The Psychology of Progress in SaaS Leadership
Why B2B teams resist the change they want most.
"If you think and achieve as a team, the individual accolades will take care of themselves. Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships" - Michael Jordan
Welcome back to The 100. Last week we explored how B2B buyers are shifting to self-directed research. This week, we're examining something that might feel uncomfortable but necessary: why teams resist the very changes they say they want.
Grab your afternoon 🫖 — today we're exploring three behavioral biases that prevent effective cross-team alignment, focusing on product, marketing and sales functions. But first, we need to understand the principle that often drives stagnation in SaaS GTM orgs: the status quo bias.
This fundamental tendency to prefer things staying the same — by doing nothing or sticking to previous decisions — isn't inevitable. It's a choice teams make, often unconsciously. When left unchallenged, it leads departments to operate in isolation, each convinced their view of the market, audience and customer is complete.
That said, up to 90% of sales and marketing professionals report misalignment in strategy, and this disconnect costs businesses over $1 trillion annually.
I see time and time again, teams sticking to familiar practices even when they see evidence that change would help them grow. They want better collaboration, but their established ways of working — from how they track success to how they share information — actively prevent it.
Think about your last planning session.
Each department likely presented their view of the customer, their metrics, their priorities.
But how many connected their insights to what other teams were building? How many showed they understood their role in the bigger picture?
Let's examine the three key biases holding teams back, and how to overcome them.
1. Groupthink is killing your ability to move fast.
Social psychologists call it "ingroup favoritism" — our natural tendency to favor our own group while viewing others with skepticism. Left unchallenged, this bias breeds groupthink, where teams become echo chambers of their own ideas. In enterprise settings, this creates invisible walls, with each department building their own language, metrics, and priorities while dismissing input from others.
Picture your last planning meeting:
Marketing presents engagement metrics
Sales jumps to pipeline velocity and closed-won summaries
Product focuses on feature adoption
Customer Success emphasizes retention signals
Each team builds their own specialized knowledge, making it increasingly difficult to step outside their viewpoint. This then leads to disconnected perspectives on what is actively driving buyer and customer value. But when GTM teams align, companies see up to 36% higher revenue growth and 28% increased profitability.
That means you're leaving your biggest growth opportunities on the table when departments choose to operate from different mental models entirely.
Moving forward with a shared mental model
Trust me, the last thing you need is another complex framework that sits outside your existing planning cycles. Instead, here's how to integrate these changes into your current quarterly rhythm:
1. Map the models (First Two Weeks of Quarter)
Align this with your quarterly kickoff when teams are already sharing their OKRs and initiatives. Create a shared workspace where each department documents their customer signals alongside their quarterly goals. This creates immediate context for why certain metrics matter:
Marketing tracks engagement patterns and content preferences
Sales captures conversation insights and deal velocity
Product logs feature adoption and usage patterns
Get everything in one place while teams are already thinking about quarterly alignment so the investigation feels natural and aligned to what you’re already doing.
2. Find the gaps (week 3-4 of quarter)
Use your existing monthly review (MBR) to:
Compare how each department interprets the SAME customer data
Identify where success metrics conflict (this may be a tough convo across team leads so best to tackle at the top first and then tactically align)
Spotlight handoff points where information gets lost (when marketing teams are genuinely interested in driving hard growth/revenue metrics, this activity gets much deserved attentention)
Map out where information gets lost between departments and where assumptions don't match reality. I’ve created a prompt here to get started with your gap analysis once you’ve documented the respective team perspectives on customer and buyer signals. Feel free to copy and paste it in any LLM interface with your documented insights from the shared workspace.
3. Build bridges (months 2-3)
Pick 3-5 core metrics that matter to everyone and then build a shared view that translates each department's data into terms others understand. Be sure to define who owns what and how success gets measured.
You can get started with the three below:
Win Rate:
Marketing: Measures campaign and messaging effectiveness
Sales: Indicates sales team performance and deal closure efficiency
Product: Reflects product-market fit and feature competitiveness
Feature adoption rate
Marketing: Shows content effectiveness in driving feature awareness. If YOU JUST PICK THIS…your content program effectiveness will change phenomenally.
Sales: Validates sales enablement and value proposition delivery
Product: Measures feature success and user engagement
Lead-to-sale conversion rate:
Marketing: Measures lead quality and messaging effectiveness
Sales: Shows sales process efficiency
Product: Indicates product-market fit and demo-to-purchase success
4. Practice translation (ongoing/weekly)
Rather than adding new meetings, use existing touch points:e.g. you can turn one weekly standup into a cross-team insight share. (everyone records zoom calls so it’s as easy as dropping the latest link in a group slack!) Focus on enriching the rhythms your teams already follow and you’ll be heading in the right direction.
2. The sunk cost fallacy: Building tomorrow's brand with yesterday's rules
When you've spent months, perfecting your visual identity or establishing your editorial voice, pivoting feels like abandoning that investment—even when your audience has moved on. But that’s just what submitting to the ‘sunk cost’ fallacy will yield.
At Thought Bakery, we see this pattern repeatedly when it comes to brand design and editorial strategy:
Marketing teams clinging to formal, corporate language while their audience craves authenticity
Design systems that prioritize legacy guidelines over modern user expectations
Content strategies built for how buyers researched two years ago, not how they search today
The more time teams invest in these directions, the harder it becomes to change course. This "escalation of commitment" explains why B2B creative campaigns often lag behind audience expectations—the brand was too invested in their existing brand guidelines to see it's no longer serving them.
The sunk cost fallacy is pervasive when applied to marketing and sales functions. It creates a cycle where:
Leaders persist with failing projects due to emotional attachment to past efforts.
Decision-makers focus on past investments rather than evaluating current situations objectively.
Fear of losing previous investments prevents adaptation to changing market conditions
Improving the status quo slowly by slowly
Start with 90-day brand sprints focused on one core element: voice, visuals, or channels. Each quarter becomes an opportunity to audit, test, and measure how your brand resonates with today's audience. This isn't about wholesale changes—it's about intentional evolution backed by data.
Build weekly insight loops into your routine. Track how your audience engages with different brand elements, monitor shifts in their communication preferences, and document emerging content patterns. These regular check-ins prevent small disconnects from becoming major gaps between your brand and your audience.
Challenge your assumptions monthly. Take one core brand belief and pressure test it against current data. Maybe your audience no longer responds to formal language, or your traditional visual hierarchy doesn't match how they consume content now. Question everything, especially the "we've always done it this way" thinking that keeps brands stuck in the past.
Finally, run consistent design experiments. Test modern patterns against your established approach. Try new content formats. Play with different brand voices. Most importantly, measure the impact on engagement. These small, controlled experiments give you the data to make confident brand decisions.
This pivot in thinking usually causes an insane amount of friction internally and especially if you’re working with an external agency or vendor. What helps is remembering that moving on from an older representation of the brand, is not moving away from the brand’s identity or core ethos but rather closer towards your customers’ desired journey.
3. The illusion of control: When more tools mean less clarity
The illusion of control leads teams to overestimate their ability to manage outcomes through additional tools and processes. First identified by psychologist Ellen Langer, this bias is particularly prevalent in tech organizations, where adding new tools often feels like adding more control.
Occurrence patterns
The illusion of control tends to be stronger in:
Stressful and competitive environments
Scenarios where people receive success-focused feedback
Settings that allow practice or familiarity with a task
Psychological mechanisms
The illusion arises through several factors:
Pattern recognition tendencies of the human brain
Optimism bias and desire to feel empowered
Lack of direct introspective insight into actual control levels
In enterprise settings, this manifests in a big way when it comes to building or improving the GTM stack of applications being leveraged—the belief that adding more software will somehow create better alignment. This then connects to what organizational psychologists call "complexity bias"—our tendency to prefer complicated solutions over simple ones, even when simplicity would be more effective.
Technical teams often demonstrate this bias by:
Selecting new, unfamiliar technologies over simpler, proven solutions
Creating complex architectures to appear more sophisticated
Implementing features that add little value but sound interesting
So how do we stay focused but still use tools that’ll give us the insights we need to make decisions in an agile way?
Develop a Minimum Viable Intelligence (MVI) Framework
Based on cognitive load theory and decision-making research, here’s a simple framework for creating a foundation for unifying insights:
Core metrics: Identify 3-5 key metrics that matter across all teams (see above!)
Single source protocol: One designated system of record for each metric. I showed a snapshot of a planning tool I use to help teams align their view of the buyer journey, drop me a note at chae@thought-bakery.com if you’d like a copy sent your way.
Decision velocity tracking: Measure how quickly teams can access and act on key data .THIS is a big one — no one likes realizing they’ve been moving at 🐢 pace when they could have been zooming along 🏎️.
This framework, which is just a starting point, can help teams start overcoming the psychological urge to add complexity when simplicity would serve up a massive ‘peace’ of mind 😅
But be mindful, in this process be sure to focus on productive change.
Instead of deficit-based questions:
- "Why isn't this working?"
- "Who's responsible for the problem?"
- "What are we doing wrong?"
Ask possibility-focused questions:
- "When have we collaborated most effectively?"
- "What enables our quickest decisions?"
- "Where do we see signals of successful integration?"
Research in positive psychology and organizational behavior shows that sustainable change comes from focusing on possibilities rather than problems.
The psychology of progress: Finding stability in change
These three psychological forces—the status quo bias, sunk fallacy effect, and the control illusion, don't exist in isolation. They interact and amplify each other in ways that can paralyze even the most capable teams. When Marketing can't translate their wins into Sales' language, when Product roadmaps don't reflect CS insights, when teams spend more time reconciling dashboards than acting on insights—that's when innovation stalls and opportunities slip away. It’s one of the few things I see with so many clients I’ve worked with. Leadership has a limited view of what’s really happening at the customer level and instead of pushing against that belief, everyone in the GTM functions succumb to the status quo with a nice dose of groupthink.
One of the books that radically shifted how I think and prepare for change was Brad Stulberg’s The Practice of Groundedness. He points out that true stability comes from accepting and adapting to constant change, not resisting it. This paradox perfectly captures what marketing teams need to embrace in 2025: being grounded doesn't mean being static.
The most effective teams develop what Stulberg calls "present-moment awareness" - they're neither stuck in past successes nor paralyzed by future uncertainties. They understand that groundedness comes from building strong practices while remaining flexible enough to adapt them.
This is the ultimate antidote to mindlessly proliferating the status quo: recognizing that consistency and change aren't opponents - they're partners. Your processes should be consistent enough to create stability, but flexible enough to evolve with your market.
Ready to break these patterns? Start here.
Start with one metric that matters across teams—product feature usage is my favorite but you can use lead to conversion rate for acquisition. Map how different teams view it, measure it, and act on it. Look for the gaps in understanding, the disconnects in measurement, the differences in priorities.
Run a two-week sprint where teams share their view of this metric daily. Slack channels are best so the discourse is more natural and not time-specific once feedback is shared in the day by various POCs (points of contact).
When Sales understands how Marketing's early-stage metrics predict customer success…
when Product sees how CS insights could inform feature prioritization…
when teams move from defending their metrics to leveraging their combined insights…
that's… when THE real transformation will begin.
Until next Thursday,