I’ve been selling business-to-business since the 1980s. When I started, it was a personal craft. You got to know the people you hoped to work with, you understood their problems. You sat with them long enough to see the worry underneath the brief, the emotional reason behind the rational decision. Then you fitted what you had to what they actually needed. The best relationships were built one person at a time, and they lasted for years.
Somewhere along the way, we industrialised all of that.
The digitised, results-now world had no patience for the long version. Management needed the numbers by Friday. So the big decisions, the considered ones, the ones that shape a company for years, got forced to the bottom of a funnel and asked to happen now. Decide today. Here’s a rational reason. The people, and the patience, and the craft of helping someone make a real decision for the right reasons, quietly went missing.
What replaced it was a maniacal focus on counting. How many sent, how many opened, how many turned into a lead, then a meeting, then a deal. The quantitative swallowed the qualitative. And the strange thing is, it stopped working. A short-term need became a long-term habit, and the habit gives us short-term results. There are always two or three conversations that matter more than the other six hundred. We started treating all of them the same.
Here’s the part that never changed, no matter how much the tools did.
People buy people. In b2b, more than anywhere, buyers buy reputation, expertise, and the person sitting across the table. They make an emotional decision, then they justify it rationally, and that isn’t a flaw to engineer out. It’s the whole point.
Years ago I was part of a team that won the IBM business. We didn’t win it on price, or on coverage, or a clever number. We won it because they liked the team. They liked the passion, and the nimbleness, and the sense that we’d care. They sent their feedback in a letter, with one instruction on the envelope: don’t open this until we’ve called you. They gave us the human verdict before they’d let us see the scores. I’ve never forgotten it. It’s the most honest thing a buyer ever did for me.
So why build this business now, when so many people are racing the other way?
Because the machines have made the human worth more, not less. Everything is being compressed: the outputs, the analysis, the time itself. The reflex is to automate the humanity out of the work. I think that’s exactly backwards, and it’s the hill I’ll happily die on. Machines are very good at the easy questions, and I’m glad to let them answer those. But a difficult question, the kind you’ve been turning over for months, the kind that survives a couple of false starts, doesn’t want a machine. It wants a person who has seen the problem before.
So we built Its Personal.
We start where most of the industry ends. We begin with the one human being you’re actually trying to reach, and why they’ll decide what they decide. We understand that properly, one to one. Then we widen it with care, one to a few, then one to many, so it gains reach without losing the thread. Strategy first, led by people who have done the work. Technology second, to help us carry it out. We’ll never hand you a piece of software and call it an answer. It is, if you like, a new way to do some very old things.
This isn’t for everyone, and that’s the point. A friend asked me over coffee recently what the new business was about. I told him: one to one, then one to a few, then one to many. He runs six hundred leads a week and has to convert a good share of them to hit his plan. He smiled and said, not us, mate. He was right. We shook hands and I got the coffee. We’re built for the decisions that are too important to rush, and too human to leave to a machine.
I think the wider market is about to learn this. The noise around artificial intelligence will settle. What’s left standing will be a clearer sense of where the machines genuinely help, and where a human has to stay in the lead. I want us to be the people who got there first, and who kept the human firmly in charge while everyone else was handing over the wheel.
So here’s my invitation. If you’ve got a customer relationship that matters too much to become a number in a pipeline, that’s exactly the kind of work we’re here for. This isn’t a form you fill in and wait on. It’s a conversation. Tell me about the decision you’re trying to win, and let’s talk about it like people.
That, after all, is the whole idea. It always was.
Paul