Picture a salesperson about to walk into a hard meeting. A big customer who has already said “not interested” three times. A product they only half understand. And one question running on a loop in their head: how do I not look stupid in there?
I have spent twenty years building tools for that person. Long enough to know that the hardest part of selling is not the pitch. It is the translation.
Marketing builds a message for the market. One overarching story, polished, designed to travel. The salesperson needs something else entirely. They need “what is in this for you”, for this customer, in this meeting, today. Nobody hands them that. So they do it themselves, alone, at eleven at night, turning a generic deck into something a real person might actually care about. Most of the time they are translating a bullshit message that was never going to land, and they know it.
That translation is the most expensive unpaid job in business to business. And for twenty years the industry’s answer has been to buy more tools.
Here is the uncomfortable truth about the tools. “If you build it, they will come” is a lie. Adoption of the average sales platform stalls around half the team, claws into the seventies if you are lucky, and then the company outgrows it and starts again. Sellers are not stupid. They look at the new system and ask the real question: is this here to help me, or to track me, or to quietly write down everything in my head so I am easier to replace?
And the person everyone forgets is the customer. Buying is bloody hard now. Stand in their shoes for a second. A dozen vendors, a thousand data points, and a decision that could go badly wrong with their name on it. “Am I going to get fired if I pick the wrong one?” Your seller is nervous. Your buyer is frightened. And almost nobody is building for the buyer’s fear.
So why now? Because the one thing that was always too expensive finally got cheap. We have talked about mass customisation in sales for twenty-five years. It was never real, because making a message specific to one customer took a team and a fortnight. Now it takes seconds. The work is no longer gathering the information. It is curating it: turning a flood of data into one honest, specific, useful thing a seller can carry into a room.
That is what we build at Its Personal, in a product called SalesX, and the heart of it is an idea we call the value hypothesis.
It is not an answer. That is the whole point. We do not hand the seller a script that says “tell the customer this.” We hand them a credible starting point and one instruction: lead with humility. Say to the customer, “I am probably not a hundred percent right about your numbers. What I want to check is whether I have the direction right.”
I watched this play out recently with a new seller and exactly the cold customer I described. He opened with the hypothesis. The customer looked at it and said, flatly, “you have got this all wrong.” And instead of panicking, the seller said the best thing he could possibly have said: “then tell me what’s right.” The customer did. A dead account became a multi-million conversation. His manager told me afterwards that he had never seen anything turn that fast, from a flat no to a real discussion about value.
Nothing magic happened. The seller did not suddenly become a better presenter. He became a better question. The tool did not replace his judgement. It gave him the nerve to walk in and admit he might be wrong.
Which brings me to the line I have been using for fifteen years, the one that usually gets me into trouble. I want to make the salesperson disappear.
People hear that and assume I want to automate them out of a job. The opposite is true. I do not want to remove the salesperson. I want to remove the things that get in their way. The bias. The reluctance. The hang-up about looking unprepared. The safe retreat into facts and figures when the moment calls for honesty. Strip all of that out, and what is left is the part only a human can do: the tough question, the awkward truth, the quiet work of taking risk off another person’s shoulders. Part provocation, part simplification, part enablement. The machine does the homework. The human has the conversation.
There is a story I tell about a designer. A friend asks him to knock up a quick logo, and he quotes ten thousand dollars. “You must be joking,” says the friend, “that is five minutes of work.” And the designer says: “I am not charging you for five minutes. I am charging you for twenty-five years of experience you are going to get in five minutes.”
That is the business we are in. Not five minutes of AI. Twenty-five years of knowing what works in front of a customer, distilled into something a seller can use before lunch.
So if your salespeople are spending their nights translating, and your buyers are lying awake hoping they do not choose wrong, that is exactly the problem we built for. Do not book a demo and wait. Talk to me. Tell me about the conversation you cannot afford to get wrong, and we will work out how to make it human again.
Frederic