“Sell to me, as me.”
That was one of the simplest, and most revealing, pieces of advice I heard while interviewing buyers for our Findability, Credibility & the New Rules of Visibility report.
It sounds obvious. Yet the frustration behind it came up again and again in my conversations with Chief People Officers.
Not with selling itself. Buyers do genuinely understand people are trying to grow their businesses. That’s not the issue.
The issue is how the selling often begins.
Use Linkedin as an example…
Connection accepted. Direct Message received. Sales Pitch delivered.
No curiosity. No context. No attempt to understand the person behind the title.
One of the Chief People Officer’s I spoke to had a phrase for it: the “pitch slap.”
In professional services, credibility is fragile. Buyers are primarily buying expertise, and whose expertise they’re willing to stand behind internally. That means the signals you send early really matter.
Generic outreach tells the recipient either you haven’t taken the time to understand their world, or you don’t think it matters.
Neither interpretation builds confidence.
Another Chief People Officer summed it up well: “Do your homework.”
And we’re not talking elaborate research. Just enough to show the message is meant for them, not simply the next name on a list.
Another buyer framed it well: crafting ten well-researched approaches is far better than mailing fifty thousand people. She’s right, it’ll get you a far better return.
For years, outreach has been built around scale. More messages, more automation, more activity.
But senior buyers don’t experience that as effort. They experience it as noise. And they receive a lot of noise.
The messages that land are those that feel very different. They are thoughtful. Contextual. They read like the start of a conversation rather than the start of a transaction.
Precision signals care. Volume signals pressure.
When buyers talk about what makes them respond, the answer is remarkably consistent.
They just want to feel understood. Not flattered with automation. Just simply understood.
That means recognising their context – the sector they operate in, the pressures they face, the constraints they work within. It means asking questions before offering answers.
Just “Sell to, me as me.”
Not as a persona. Not as a segment. Not as a job title. But as a person with a specific set of priorities and pressures.
It might sound like a small behavioural shift. But in professional services, those early interactions carry weight. They shape perception. They create signals about how you and your firm thinks, how it behaves, and whether it can be trusted.
If those signals feel careless, buyers assume the work might be too.
If they feel thoughtful, buyers become curious. And curiosity is where relationships begin.
We explore this more in our 32-page report, Findability, Credibility & The New Rules of Visibility: How professional services firms earn trust and preference earlier.
You can download the full report, completely ungated, by clicking below.
