You know the feeling. Someone's trying to sell you something and within thirty seconds you can tell they haven't really listened. They're waiting for you to stop talking so they can start. The questions are the ones they were trained to ask, not the ones your situation calls for. You sit through it. You say you'll think about it. You don't call back.
You also know the other feeling. The person who names your problem before you've finished explaining it. Who says "we see this a lot with companies at your stage" and clearly means it. Who isn't trying to convince you of anything. They just make you feel like they've been here before and they know the way out.
You buy from that person. You remember them.
The difference isn't information. It's whether you felt understood.
Now think about how most technology and telco companies talk to their customers. The website explains what the products do. The sales deck covers the portfolio. The account manager has a slide for every objection. There's a lot of content, most of it accurate, almost none of it written for the specific person reading it. It's written for the persona. The segment. Which is another way of saying it's written for no one.
Everyone in the room knows it. The buyer knows they're being pitched. The seller knows they're pitching. The whole thing is a performance neither side entirely believes in, and somewhere in that gap is where deals quietly die.
This isn't a resourcing problem. Companies spend enormous amounts on content, training and tools. The problem is structural. Almost all of it is organised around what the company has to sell, not around what the buyer is trying to work out. Those are different starting points. They produce very different conversations.
Gartner has been pointing at this for years: B2B buyers now spend only about 17% of their purchase journey talking to suppliers, and most of that time is split across several. By the time someone gets in the room, the buyer has already done their thinking. The question is whether your company shaped any of it.
Most don't. They produce content about themselves and hope it travels.
AI was supposed to fix this. More content, faster, personalised at scale. What it has actually done is produce more of the same thing, quicker. Point a language model at your product documentation and ask it to write sales copy, and it writes sales copy about your products. Fluent, well-structured, still about you.
The companies pulling ahead right now aren't generating more. They're the ones who have done the slower work of understanding what their buyers are wrestling with, and built everything outward from there. That work doesn't get faster with AI. It matters more, because everyone else now sounds the same.
You know within minutes whether someone gets it. Your buyers are making the same judgement about you, in less time than that, before anyone from your team has spoken to them.
So the real question isn't whether your people have enough content or the right tools. It's whether the company has organised itself around the buyer at all, or just around what it sells.
