Sherlock never worked in sales
Or in marketing, for that matter. But they both need him. And so should you.
I regularly visit B2B companies to talk about branding, marketing, and commercial strategy. Almost every time, I see the same pattern. Marketing knows its craft: target audiences, behavioural patterns, campaign logic. Sales knows the client from the inside (who hesitates and why, where the timing is right, what is really being said between the lines). But they barely speak each other’s language.
This is usually diagnosed as a communication problem, or a structural one. Put them in the same room. One department, one budget, one stand-up. Call it Commerce. Problem solved.
But that relocates the friction rather than resolving it. The silo disappears from the org chart and carries on quite happily inside people’s heads. The reason is simpler and more stubborn than org design: marketing is measured on reach and leads, sales on closed revenue. They are not rewarded for the same things, so they do not invest in the same things. You will not fix that with a shared dashboard.
The solution I want to argue for is different. Not structural. Not technological. It starts with a question: what if everyone in your commercial team (marketer, salesperson, account manager) felt a little bit like Sherlock Holmes?
The right Sherlock
Sherlock Holmes has been thoroughly worked over by consultants and keynote speakers. The reason he keeps coming back is not the famous pipe. It is the method.
Holmes never missed a detail, but he also filtered ruthlessly. What set him apart was not observation alone. It was the capacity to connect dots that others could not see, and to do so in service of a single goal: understanding what actually happened. Curiosity was not a choice for him. It was a default state he could not switch off.
That is the quality worth importing. Not Sherlock the solitary genius, but Sherlock the method: the deep, almost compulsive curiosity about what a client is really telling you, what a market signal actually means, and how those two things relate to each other right now.
The Mind Palace (Holmes’s mental archive of everything he had ever perceived, instantly retrievable) is the system that made the method work. You cannot replicate that literally in an organisation. But you can build the conditions for it.
What shared metrics actually mean
If you want a commercial team that thinks and behaves as one, you need to measure them as one. Not marketing on leads and sales on revenue, but both on the full arc. Marketing accountable for conversions and revenue. Sales accountable for reach and lead quality. Both able to claim credit for the whitepaper that a prospect read in January, the webinar they attended in March, and the contract signed in September.
This is not an attribution problem. It is a design choice. When both teams can claim the win at every stage, they stop competing for credit and start collaborating on outcome. The question in the room becomes: what does this client need next, and who is best placed to deliver it?
Imagine you are three conversations into a sales process. Rather than the salesperson working the deal alone, marketing and sales sit down together and ask: what do we know about this client right now? Is there a case study from a similar company that would land well at this moment? A piece of content that addresses the hesitation we heard last week? A reason to reach out that feels helpful rather than pushy? That conversation is only possible when both sides have access to the same knowledge, and when both sides have been paying attention.
The Mind Palace you can actually build
Most CRM systems ask you to capture knowledge in dropdowns, sliders, and status fields. For process data, that works. But human signals do not fit in a dropdown. The salesperson who notices, almost in passing, that a client mentioned succession planning is keeping them up at night, that observation is more commercially valuable than any lead score. And it will never survive the journey from memory to a picklist.
AI has changed what is possible here. Tools that let you speak freely (recording a thought on the drive back from a client meeting, or asking a question before a call) can now feed and query a shared archive of unstructured insight in ways that no structured CRM field ever could. Imagine asking, before calling a CFO with a new proposition: what do we know about this person, what has come up in previous conversations, and what would be a credible hook for this particular moment? A well-fed system can answer that. A dropdown cannot.
The quality of your commercial intelligence stands or falls by the quality of what goes into it. Sherlock wrote everything down, not in boxes, just everything. The organisations that will be best at this are not the ones with the most sophisticated CRM architecture, but the ones where feeding the system has become as natural as sending a message.
The baker at scale
The end goal is not technological. It is human.
Think of the neighbourhood baker, back before loyalty apps and CRM systems existed. He knew that one regular always came in just before the school run, that another hesitated at the counter when money was tight, and that a third would buy the expensive sourdough on Fridays but the plain loaf the rest of the week. No database. No campaign. Just attention, pattern recognition, and the quiet discipline of remembering what mattered to each person who walked through the door.
That baker was a mini-Sherlock. He asked questions, spotted habits, noticed what was left unsaid. He kept a running score in his head for every regular customer, not because he was trained to, but because he was genuinely curious about the people he served. And that curiosity made every interaction feel personal, even when it was routine.
At the scale of a B2B organisation, you cannot achieve that without structure, data, and technology. But technology is never the point. The point is the relevance you create with it, the moment when a client feels genuinely understood rather than merely targeted.
Commercial intelligence is the capacity to be that baker. At scale. It requires people who are curious enough to notice, disciplined enough to capture, and collaborative enough to share. It requires a system that makes all of that frictionless. And it requires a structure that rewards the whole team for the same thing: a client who is genuinely well served.
The real Sherlock in your organisation is not the AI. It is the colleague who cannot help but ask the next question, and who knows where to look for the answer.