Eve Chen says B2B revenue teams are missing buyer-group authority

Revenue strategist Eve Chen will publish Era Six on Sept. 25, arguing that B2B systems still confuse engagement with purchase readiness and fail to surface who actually has authority inside enterprise buying groups. The book introduces Buyer Group Intelligence as a way to judge consensus, decision structure and readiness more accurately.

Why it matters: - Enterprise deals now involve more people, more departments and more conflict than many revenue systems can track. - Chen argues that older qualification models can make pipelines look healthy while forecasts stay fragile. - The book is aimed at B2B revenue teams trying to identify real buying readiness, not just interest.

What happened: - Eve Chen will publish Era Six: Rethinking Revenue Readiness in a World of Buyer Groups on Sept. 25, 2026. - Chen says the book argues revenue prediction systems were built for a buyer model that no longer exists. - Chen frames the problem as authority-blind qualification, where engagement is treated as a proxy for purchase intent. - Era Six is available for pre-order on Amazon now.

The details: - Chen says AI did not create the qualification problem, but has accelerated a long-running assumption that engagement equals readiness. - She traces that assumption to the CRM era, when companies used engagement because decision authority was harder to measure. - The book introduces Buyer Group Intelligence as a discipline focused on whether the people needed to approve a purchase have been identified, engaged and brought toward consensus. - Chen's Intelligence Qualified Match replaces engagement scoring with four checks: whether the need is confirmed, whether the authority structure is understood, whether the right people are involved and whether consensus is real. - Forrester reports that the average business purchase now involves 13 people inside the buying organization, and 89% span at least two departments. - Gartner found that 74% of B2B buyer teams experience unhealthy conflict during the decision process. - Gartner also found that teams reaching consensus are 2.5 times more likely to report a high-quality deal. - Chen said revenue teams often get a CRM field instead of an answer when they ask why they lost a seven-figure deal.

Between the lines: - The argument is less about new technology than about a basic measurement problem in B2B revenue operations. - Chen is pushing the industry away from account-level reporting and toward person-level decision visibility. - The timing matters because AI can scale existing sales-process assumptions faster than teams can correct them. - The book also signals a broader critique of common pipeline metrics that may capture activity without revealing decision power.

What's next: - Era Six publishes Sept. 25, 2026. - Chen says interviews, review copies and the book trailer are available on request. - The book includes a foreword by Len Augustine, a 25-year veteran of Oracle and SAP. - Endorsements come from current and former senior leaders at Salesforce, Splunk, TechCXO, F5 and Plug and Play. - Andrew Everingham, former marketing executive at Salesforce, says the book asks what if the industry has been measuring the wrong things all along. - Chen is CEO and co-founder of Catalysi and founder of The Growth Engine, and she lives in Denver, Colorado.

The bottom line: - Chen's central claim is that B2B revenue teams need better visibility into buyer-group authority and consensus before they can trust pipeline signals.