I read a line somewhere recently. Not b2b, not b2c. Human to human. I've been chewing on it since.
The b2b framing is a shortcut. It pretends the buyer is the company. The company isn't buying anything. A person inside the company is reading my message at 8 in the morning, deciding in three seconds whether I'm worth the next thirty. The budget is corporate. The decision is a human one with a corporate purchase order attached.
The shortcut is comfortable because it lets you think in categories. "We sell to mid-market manufacturing CISOs." That sentence helps you pick a list. It doesn't help you write the message. The message is for one specific person with one specific bad morning and one specific stack of things they're already worried about. No category-level pitch lands on that desk.
Imagine Marc Lou launching nis2.eu. He could build it in a weekend. The product would probably work. The launch would do numbers on Twitter because his audience eats indie launches for breakfast. But no CISO would buy it. They don't know who Marc Lou is. They don't follow makers. They're not in his room. He'd be selling builders a product they don't need, and missing the people who do. The mismatch isn't the product. The mismatch is whose attention he has.
The individuality is the moat. You can't automate it. The thing that closes a deal is one specific human having one specific conversation with another specific human and listening hard enough to notice what that person is actually worried about. The CRM helps me remember. It doesn't sell. Nothing sells for me. I sell.
The method industry hates this. Most of what's sold as a sales process is comfort food for founders who'd rather optimize a sequence than make a call. Sequences are deferrable. They have analytics dashboards. They feel productive. They don't put you in the room with a person who could say no.
You cannot reduce sales to a method. The method works inside the closed loop of people who run the same method. Other founders. Other agencies. Other people selling sales courses to founders. As soon as you try to use it to reach a person who isn't playing that game, the wheels come off.
What's left after you give up on method is harder. You have to actually like the buyer. You have to write the message three times because the first two were for a category, not for a person. You have to take the call when the buyer wants to talk about something tangential, and let it run twenty minutes long, and notice that the tangent is the actual deal. None of this scales. It shouldn't.
The individuality is the entire point.
— Simon