I have known Frans de Groot for a long time. My brother worked for him at his creative bureau over thirty years ago. Even then, Frans was talking about the marketing methodology he’d built, called BITS. It scarred me for life. Ever since, I have queried the connection between marketing and sales. Most marketers still can’t answer the question. Harvard Business Review just published a piece declaring that agentic AI is “blurring the line between sales and marketing.” Blurring? There was no line to begin with. Not if you build your campaign or company the BITS way.
No line to blur
HBR’s diagnosis: most companies are still bolting AI onto marketing and onto sales, separately, function by function. Meanwhile the customer experiences one relationship, not two departments. Some numbers behind that:
- Over 80% of consumers now use multiple channels to research or buy
- B2B buyers engage across ten channels in a typical journey, double what it was less than a decade ago
- Inconsistent information across teams is the number one reason buyers cite for switching suppliers
- Market leaders are four times more likely to run true one-to-one personalisation
Their conclusion: the winners are redesigning marketing and sales as a single system, with a shared customer data foundation and shared incentives, measuring pipeline quality, conversion and customer lifetime value instead of the old marketing-qualified-lead versus sales-qualified-lead handoff. Correct. Also, not new.
Built backward, from day one
BITS is an alternative to the 4Ps. Not Product, Place, Promotion, and Price, but Branding, Image, Traffic, and Sales. And the campaign is built backward. It starts with Sales, and the profit margin from Sales, because that is the maximum budget you have. Sales tells you the Traffic you need. Image tells you how many potential customers will have to like you. Branding tells you how many need to know you exist. That is a closed loop. HBR just gave it a technology layer and a McKinsey report. Recognition at last.
The Seven Laws of Guaranteed Growth
The messages from Frans’s book, “The Seven Laws of Guaranteed Growth, BITSING,” carry the same discipline in plain language:
- Set three goals: continuity, ambition, and dream. Without goals, you are rudderless.
- Focus on the facts only
- Realised turnover is the only metric that counts
- Focus on your strengths — use the sharpest pencil
- Ignore change management, focus on small increments
- There are only three barriers to selling: preference, buying behaviour, and loyalty. Rank them. Let that inform the campaign.
- A scorecard comparison against competitors tells you where to focus
- Categorise the differences as emotional, rational, or relational, and let that inform focus too
- Find your not-to-copy. There is always one.
- Never spend more than the sales forecast of the campaign justifies
Ownership sharpens
It is simple. When execution converges, ownership sharpens. As AI agents take over segmentation, outreach, and lead handling, marketing and sales end up sharing responsibility for the same numbers, because there’s nowhere left to hide behind a departmental metric. That is precisely why CFOs love BITS and CMOs, historically, less so. BITS makes marketing accountable from day one. It doesn’t wait for AI to force the issue.
The excuse that just died
HBR’s warning: “AI can scale inconsistency as easily as it scales efficiency.” Give a fragmented system a faster engine, and you get faster fragmentation, not less of it. BITS was already built to close off that escape hatch. Logical, factual, numbers-driven, with very little room to dodge the truth. Very Dutch. Very direct. The Navy SEAL approach to marketing: extreme ownership. The cheque, or the bucks, stop with you. AI doesn’t remove that requirement. It removes the last excuse for not meeting it.
The go-to-market engineer needs a not-to-copy
HBR’s other headline finding is a new role: the go-to-market engineer, designing and running the agentic workflows that span both functions. Fine. Give that person a BITS scorecard on day one. Without a not-to-copy, an AI agent will optimise your outreach into a perfectly efficient version of everyone else’s outreach. Efficient sameness is still sameness.
BITS AI
The technology to build the closed loop is no longer the constraint. AI has now made BITS unavoidable. The constraint now is whether leadership has the mandate and courage to design around the customer and sales instead of around the org chart.
If you want to find out more about the BITS methodology, DM me “BITS”. The methodology is now also available in Spain.
