Nobody knows anything

William Goldman made a career out of being honest about something the entire movie industry worked hard to hide.

"Nobody knows anything."

And studios paid him record sums.

He spent his career telling them they didn't know what they were doing.

His full version, from his 1983 book Adventures in the Screen Trade, is even blunter:

"Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what's going to work. Every time out it's a guess, and, if you're lucky, an educated one."

He was right.

The emperor has no clothes

Now go walk the floor of any tech conference.

You will find a wise vendor who knows exactly how you should run your marketing campaign. They know the six pillars of customer engagement and the four your brand currently lacks. They know what your customers want, when they want it, and which channel they want it on.

They've never talked to your customers.

But they know.

B2B tech has confused access to patterns with nuance of understanding. Vendors sit on benchmarks across thousands of accounts. Pattern libraries from years of implementations. That's all real, and it's valuable enough to make the guess more educated. There's a significant gap, though, between "we've seen this pattern before" and "we know what you should do."

The gap is you.

Your real customers, your budget, your regulatory environment, the internal politics of getting anything past a committee that thinks a camel is the optimized version of a horse.

The vendor doesn't know any of that.

They've pattern-matched their way to the confidence of Don Draper and presented it as expertise.

AI makes it worse

Now they have benchmarks and a model that generates a 12-step campaign playbook in 47 seconds.

The output looks authoritative. It arrives before you've finished your coffee. Whatever small amount of humility that existed in most sales conversations has evaporated entirely.

This will definitely work for your vertical.

This is the thing your team is missing.

This is the difference between success and failure, and we make it easy.

People reach for the easy button because they're stressed, out of time, and out of budget. When someone presents a crisp answer quickly, the brain wants to accept it.

You'll see how easy it is if you just start using it.

The wrong diagnosis

B2B tech interprets adoption friction as ignorance.

Customer doesn't use the feature? They don't understand it. Customer pushes back on a recommendation? They haven't seen the data. Customer runs the campaign differently than suggested? Not sophisticated enough yet.

This is the wrong diagnosis almost every time.

The customer who pushes back has usually run that approach before and watched it fail. The customer asking "will this actually work for us?" isn't ignorant. They're showing the hard-won skepticism of someone who has watched confident vendor recommendations fail to survive first contact with reality.

Their pain is that they're running their business with imperfect tools, insufficient time, and a budget that got cut in February.

What actually works

Goldman's skepticism didn't make him unemployable; it made him trustworthy. When he said "this feels like it could work," people believed him – because he'd already told them he didn't always know.

The hardest vendors to work with are the ones who always know the answer.

The vendors actually worth working with listen longer than is comfortable. They say "that's different from what we usually see – tell me more." They treat your situation as an opportunity, not as an obstacle to closing.

Nobody knows anything. Not one person in the entire tech field knows for a certainty what's going to work in your market, with your customers, inside your organization.

Every time out it's a guess.

Find the ones trying to make it an educated one.