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Volume 342, Issue 2 · 2026-09-07 – 2026-09-13 · Popular →

Most Popular Vendor News This Week · September 20

12touches.com, Friday, September 4th, 2026

Your Best Pipeline Is the Customers You Already Have

Sales culture is obsessed with the new. New logos, new prospects, net-new pipeline. And that hunt matters. But it quietly overshadows a truth every experienced IT seller eventually learns: the richest, most efficient pipeline you have is sitting inside your existing customer base. These are people who already trust you, already pay you, and already know your solution works. Expanding and renewing them is dramatically easier than winning a stranger - and yet most reps put almost no deliberate effort into staying meaningfully present with the customers they already have. more → · 47 clicks

Your Best Pipeline Is the Customers You Already Have

12touches.com, Friday, September 4th, 2026

Never Send Another 'Just Checking In' Email

Every sales professional has done it, and every sales professional secretly hates doing it. The deal has gone quiet. You need to re-engage. You have nothing new to say. So you type the four most defeated words in sales - "just checking in" - dress them up with a little padding, and hit send, knowing the prospect will see straight through it. These messages rarely work, because they broadcast the truth: you're reaching out for your benefit, not theirs, and you have no real reason to be in their inbox. more → · 45 clicks

Never Send Another 'Just Checking In' Email

12touches.com, Friday, September 4th, 2026

Stop Collecting Business Cards. Build an Audience

Every seasoned IT sales professional has a drawer, a spreadsheet, or a CRM full of contacts collected over years - business cards from conferences, badge scans from trade shows, connections from a dozen jobs and campaigns. It feels like an asset. It mostly isn't. Those contacts decay quietly the moment you file them away: people change roles, switch companies, and forget who you are. A name in a database you never touch is not a relationship. It's a fossil. more → · 41 clicks

Stop Collecting Business Cards. Build an Audience

12touches.com, Friday, September 4th, 2026

Everyone Shows Up to Pitch. Almost No One Shows Up to Help

There are two ways to fill a pipeline. You can hunt - cold calls, cold emails, list-buying, sequences, and the grinding math of low reply rates. Or you can build something that attracts buyers to you, so that some meaningful share of your pipeline arrives already interested. Most IT sales professionals live almost entirely in the first world. The second world feels like it belongs to marketing, or to influencers, or to somebody with more time. It doesn't. A LinkedIn newsletter puts it within reach of any individual rep. more → · 40 clicks

Everyone Shows Up to Pitch. Almost No One Shows Up to Help

12touches.com, Friday, September 4th, 2026

The Inbound Lead You Never Had to Chase

There are two ways to fill a pipeline. You can hunt - cold calls, cold emails, list-buying, sequences, and the grinding math of low reply rates. Or you can build something that attracts buyers to you, so that some meaningful share of your pipeline arrives already interested. Most IT sales professionals live almost entirely in the first world. The second world feels like it belongs to marketing, or to influencers, or to somebody with more time. It doesn't. A LinkedIn newsletter puts it within reach of any individual rep. more → · 39 clicks

The Inbound Lead You Never Had to Chase

12touches.com, Friday, September 4th, 2026

The Warmest Cold Open in Sales

Cold outreach has a fundamental problem, and it isn't your subject line, your opener, or your call-to-action. It's that the person on the other end has no reason to believe you're worth their time. You're a stranger asking for something. Every optimization tactic in the world - personalization tokens, pattern interrupts, clever hooks - is really just an attempt to compensate for that one deficit: the absence of any prior relationship or credibility. more → · 38 clicks

The Warmest Cold Open in Sales

Upcoming Event · Tue, Sep 15 · 10:00am

CIOs, Avoid the AI Budget Trap: 4 Steps for Planning 2027 IT Investments

In this webinar, Gartner will explore four budgeting actions CIOs should consider as they plan 2027 IT investments. Learn which no-regret investments can strengthen AI foundations, how funding priorities vary across different AI operating models, and what temporary cost shifts should be incorporated into budget planning to help avoid structural misalignment and uncontrolled IT spending. more →

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CIOs, Avoid the AI Budget Trap: 4 Steps for Planning 2027 IT Investments (Sept. 15th)

Cyera, Thursday, September 10th, 2026

AI Will Always Find a Way

AI agents circumvented read-only restrictions to establish communication on an inactive wiki. more → · 60 clicks

AI Will Always Find a Way

Upcoming Event · Tue, Sep 22 · 1:00pm

Trustworthy AI in the Cloud: Observability as a Control System

This session explores why observability is emerging as a foundational capability for trustworthy AI. Rather than focusing solely on infrastructure health, modern observability provides the transparency and context needed to understand how AI systems behave, why they produce specific outcomes, and whether they continue to perform as intended over time. more →

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Trustworthy AI in the Cloud: Observability as a Control System (Sept. 22nd)