Seth Godin on Strategy: 7 Lessons From Our Eye-Opening Conversation

Saima · July 31

By Saima Rashid

When we invited Seth Godin to join the Revenue Makers podcast, I expected thought-provoking insights. What I didn’t expect was a complete reframe of how we as revenue leaders think about strategy, systems, and even AI.

Seth didn’t speak in buzzwords or frameworks. He spoke in truth. And as I’ve reflected on our conversation, I wanted to share the lessons that stuck with me—the ones I believe are most essential for B2B marketing and revenue leaders navigating complexity, ambiguity, and pressure to deliver fast.

Listen to our interview here:

1. Strategy ≠ Strategic Planning

“People usually view strategy mistakenly as one of two things. Either plans… or a fancy word for tactics.”

Seth was direct about this. Strategic planning is a calendar. Strategy is a direction. A choice. A commitment to become a certain kind of company, for a certain kind of buyer. And that’s not something you can delegate to a planning cycle.

He offered an example I loved:

“Microsoft’s strategy was ‘our software is for companies where you buy this at your job — you’re not going to get fired for buying it.’ The tactics keep changing. The strategy hasn’t changed at all in 50 years.”

At 6sense, we’ve seen the power of this kind of clarity. When our strategy is grounded in identity and purpose — who we’re for, what problems we’re solving, what we stand for — our tactics align naturally. When we lose that thread, everything starts to feel reactive.

Takeaway: Audit your current “strategy.” Is it a plan — or a decision about who you want to become and how you’ll lead your market?

2. Empathy Is a Strategic Advantage

“I don’t know what you know. I don’t see what you see. I don’t want what you want. I don’t believe what you believe. And that’s okay.”

When Seth said that, I underlined it in my notes. Empathy is not the same as niceness (though there’s naturally some overlap). Empathy means operating from a place of curiosity and humility — two things our go-to-market systems desperately need.

Seth connected this to leadership and marketing:

“Empathy becomes one of the pillars of strategy because we have to say, ‘What do they believe, what do they see, what do they seek?’ ”

In revenue operations, we talk a lot about buyer-centricity. But unless we’re operationalizing empathy — through signals, intent data, behavioral understanding, and messaging that respects where the buyer is — we’re just guessing.

Takeaway: Make empathy measurable. Use buyer signals to anticipate needs, guide timing, and orchestrate relevant engagement across functions.

3. Be a “Meaningful Specific”

“If I go to the 6sense homepage, I might not understand half the things on it, but that’s okay because you want to be a meaningful specific, not a wandering generality.”

This golden nugget came in a conversation outside of the podcast recording, but it resonated deeply. Seth visited the 6sense.com home page and remarked that it spoke to the problems and topics that our audience cares about.

So many websites have become part of that gray goo — looking alike, sounding alike, not really clarifying what the company solves for and why anyone should care.

Takeaway: Know your audience, and identify what it is that makes you stand out for them. “Be a meaningful specific, not a wandering generality”

4. Don’t Blame the Team. Fix the System.

“You should either work within systems and get what they give you — or you should change the system. But what you shouldn’t do is work within the system and expect to get something different.”

Seth used examples like meeting culture and college admissions to make his point, but I couldn’t stop thinking about revenue systems — especially the ones we outgrow but never challenge.

Too often, when pipeline lags or conversion rates stall, we look to the people. But more often than not, it’s the system that’s misaligned — overengineered handoffs, unclear ownership, shallow metrics.

Seth sums up the problem:

“Systems hide behind culture to look normal.”

So much of RevOps is about exposing that “normal” to scrutiny. Are our systems serving the strategy or just reinforcing what’s familiar?

Takeaway: Identify one GTM system your team uses every day. Ask: What’s the default behavior it reinforces — and is that behavior helping you serve your buyers?

5. What You Measure Becomes the Culture

“A false proxy is something that is easy to measure but not useful.”

Seth challenged us to stop optimizing for proxies — open rates, lead scores, meetings booked — unless they’re actually moving us closer to strategic outcomes.

He told a story about writing open rates on a whiteboard in a lobby. The numbers went up — not because the metric changed, but because people cared about the number.

“If every time I meet you in the hall you say 7.2, then 7.8, then 8.3, guess what? The culture is going to shift.”

This is something we’ve internalized at 6sense. We track what we want to grow: engagement quality, buying team alignment, conversion by stage. The metric is the message.

Takeaway: Choose one vanity metric to replace this quarter. Define a new signal-based or buyer-centric proxy that better reflects real progress.

6. Use AI to Add Value — Not Create “Gray Goo”

“If you're going to use AI to create the gray goo that lowers costs, please understand that's a race to the bottom.”

This might’ve been my favorite moment in the conversation. Seth didn’t mince words. He drew a clear line between using AI for efficiency vs. using AI for value creation.

He said:

“Either you work for AI — or AI works for you.”

That’s the lens we use at 6sense when we evaluate AI adoption. We don’t just ask, “Does this save time?” We ask, “Does this deepen relevance? Does it improve timing? Does it help us engage the right buyer, in the right way?”

That’s not gray goo. That’s competitive advantage.

Takeaway: Before deploying any AI workflow, ask: Does this improve the buyer’s experience — or just lighten our workload?

7. Play the Long Game (and Know When You’re Surfing vs. Golfing)

“Sometimes you're going to surf and sometimes you're going to play golf. And you need to be very clear about which people are on which team and what you're measuring.”

Seth used the metaphor of surfing vs. golf to explain strategic flexibility:

Golf is about precision, standardization, repeatability.
Surfing is about flow, adaptation, and responding in real time.

We often treat our marketers like golfers — expecting predictable outcomes and linear growth — when in reality, they’re operating in ocean conditions.

As leaders, our job is to know which game we’re playing — and set expectations, metrics, and workflows accordingly.

Takeaway: Look at your current GTM priorities. Are you surfing or golfing? Make sure your systems, teams, and metrics are set up to win the right game.

Final Thoughts

Seth said something near the end of our conversation that keeps echoing in my mind:

“I don’t think your job is to do what you did yesterday, but faster and cheaper. We’ve got people who aren’t as smart as you who can do that.”

As marketing and revenue leaders, we’re not here to scale sameness. We’re here to lead — through systems, through signals, and above all, through strategy.

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Listen to two episodes of insights from Seth Godin on the Revenue Makers podcast: