Jungian analysis of Original Sin and what it taught me about B2B sales

The Garden Of Eden is really a story about becoming self-aware.

Adam and Eve eat the fruit and "knew they were naked." For the first time, they could see themselves from the outside.

Jung would say this is the cost of consciousness. Once you can see yourself, you feel shame, anxiety and the gap between who you are and who you think you should be.

It's tragedy and transcendence simultaneously.

Before eating the apple, they were not good or bad. They simply "were," like an animal operating under its programming.

The "goodness" we see in that innocence isn't goodness at all. It's blindness. You can't be good if you don't even know you could be otherwise.

Once we wake up to that choice, most of us don't make it though. We fake it instead, allowing our ego to construct something out of the raw materials.

We build a persona, a "good person" identity, and push everything that doesn't fit into what Jung called the shadow.

The shadow doesn't go away, though. It keeps acting through us, usually where we're least looking. When we fail to acknowledge our innate ability for cruelty, for lust, for greed, our shadow manifests in ways we can't control.

Sin is not having a shadow, it's attempting to stuff it into a corner praying it will stay there.

But it never does. And so people do all sorts of terrible things all the while whispering to themselves that they are good, decent people.

GTM organisms work exactly the same way.

Every company has a persona it constructs. An identity it projects internally and externally. Things it knows to be true.

"Our ICP is obvious."

"Buyers love the product."

"The messaging is fine, we just need more volume."

"Sales just needs to close better."

Then the campaign flops. Pipeline dries up. Win rates slide.

So we project. It's the list, the market, the SDRs, the economy, the board. It's anything but the construct we've been sculpting for years while the truth stays far away from our blueprint.

"What's wrong with them" is almost always easier to say than "what's wrong with us."

When I'm working with clients, a lot of times the biggest job is not building a better CRM or getting email response rates up, it's just getting them to acknowledge their own human frailty enough to let someone help them.

GTM motions have shadows too. It's the things no one wants to say in a leadership call.

That we don't actually know who our best customers are. That we've never asked lost deals why they left. That our positioning is what the founder wished were true three years ago.

Corrosive threads, slowly eating away at the entire machine like lye washing over aluminum.

There's no going back to the garden. You can't unknow your churn numbers. You can't unsee the deals you keep losing to the same competitor.

You can get very good at explaining why your pipeline is broken and still have a broken pipeline. Plenty of teams have a beautiful post-mortem deck and the exact same results next quarter.

Ego loves insight.

The intellect is a beautiful servant but a very poor master.

It turns "we were wrong" into a smart-sounding framework and then goes right back to doing what it was doing.

GTM orgs fail for the same reason that humans fail personally. They know what they are doing is not working, but change is harder than trudging through the muck and mire that they're currently in.

People would rather continue suffering in a familiar way than risk a new and different suffering. They are usually more comfortable with the cost of inaction than action, even if there is light at the end of the tunnel.

What actually moves things is admitting we don't know, and that we can't think our way out of it alone.

"I don't know what our best customers have in common."

"I don't know why we lose these deals."

"I don't know if this message lands."

That admission is what opens the door. You stop defending the plan and start testing one. You talk to buyers. You run the small experiment instead of the big launch. You let the data embarrass you.

And you keep doing it. The ego doesn't stay humbled. Every win becomes a new identity to protect, and the shadow just moves somewhere else. The work has to be daily, not a one-time reckoning.

Every real breakthrough I've seen with clients started the same way. Somebody in the room dropped the ego and said "I think we've been wrong about this."

The deepest form of original sin is the ego's belief that it can be its own savior, despite all evidence to the contrary, even after eating the apple and waking up to its own exposure. Somewhere deep down it always believes, and wants us to believe, that it can solve the problem if you just give it a little more rope...

In GTM, the sooner we admit we're flawed and don't know, the sooner we make progress.