Recent earnings reports from leading industrial and manufacturing companies reveal a pattern that should concern executive leadership teams and investors alike. The issue is not revenue growth. The issue is growth quality.

What does Phil Collins have to do with Signal-Led GTM™? According to legendary bassist Leland Sklar, Phil Collins believed the audience at the first show deserved the same experience as the audience at the hundredth. The result was relentless preparation before ever stepping on stage. The same principle applies to revenue growth. The best GTM teams don't learn during customer conversations. They prepare before them.

by Brian Shea, CEO Lucrum Partners Why May's 172,000 jobs report is a case study in Signal-Led GTM™ The headlines focused on the number. 172,000 jobs added in May. Predictably, the debate immediately became political. Was it proof that economic policies are working? Was it merely a continuation of existing trends? Which administration deserves credit? For business leaders, those questions miss the more important lesson. The May jobs report is not the story. It is the outcome

By Brian Shea, Lucrum Partners For years, Strategic Account Management (SAM) has centered on a familiar set of disciplines: Account plans Relationship maps Executive sponsorship programs Quarterly business reviews Growth plans Opportunity management These practices remain important. But after reviewing the themes, sessions, and practitioner discussions emerging from the 2026 Strategic Account Management Association (SAMA) Conference, one conclusion became clear: The future of

What caught my attention wasn't the technology. It was what one executive said about salespeople. "I'd rather work directly with the executive team than involve salespeople. Most salespeople only care about getting meetings, not getting outcomes for the customer." The room went silent. Not because the statement was controversial. Because everyone in the room knew exactly what he meant.

Most executive teams believe they have a sales execution problem. They don’t. They have a timing problem disguised as a sales problem. Why? Because most go-to-market systems are still architected around a buying motion that no longer exists. The modern B2B buyer does not wait for sellers to educate them. They research independently. They form buying groups early. They define requirements before engagement. They shortlist vendors before sellers even know an opportunit

New research from SBI Growth Advisory and Polaris I/O found that signal-driven account teams: → Generated 4x more qualified opportunities→ Converted at 71% versus 20% for traditional approaches→ Closed deals 7.4x larger→ Closed deals 128 days faster Those are not marginal improvements. Those are operating model differences.

Why custom software firms are still selling like it’s 2018, and paying for it in 2026 From 2015- 2018, the world changed for custom software development firms. “Digital transformation” wasn’t a buzzword, it was a budget unlock. Demand exploded. Buyers flooded the market. And for a moment, it didn’t matter how you went to market. If you had developers…If you could deliver…If you responded fast enough…You grew. Then something subtle, and dangerous, happened. You built your GTM

"Drive to Survive" didn’t make cars faster. It made the signals visible. For the first time, audiences could see: The strategy behind pit stops The tension in split-second decisions The data informing every move The personalities interpreting the signals The show transformed F1 from “cars going in circles” into “a high-stakes, real-time decision system powered by data.” That’s the exact transformation happening in B2B growth right now. The Parallel: Netflix Did for F1 What Si

40–60% of deals end in no decision, 61% are lost to buyer indecision, and 70% of churn signals appear months before renewal—yet most revenue teams still detect problems only after pipeline breaks. For decades, revenue leaders have tried to fix growth problems by focusing on pipeline performance. They analyze conversion rates. They coach sellers on closing skills. They push for more activity. Most pipeline problems don’t actually start in pipeline. They start months earl

Most revenue risk doesn’t come from losing customers. It comes from misclassifying where growth is actually possible.

The real risk is missing revenue signals that are already present—signals that indicate expansion, contraction, competitive entry, or budget reallocation long before they show up in CRM, forecasts, or QBR decks.

Most growth failures don’t happen because strategy was wrong. They happen because leadership teams don’t see execution risk early enough to intervene. That insight, validated repeatedly through our advisory work, research, and board-level engagements—is why Lucrum Partners created Signal-Led GTM™, a new executive execution program designed to help B2B leadership teams scale growth without losing control of go-to-market execution

Most leadership teams don’t fail because they “didn’t work hard enough.” They fail because they miss the moment when confidence begins to erode, and by the time it shows up in revenue, retention, or board pressure, it’s already expensive.

The RepVue Q3 2025 Cloud Index is out—and the signals behind the numbers reveal a commercial landscape undergoing its most significant transformation in a decade.

Interest rates are falling. Employment and GDP are beating expectations. Trade deals are accelerating. In January 2026, the “Big Beautiful Bill” activates, unlocking incentives across infrastructure, digital modernization, broadband, data centers, and domestic innovation. For tech and telecom companies, this isn’t just good macro-noise. It’s a rare, time-sensitive opportunity to win market share, shape enterprise spend, and lock in high-value contracts before the flood of com

When Lucrum Partners released our 2026 GTM Predictions, we framed the upcoming year around a simple but urgent message: Growth in 2026 belongs to the prepared.

2026 will be remembered as the year the market rewarded the disciplined, signal-driven, and buyer-intelligent — and left behind the reactive, story-driven, and nostalgia-led. This isn’t a market correction. It’s a capability correction.

by Lucrum Partners As we move into sales kickoff season, revenue leaders face a clear crossroads: either they run their playbooks like modern offensive coordinators, studying the defense (buyers), audibling at the line, adapting the play mid-game, or they rely on familiar “best practices” that increasingly resemble last season’s Hail Mary: flashy, hopeful, but lacking precision. At Lucrum Partners, we’ve seen enough performance data to know which path wins. The New Buying Gam

The revolving door of executive sales leadership is spinning faster than most companies realize. CROs and VPs of Sales are burning out, being replaced, or walking away, not because they’ve lost their edge, but because the systems they’re asked to run are fundamentally misaligned with how growth actually happens today.In short, leadership churn is often the symptom. The underlying cause is a misfit between what leaders are accountable for and the systems they’ve inherited.