Focus on People

In a world of "slop" and "static messaging" segmented, focused conversation that's built around the recipient differentiates you.

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Most B2B teams still believe the key to winning hearts and deals is personalization—swapping in a name here, a school mascot there, maybe nodding to the weather in Columbus. It’s industrialized flattery, and your buyers see right through it. The companies forging real relationships (and real growth) are the ones who obsess not over data fields, but over understanding—the ones who treat every connection not as an opportunity for “targeting,” but as a living conversation. Here’s why focusing on the person in front of you—moment to moment—outperforms even the slickest personalization engine, and how you can operationalize that mindset across sales, marketing, and team leadership.

Why “Personalization” Alone Doesn’t Move the Needle

Personalization is now table stakes—and increasingly, background noise. Mentioning that your prospect’s daughter plays varsity soccer might get a smile, but it rarely wins a second meeting. What buyers, users, and teams crave is deeper: proof that you actually see them and are curious enough to understand.

At Rising Tides Agency, we’ve worked with SaaS and agency teams large and small. The lowest-performing campaigns have a pattern: their “personalization” is formulaic, and their messaging is broad—speaking to industries, not actual people. Engagement tanks, conversion rates crawl downward. Why? Because nobody wants to be a persona—they want to be heard.

  • Stat to chew on: Gartner found that only 24% of B2B buyers feel the personalization they receive is “useful” or “authentic.” Worse: 44% say generic personalization signals disinterest, not connection.
    (Gartner Behavioral B2B Buying Survey, 2024)

The broad-targeting trap:
Marketing teams segment audiences on paper, but their messaging still goes out in “buckets”—roles like “VP Marketing,” industries like “Retail Tech,” or company stages like “Seed.” This is an illusion of focus. In practice, it means landing no real emotional resonance with anybody.
We’ve onboarded clients whose nurture sequences listed seven industries—“If you’re in SaaS, or a service business, or consulting”—and wondered why their best leads went cold.

  • A client at Rising Tides Agency increased their booked demo rate by 2.8x simply by rewriting copy to explicitly reference current pain points for each role (“We’re seeing early-stage RevOps leads spending over 8 hours a week wrangling failed invoices; is that on your radar?”) instead of industry descriptors.

Key takeaway:
If your messaging can be sent to anyone, it connects with no one. People crave evidence you get their lived reality—not just their LinkedIn profile.

Interested to learn how experts are managing high volume (and extreme qualifying) cold email for appointment setting? Join me and experts on both agentic and copy driven marketing to find out how to stay ahead for your business. Our live event is happening in early September, so block your calendar today!

Conversation > Personalization

Here’s the central fallacy: companies think personalization IS the shortcut to trust. It’s not. Conversation is.

Let’s break this down:

Personalization is cheap. Conversation costs attention.
Most personalization in B2B is easy:

  • Scanning LinkedIn for alma maters

  • Dropping in their city’s weather

  • Mentioning the CEO’s latest Medium post

This is fine as a door-opener. But it’s table stakes, and buyers are tired of it. The signals are too easy to fake. Mentioning someone’s local high school shows you have internet access, not empathy.

Conversation, on the other hand, is alive. It can’t be faked.
True conversation requires humility and curiosity. You’re not just gathering facts; you’re giving your attention, listening for nuance, and inviting your prospect to shape the dialogue. It's how you learn what isn’t in their LinkedIn bio:

  • What real-world obstacle is keeping them up at night

  • Where they see the opportunity (not just budgeted, but believed-in)

  • What they wish vendors did differently

You don’t have to carry the show
Too many B2B teams conflate “value” with “talking.”
They build elaborate nurture flows and sales scripts, always putting themselves at the center: “Here’s what we do, here’s our differentiator, here’s our stat sheet.”
But the best calls are balanced, or even slightly weighted to the buyer.
Think of the most memorable discussions you’ve had with potential clients or even internally—how often did they light up when you simply asked, “What have other solutions missed for you so far?” and let them run?

  • Data point: Gong’s 2025 B2B Conversation Analysis found that top-closing reps spoke for just 49% of the average call; the remainder was probing questions, active listening, and clarifying. This produced 23% higher close rates than talk-heavy rivals.
    (Gong Research, 2025)

How to lead with questions:
The best conversations always begin with sincere curiosity:

  • “I noticed your team’s headcount doubled last year—what’s been the hardest adjustment?”

  • “You mentioned invoice reconciliation is a time sink—what does your process look like today?”

  • “What’s the one thing you wish your current vendors would actually listen to?”

This isn’t just discovery—it’s engagement. Each follow-up can go deeper, guided by their actual words, not your assumptions.

Conversation is a flywheel
Every real, back-and-forth conversation makes your next outreach better. You accumulate context and insight—signals to refine your segments, shape messaging, and tune your value prop. Done well, your “personalization” in the next round isn’t formulaic. It’s about this person’s journey.

The Unbalanced Conversation—A Hidden Company Killer

You see it in more than sales—team meetings, onboarding calls, client reviews.
Far too much airtime on one side (often yours), and not enough space for the other party to feel seen and heard. This imbalance silently erodes trust, loyalty, and ultimately, revenue.

Why? Because everyone’s an expert in their own pain.
If your process clutters the dialog, leaves little whitespace for the customer (or colleague) to respond, or constantly jumps to solutions without uncovering context, you lose two things:

  • Accurate information (you’re chasing symptoms, not root causes)

  • The trust required to take your guidance seriously

Anecdote:
We worked with a SaaS CFO who ran onboarding calls like investor pitches—30 minutes of features, PowerPoints, and “You're in great hands.” Churn at month three was 2x above industry norms—teams didn’t know how to use the product because they never got to articulate their real-world goals and blockers.
When our client flipped the script and dedicated the first call to “what’s actually broken for you today?” their post-onboarding NPS shot up 18 points.

Where does unbalance show up most?

  • Sales calls: More pitching than probing

  • Team check-ins: Leaders dominate updates, stifling feedback

  • Client reviews: Reporting outputs (“here’s what we did”), not drawing out reactions or course corrections

  • Project kickoffs: Agendas set top-down, not collaboratively

The simple litmus test:
After every high-stakes interaction, ask:

  • How much did we talk, versus listen?

  • What did we learn—and who heard felt heard?

If the answers skew your way, you’ve missed an opportunity to deepen connection and insight.

Expertise is Assigned—Earn It Moment by Moment

No matter what your website claims, nobody believes you’re an expert until they experience it. That experience isn’t won by being the loudest or most precise; it’s won by being the most attentive and adaptive.

True expertise is about context:

  • Did you notice that the buyer’s team is short-staffed and adjust your onboarding promises accordingly?

  • Did you pick up that the CFO hates surprise line items, so you preemptively document every project cost and flag deviations early?

  • Did you catch that your service lead is burnt out by weekly updates, so move to a biweekly, high-trust cadence?

The operators who become indispensable are those who make their stakeholders feel uniquely understood, not just “serviced.”

Quote to keep in mind:

“Expertise isn’t a credential. It’s the experience of feeling understood.”
— Adapted from David Perell, “Expertise is a Social Assignment”

How to Operationalize “People-First” Across Your Business

Let’s get tactical. If “Focus on the People” is your north star, here’s how to make it more than a slogan:

  1. Audit all your core communications

    • Test: Strip your outreach of all names and custom fields. Does it still sound generically applicable to anyone? Rewrite until it feels like only one type of person would care.

    • Example: Instead of, “Hi [FIRST NAME], I noticed you’re in [CITY]...” swap for, “Last week, three ops leaders told us their #1 blocker was manual reconciliation. What’s topping your list?”

  2. Build question frameworks over pitch decks

    • List 10 open-ended questions that get your buyers, team, or clients talking about what matters now—not last quarter’s KPI. Make these your playbook for any first touch.

    • Use each answer as a new branch in the conversation, not a setup for your slide.

  3. Measure conversation balance

    • Leverage auto note-takers or CRM plugins to see who dominates meetings. Set a target ratio—ideally, your contact should talk 55–60% of the time.

    • Train reps and managers to pause and ask: “What else should I know?” at least twice in every meeting.

  4. Reflect your learnings in real time

    • Recap what you’ve heard at the end of every call—“What I’m hearing is _____, did I get that right?”

    • Adjust your follow-ups and deliverables based on their responses. Show, don’t just tell, that you’re adapting to their needs.

  5. Feedback loops: ask before you assume

    • Before launching a new feature, service, or process, pulse your users or staff. “Would this solve what you described to me?” The best insight comes before the build, not after the launch.

  6. Celebrate curiosity, not just certainty

    • Reward team members who bring back surprising insights from customers.

    • Make space in meetings to air “unknowns” and open questions, not just status updates.

Example playbook:
At Rising Tides Agency, every first demo call now ends with one simple question: “If you could wave a magic wand and fix one part of your billing process tomorrow, what would it be?”
We use the answers not just to qualify, but to rewrite nurture sequences, tune onboarding, and even build product features. The result: a 31% increase in at-risk deal saves—because we were addressing the actual problems, not imagined ones.

“Focus on the People” Is the Ultimate Growth Hack

When you obsess over segmentation, personalization, and automation, you move at scale—but at the cost of human connection. The real wins—loyal clients, high-performing teams, deals that close and stick—are reserved for the companies and leaders who tune every touchpoint for the reality, needs, and dynamic context of the person across the table (or Slack thread).

Forget being everywhere. Be relevant to someone—right now—with questions, open-ended curiosity, and the discipline to listen and adapt.

In every interaction, ask yourself:

  • Did I treat this as a conversation, or a transaction?

  • Did the other person walk away feeling more understood?

Because no matter how advanced your AI stack, how personalized your campaigns, or how sharp your product differentiators—growth is just trust multiplied by relevance, one human at a time.

What’s your best “people-first” tactic or war story? Hit reply—I want to learn what’s working for you, and may feature it in an upcoming edition. See you next week!

— Grady

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