Marvin Karis on Why Precision is the New Superpower in Sales
Speaker: Marvin Karis, Senior Director of GTM Execution at Dealfront
If there is one person who has seen every possible version of a go to market motion, it is Marvin Karis. After more than seven years at Dealfront and a career spent leading GTM teams across DACH, France, and BeNeLux, he has developed a simple conviction that feels almost rebellious in a world still obsessed with volume.
“Most teams do not have a sales problem. They have a precision problem.”
Marvin believes that the era of high volume sales is finally cracking. The calls. The sequences. The endless outreach. It still runs, but it no longer converts at the level founders expect. Teams drown in activity but starve for meaningful opportunities.
Why spray and hope is still here
Marvin sees the root cause in leadership. Many managers have been raised on dashboards where volume equals competence. It is comforting to point to the charts and say the team is working. It is far harder to ask if the work actually matters.
“Managers chase activity because it looks healthy from the outside even when it produces nothing internally.”
The result is predictable. Reps burn time speaking to companies that were never in market. Pipelines inflate but revenue does not move.
The shift toward sniper level targeting
Marvin argues that the most successful teams are moving in the opposite direction. They study their ideal customer profile at a deeper level than ever before. Not demographics. Not surface attributes. Actual patterns of behavior.
He puts it simply:
“The best sellers do not ask who can buy. They ask who must buy.”
This mindset creates a different type of rep. One who reads their market like an analyst. One who uses intent signals instead of guesswork. One who works ten accounts with focus rather than one hundred accounts with panic.
Quality makes the entire GTM engine stronger
It is easy to assume precision benefits only sales. According to Marvin, that is not true. It strengthens marketing, because campaigns become sharply tailored rather than generic. It strengthens product, because feedback comes from real customers with real pain. It even strengthens customer success, because the right buyers churn less.
“When you pick the right accounts, everything downstream becomes easier. Even the problems are better problems.”
Why pairing SDRs and AEs matters more than people think
Marvin is a strong believer in pairing teams by industry and pattern, not by random assignment. When an SDR understands the world of the AE they support, outreach becomes intelligent instead of mechanical. The handoff becomes frictionless. And the buyer feels understood instead of hunted.
“If your SDR does not know the world of your prospect, they cannot create interest. They can only create noise.”
The future belongs to teams that understand timing
Marvin is convinced the next wave of sales will be defined by timing rather than volume. Tools will reveal which companies just hired a new leader, just expanded a region, just announced a strategy shift. The teams that act on these signals will win most of the pipeline before their competitors even wake up.
“The next competitive edge is knowing who is ready today, not who might be ready someday.”
The great mindset change
For Marvin, the hardest part is not the tooling. It is not the process. It is the culture. Teams must be willing to trade comfort for accuracy. They must redefine what productivity means. And they must accept that more input does not mean more revenue.
His message is clear:
“Precision is not a luxury anymore. It is survival.”
