity engine created motion, but not momentum. And now, in a market where buyers have endless information, limited attention, and shrinking patience, motion without meaning is a dead end.
Is there a Quality Revival: Why Will Effectiveness Is Become the Only Advantage That Matters
The market is shifting toward a new truth: companies don’t need more touches, more sequences, or more dashboards — they need better ones. They need sellers who show up prepared, marketers who understand relevance, and customer-facing teams who can think, adapt, and create insight in real time.
This is why a new class of AI applications is emerging — not the volume machines of the last decade, but tools built around effectiveness. These are AI systems that improve human performance rather than replace judgment; systems that help sellers practice, rehearse, strategize, and tailor their approach; systems that help marketers craft relevance, not just scale outputs.
They don’t add more noise, they reduce it. They don’t automate spam - they elevate quality. And they don’t depend on perfect CRM data, because they operate on thinking, preparation, and context — things humans control.
In other words, they finally address the real bottleneck: the quality of the conversations that shape the pipeline, not the quantity of the activities logged inside it.
Why Quality Is Becoming a Competitive Advantage
Three big forces are accelerating this shift.
First, every market is saturated with content, outreach, and automation. Buyers aren’t responding to more — they’re filtering it out, and worse ignoring it (and AI can help with that as well!). The companies breaking through are the ones demonstrating relevance and insight, not volume.
Second any companies outside the biggest of the big don’t have the data density required to make RevOps forecasting and analytics meaningful. If a company has 10 reps and 40 live deals, no algorithm on earth can extract reliable patterns. Statistical validity demands a critical mass of data, and 95% of companies have neither the quantity or quality of that data. You can prettify the dashboard, but you can't conjure signal where none exists.
Third, AI has reached the point where it can meaningfully improve human performance — helping salespeople think through strategy, helping marketers sharpen messaging, helping reps rehearse and internalize better engagements. Quality can now be engineered, supported, and scaled. Not by replacing humans, but by making them dramatically better.
The advantage is no longer the size of a tech stack. It’s the quality of the customer-facing moments that tech enables, and that’s driven by insight, relevance, perspective, context, creativity, clarity and courage. It’s no longer all about “cadence.”
The End of the Activity Arms Race
The old model (RevOps if we might be so bold) recognizes teams for how much they produce - how many emails, how many calls, how many sequences, how many dashboards, how many “touchpoints”. People watered down lead definitions so they could show more success. In fact Marc Benioff’s greatest early achievement was the use of the word “lead” instead of “contact” which instantly propelled the value of his system. It wasn’t contact management; it became lead management.
None of the RevOps categories have predictive power anymore (they never did). Not on their own. They may describe movement inside the machine, but they don’t tell you whether that movement is intelligent, persuasive, or connected to any real human buying intent.
The next era of B2B isn’t an arms race of activity. It’s a craft race — a race toward sharper thinking, more relevant messaging, stronger conversations, and better understanding of the customer’s world. They (who’s “they?”) used to describe sales and marketing as “arts, and crafts.” It was something of an “insult.” Science (engineers) built the products. But driven by greed and vanity, sales and marketing wanted to (and did) become engineering problems – science. Science is “cleverer” than “arts and crafts” and who doesn’t want to be “cleverer?”
Where AI Fits Into the Shift
The irony is that AI — the technology most people assumed would create more automation and more volume — can be the catalyst for quality.
Modern AI tools can:
take in context and generate strategic insights
help reps plan more intelligently and prepare faster
simulate conversations and coach reps through better talk tracks
personalize content at a level no template ever could
surface client-specific insights that previously required hours of research
help teams understand buyers at a depth that no “sequence” ever delivered
This isn’t the AI of “send 10,000 more emails.” It’s the AI of “send five better ones.” It’s the AI of “show up smarter, run a better meeting, create a better conversation.”
This is the bridge from quantity to quality — and maybe it’s already reshaping the way leading teams operate.
The New Battleground
If the last twenty years has been defined by scale, the next will be defined by effectiveness. If yesterday’s edge was motion, tomorrow’s is mastery. If companies competed on how many people they touched, they will now compete on the quality of the impact they have.
The quantity era was built by technology that amplified activity. We threw more technology at these challenges, and all we succeeded in scaling were our sales and marketing crimes and misdemeanors. The quality era will be built by technology that recognizes we're dealing with people (and all our behavioral vagaries) and that amplifies insight, preparation, and human ability.
The companies that thrive will be the ones who stop chasing bigger numbers and start building better sellers, better marketers, better conversations, and better experiences.
Quality isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the only advantage left that actually moves people. And people in this space haven’t been moved in a while.



