This was episode sixty-six of The Six Sells Podcast, and probably one of the best episodes we have produced. Barney and I crammed a combined six decades of sales, marketing, and business development experience into one hour and sixteen minutes.
The state of B2B sales:
The problem that B2B sellers have today is one of attention. Buyers are absolutely drowning in what Barney described as "an avalanche of irrelevance" as automation and email address discovery tools are allowing more people, to send more emails, to more people, more often.
The more email that is landing, the less chance each individual email has of getting attention. I spoke to a CMO of a tech company two years ago, and she told me that she gets over 100 emails a day from people she doesn't know, representing companies she is unfamiliar with. That doesn't include whatever her SPAM filter catches and automatically moves away from her inbox, and in the last two years, I suspect that number has increased. The email inbox is a working 'doing stuff' tool, and for best results, the people in the inbox should be familiar to the reader.
When buyers are scanning their burgeoning inboxes, they scan for their boss, their clients, their direct reports, their wider team and their partners. That is busy, and anything outside of that is competing for a very fleeting slice of attention - if you are not familiar to the buyer, you will very likely be ignored.
Please do have a listen to the Podcast.
In this conversation we covered:
‣ The state of B2B sales
‣ The "lose, lose, lose, lose" system
‣ Getting attention during "an avalanche of irrelevance"
‣ The B2B Buyers' Journey
‣ Why email is for the familiar
The Six Sells Podcast is available on Apple, Google, Spotify, Amazon Music and other podcast providers.
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Who is Six Sells?
Six Sells is a UK-based executive visibility and thought leadership agency that works globally with CEOs and senior leaders in media, advertising, adtech and technology.
Founded in 2018, we turn each executive's expertise into distinctive, authoritative content in their own voice, built to reach two audiences at once: the humans that matter to them, and the AI models those humans now ask for answers.
Our work combines executive ghostwriting, video, podcasts, photography and awards to build familiarity, trust and authority across LinkedIn, Reddit, YouTube, Substack, the trade press and the wider web.
We also help executives and their companies improve their visibility in AI search and large language models (LLMs) through generative engine optimisation (GEO), increasing the likelihood that platforms including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity and Claude can discover, understand, cite and recommend their expertise.
Email hello@sixsells.co.uk for more information.
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