Book review
How to Align Marketing and Sales for Predictable Revenue
Closed Circuit Selling Adem Manderovic & George Coudounaris
Did you ever meet someone face to face for the first time and feel like you already know them from years of Zoom conversations?
That happened to me nine months before the publication of Closed Circuit Selling when I met Adem Manderovic and George Coudounaris at my favourite bookstore café Ampersand in Sydney. They became the 75th guests in my engaging #42coffees series on LinkedIn.
Our conversation quickly turned to a topic many revenue leaders quietly struggle with: the disconnect between marketing and sales. In my simple view, marketing talks to an audience and thus generate leads, sales talks to self-sourced or converted individuals to get them over the line while the customer success teams try to retain those clients.
The challenge: the intelligence flowing through those departments often stops somewhere in the middle. And this is exactly the structural problem Adem and George address in their new book, Closed Circuit Selling.
Their argument is simple but powerful: most organisations do not miss revenue because of lack of effort, talent, or tooling. They miss revenue because the commercial system itself is broken.
Two Practitioners Building Revenue Architecture
Both authors bring complementary perspectives to this challenge. Adem Manderovic spent more than two decades building and repairing revenue systems across industries – from luxury retail to SaaS and enterprise deals. His experience includes leading revenue teams, closing multimillion-dollar contracts, and refining the cataloguing and validation systems that ultimately became the foundation of Closed Circuit Selling.
What makes his story remarkable is that the system was born in the field, not just in theory. Adem began capturing insights about prospects in a simple notebook, such as tracking timing signals, motivations, and buying readiness. Over time this evolved into a structured method that helped him achieve close rates far above industry averages.
George Coudounaris complements this field experience with a strategic lens. As co-founder of The B2B Playbook and the B2B Incubator, he has helped hundreds of companies design demand generation systems and align marketing activity with revenue outcomes.
When George saw Adem’s cataloguing system in action, he realised something fundamental: this was a missing layer in modern go-to-market architecture, not just another sales methodology.
A Story Told in Three Movements
The book unfolds in three distinct parts: The Break, The Pattern, and The System.
The first part examines the uncomfortable reality many organisations face: full pipelines worked by busy teams, yet revenue targets remain out of reach. Instead of blaming individuals or tools, the authors argue that the underlying commercial structure is flawed.
In the second part, the book explores the signals across high-performing organisations. Through stories and observations gathered over decades, the authors show that successful companies share common behaviours: they catalogue their markets precisely, recognise buyer timing signals, and operate on validated intelligence rather than hope.
The final section introduces the actual mechanics of Closed Circuit Selling. Rather than focusing on isolated sales tactics, the system integrates marketing, sales, customer success, product, and leadership into a continuous feedback loop.
The result is what the authors describe as Revenue Architecture: a structure where information flows continuously across teams instead of disappearing between departments.
Useful Quotes From the Book
Even without turning the book into a collection of sound bites, several sentences stand out in a partially shocking way:
- “Systems don’t fail because individual parts are broken. They fail because the parts stop talking to each other.”
- “By the time a client talk to your sales rep, they’re not looking for education. They’re validating their decision or negotiating price.”
- “You have a system that prevents the people in one part of the business from knowing what people in another part of your business have learned.”
Real-Life Adaptability
What makes Closed Circuit Selling particularly relevant is its practical orientation.
The book does not try to compete with existing sales methodologies or frameworks. Instead, it focuses on how organisations structure the flow of information between teams.
Sales leaders improve the quality of conversations and recognise timing signals earlier. Marketing teams escape the trap of being reduced to a lead generation function. And for leadership teams, it means designing systems where marketing, sales, product, and customer success operate around shared intelligence.
This approach ultimately shifts the focus from short-term activity metrics toward long-term commercial alignment – surely with a political aspect that the Chief Revenue function has to solve to break the existing silos.
Inspiration for Fellow Writers
From a writing perspective, the book is interesting because it translates decades of operational experience into a structured narrative.
Rather than presenting the system purely as theory, the authors anchor their concepts in stories from real life experience. I can vouch for that as I worked within those silos at corporate tech vendors where I observed many of the mentioned challenges. This approach gives the book a practical rhythm that makes complex revenue architecture easier to understand.
For authors working on their own expertise books, it offers a useful reminder: the strongest frameworks often emerge from lived experience rather than abstract models.
Final Verdict
In many organisations, the gap between marketing, sales, and customer success remains one of the biggest barriers to predictable revenue.
Closed Circuit Selling tackles that problem at its root. Instead of optimising isolated tactics, Adem Manderovic and George Coudounaris propose a broader architecture that connects the entire revenue organisation.
For leaders responsible for go-to-market strategy, revenue operations, or commercial alignment, this book provides a fresh perspective on how demand, conversion, and expansion can work as one system.
And for anyone who has ever wondered why a full pipeline still fails to translate into predictable revenue, the concept of closing the commercial circuit may offer the missing piece.
In conversation
Q&A with Adem Manderovic & George Coudonaris
1. What was the deciding moment to write this book?
AM: The seed was planted in 2014. I was working under Daniel Jensen at Sinclair, trying to do two hours of cardio every day, and I wrote the whole thing out on my phone while I was on the bike – the accident, the recovery, what I did, how I got through it, what it felt like. I sent it to everyone at Sinclair and the unanimous response was: this needs to be a book. I started posting about it on LinkedIn, writing articles, building traction from that story around mindset and injury recovery – and that ran all the way through to 2017. But the deciding moment to make it a business book, and to make it happen now, was when I started seeing sprinklings of people in the market mirroring what George and I were saying in 2025. I knew we had to get the piece out that gave the backstory – the thing that cemented it in time and showed where this all actually came from.
GC: From my side, it became undeniable when the people we were working with – and plenty who weren‘t – kept validating everything Adem had been saying. Podcasts and self-serve programs help people get across what we’re doing, but there‘s nothing like a book. Especially in the sales sphere, a book with proof is paramount as a source of authority. But there was also a very specific gap I kept seeing when working with companies through our demand gen program, The B2B Incubator: marketing being completely reduced to the lead gen hamster wheel, and nobody clearly naming the real reason why. Everyone in marketing talks about measurement, but they don’t talk about the fact that marketing is measured on MQL because of how sales are measured – and the downstream consequences of that. I could see that pattern across 300+ companies. But I couldn‘t be the marketer going out and telling marketing and sales it was the CRO’s fault for how things are structured. That message had to come from Adem. I would never have fully realised it without him either.
2. How long did it take from concept to launch?
AM: Honestly, if you count the original concept it goes back to 2014. I tried a version in 2020 – wrote it one way and people said it was too full on, wrote it another way and they said there wasn‘t enough detail, so I went back to the first version. I cold DM’d six publishing houses, got meetings with all of them, and they all passed – said it wasn't a business book. George saw one of those earlier versions and it was pretty heavy. Without his idea to turn each story into a learning lesson – to give the lived experience as receipts rather than just narrative – it stayed in that in-between place of too much and not quite right at the same time.
GC: Adem had been sending me points and extracts from early last year, but I kept pushing back because I genuinely didn't see it as the priority yet. Once we both locked in that it absolutely had to happen, that was around August 2025. From that point – really fleshing out the manuscript, working through the structure, all the way to be published on 2 March 2026 – it was about six months. So depending on how you count it: ten-plus years of concept, or six months of serious execution.
3. How did you perform the research to create the practical content?
AM: The New Year‘s Eve going into 2024, I sat down for two weeks and just wrote out every single story I could remember. That’s the foundation – 24 years of lived experience across 12 industries and multiple countries. Real companies, real deals, real names. We didn't fictionalise anything. I also sent the relevant sections directly to the people involved for their approval. I gave the section about Mark Reval to Mark Reval himself. Mark was my boss at EPAC Salary Solutions, which became RACV Finance and was eventually bought out by Smart Salary. He was my mentor and a hard man – he would not tolerate any stretching of the truth. If something was off, he would have told me to rewrite it. Full stop.
GC: The research is the stories. That‘s what makes it different from most business books. Adem’s experience spans over 24 years, 12 industries, multiple countries – and it‘s all named and detailed in the book. I drew on my side of things too – working with 300-plus companies through the Incubator, plus everything on the agency side – to identify the patterns of what consistently worked and what didn’t. And then we deliberately went and sought third-party validation. Adem‘s idea to get 12 or 13 of the biggest names in revenue on the podcast last year – to talk through this with them and show that many had independently arrived at similar conclusions – was a masterstroke. That’s not just content. That became a structural part of the book itself.
4. What was the biggest challenge along the process (and how did you overcome it)?
AM: I think it was figuring out which version of the story to tell and what structure to use to tell it. We knew the book had to be bulletproof – the framework represents a significant departure from where most of the market is right now. Even though others have written impactful books based on less, we had to make sure the structure was right. It needed to carry the weight of 24-plus years of lived experience without collapsing under it.
GC: There were versions that read almost like a memoir – genuinely fascinating, but they risked people getting so caught up in the emotional journey that they missed the core message. We didn‘t want that. We needed the stories to teach, not just to entertain. So the challenge was finding the balance: the origin stories that give the framework its credibility and context, followed by the detailed framework itself. From the early feedback, I think we found it. People are engaging with how Adem came to realise all of this, right from the very beginning, from when he worked with Mr. Christopher Chronis, and they’re carrying that through into the framework. The other big challenge was demonstrating that this isn‘t some kind of magic potion that got whipped up. It’s built entirely from first principles. That‘s where the podcast interviews became critical – serious revenue leaders across the industry independently arriving at the same conclusions. That third-party validation didn’t just support the book, it became part of its architecture.
5. What was your own reflection along the journey?
AM: George has heard a lot of stories. It feels like a monumental task until it's not. And then once the market starts talking about circuits and closed loops and first principles, which they were starting to, you just have to put the skates on and get it out there.
GC: As Adem said, you just have to get started. Adem would send me a draft and say “it‘s done” and I’d open it and there'd be 3,000 words. But that was genuinely useful, because it gave us something real to build from. You never get started waiting for the perfect version. We also went almost full circle structurally. We went one way, got feedback, went another way, then came back to something close to the original but with the right shape around it.
Broadly, we think people are starting to come around to what Closed Circuit Selling is because the environment is forcing it. When companies no longer have endless VC money masking bad go-to-market, and when so-called best practice is being published by big tech companies with vested interests and then picked up by companies that simply can‘t afford to spend infinitely and get little back – the value of what we’re talking about becomes obvious.
6. What is the outcome in having this book available?
AM: It consolidates the category that George and I have created. Until now, everything in the market has been built around how to enhance a silo. Revenue Alignment Architecture is something different – it‘s about building organisational structure and organisational success. The book gives the market the awareness and the pillars to understand what that actually means. What we’ve also built with Chief Revenue School is, in some ways, a challenger to McKinsey – not to Challenger, Gap, or SPIN, but to the full-picture strategic layer that McKinsey occupies. That‘s a big task for two people to take on themselves. But the book leads with that change. It gives people the backbone to have their aha moments before they’re even in the room with us.
GC: It‘s our stake in the ground. No fluff. Here are the origin stories of the framework. Here’s exactly how it works in practice. Here‘s how it connects sales, marketing, and customer success back to the market. Here’s 24 years of it working. And crucially – it‘s the thing that reaches the people we can’t reach directly. For those who aren‘t working with us, who are going through things in their own organisations and trying to understand why things keep breaking down – this is the comprehensive view they can get in their own time. That’s what the book does that nothing else quite can.
7. What would you advise others about writing their book?
AM: Stay true to what you believe in, but structure it in a way that makes it palatable. And write it for the people who are going to carry that message forward – because they‘re the ones who are going to lend the book to someone else with notes in the margins saying you have to read this. Those are the people whose weight of feedback and numbers will actually drive the change you’re trying to make.
GC: Write for your ideal reader. Use their language. Think about what matters to them and what format they‘ll actually engage with. We used storytelling, direct quotes, a lot of white space – deliberately, because a sales audience will engage with that far more readily than a dense textbook format. Get stuff down on paper as early as possible and let it evolve from there, because you will never start if you’re waiting for it to be right first. But do think deeply about structure early – that saves an enormous amount of pain later. And practically: build your waitlist at least three months before launch with a dedicated landing page. We did that, and it made a real difference in getting the book into the right hands from day one.
Also, speak to people who have done it before. Gunnar provided an enormous amount of encouragement and guidance!
Adem Manderovic & George Coudounaris: “Close Circuit Selling”, The B2B Playbook 2026, ISBN 979-8-24910112-1 (Paperback)
Adem Manderovic & George Coudounaris: “Close Circuit Selling”, The B2B Playbook 2026, ISBN 979-8-24910112-1 (Paperback)More about the book: theb2bplaybook.com/ccs-resources
Also published on Medium
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