August 29, 2026 | Read online
I spent last week at the Totality conference and ran into a bunch of people I hadn't seen in years.
Some of them I used to talk to every month. Then the pandemic hit, everything moved to Zoom and LinkedIn, and somewhere along the way those relationships turned into the occasional like on a post. Standing in a hallway with them again, catching up on kids and jobs and what actually happened over the last five years, was more refreshing than I expected.
I didn't go for the sessions (even though they were great). I went to speak and to see people. And almost none of the conversations that mattered happened inside the agenda. They happened at the breaks, at dinner, and at the bar after. The hallway track was the conference.
It got me thinking about a word our industry has completely ruined.
Personalization.
Every tool on the planet now promises to “personalize at scale.” Merge fields, AI-written first lines, "I saw your post about" openers generated by a model that never read the post. We built an entire tech stack to fake the feeling of somebody actually knowing you, and buyers can smell it from a mile away. When you get 50 "personalized" emails a day, personalization stops being personal and just becomes noise with your name on it.
I've been saying for a while now that relevance beats personalization. Relevance means you know what someone in that seat, at that kind of company, is dealing with right now, and you lead with that. It doesn't require knowing their kid's name. It requires knowing their business.
And this is the part AI is unbelievable at. It can tell you who is worth reaching this week, what's going on at their company, and what someone in their role probably cares about. That research used to take a rep hours per account, which is exactly why most reps skipped it and went straight to the merge field.
I've been living inside this all summer. I rebuilt my own outbound on Apollo (#sponsor), new sending domain and all, and the thing that changed for me wasn't the database. It's that the system reads the signals and hands me a prioritized list, so the frameworks I've been teaching for 15 years run on people who have a reason to hear from me right now instead of a cold spreadsheet. That's the difference between relevance and personalization, and it's why I'm heading to San Francisco on September 30 for ApolloNEXT.
Last year that's where they announced they were pulling data, intelligence, and execution into one system. This year I'm going in with one question. What happens to the rep with weak fundamentals when the system around them gets this good? I'll report back on what actually matters for anyone running a team. If you're in the Bay Area or you run a GTM team and want to see it for yourself, you can register for it here. Reply and tell me if you're going so I can find you.
Here's what I keep coming back to, though.
Relevance gets you the meeting. It does not build the relationship. What AI cannot do is show up. It can't shake a hand, read a face, catch the moment somebody's eyes glaze over and change the question. It can't sit across from someone at dinner and turn a contact into a relationship. Real relationships are HARD to build online. They are still pretty easy to build in person, if you know how to work a room.
Most reps don't. I've watched an entire generation of salespeople learn to sell from behind a laptop. They've never been taught how to walk into a room of strangers, start a conversation that goes somewhere, and get out of one that doesn't.
That's why I went back and rebuilt my Work the Room playbook for conference season. New edition, still free.
A couple of things in there that weren't in the last version. From 2010 to 2018 I trained the sales reps at Salesforce, and every year I went to Dreamforce. When somebody asked what I did, I'd say, "I train Salesforce how to sell." Almost every single time I got back a "What??" or a "How do you do that??" and we were immediately in a real conversation. That one line did more for me at that conference than any elevator pitch I ever wrote, and the playbook walks through how to build your own version for the people you're trying to meet.
The other thing people ask me about constantly is how to get out of a bad conversation without being a jerk. There's a script for that too. It works, it's not awkward, and I've been using it for years.
The new section covers conferences specifically, because a three-day conference plays by different rules than a two-hour mixer. How to plan the breaks like they're the main event, how to walk a trade show floor as a buyer, and how to work a booth without turning into a badge scanner. Plus a new AI prompt that builds your break-by-break game plan from the agenda.
Now, if you lead a team, all of this lands on you differently.
You're the one who has to figure out which tools to bring in, how to retrain reps who learned to sell through a screen, and how to keep the number moving while all of it changes underneath you. That's exactly what Lori Richardson and I are digging into at HubSpot's Unbound in Boston on September 16.
Our meetup is called Leading Through Disruption with Growth. No slides, chairs in a circle, 45 minutes with sales leaders working through the same thing. I'm bringing the monthly persona workshop I run with teams, where teams research a persona, interview a real customer, and build messaging that's relevant instead of "personalized," and Lori is bringing the data on what actually separates coachable reps from the rest. If you're already at Unbound (the event itself is sold out), grab a seat here because the meetup is limited capacity. And if you see me in the hallway, that's where I'd rather talk anyway.
Whatever conference you're heading to this fall, do me a favor. Use one thing from the playbook. One. Then reply to this email and tell me what happened. The best stories end up in a LinkedIn post, with your name on it if you want.
The tools will keep getting better at relevance. Being the person who actually showed up is still on you.
#MakeItHappen
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