21 articles
12touches.com, Friday, September 4th, 2026
Every enterprise IT sales professional knows the rhythm of a deal. There's the discovery call, the demo, the proposal, the negotiation - a handful of high-stakes conversations spread across weeks or months. We prepare obsessively for those moments. We rehearse objection handling, tune our slides, and study the org chart. And then, between those moments, we go quiet.
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12touches.com, Friday, September 4th, 2026
Ask any enterprise IT buyer how they feel about salespeople and you'll get a tired sigh. It's not personal. It's the accumulated weight of a thousand cold emails, a hundred "quick calls," and an inbox full of reps who all somehow have "a solution that's perfect for your exact challenges" despite never having spoken to them. To the average buyer, the word vendor has come to mean someone who wants my money.
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12touches.com, Friday, September 4th, 2026
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.
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12touches.com, Friday, September 4th, 2026
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.
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12touches.com, Friday, September 4th, 2026
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.
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12touches.com, Friday, September 4th, 2026
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.
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12touches.com, Friday, September 4th, 2026
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.
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12touches.com, Friday, September 4th, 2026
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.
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12touches.com, Friday, September 4th, 2026
When an enterprise IT buyer chooses a vendor, they're not just buying a product. They're betting on a relationship that will play out over years - implementations, support, renewals, escalations, roadmaps. And the single trait they most want to see in the rep and the company behind that bet is one that's surprisingly hard to fake: reliability. Will you follow through? Will you still be there, engaged and dependable, long after the ink dries?
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12touches.com, Friday, September 4th, 2026
Most enterprise IT sales professionals are, whether they admit it or not, dependent on marketing for the top of their funnel. The leads that arrive, the campaigns that warm the market, the content that gives them something to send - all of it flows from a team the rep doesn't control, working to priorities the rep didn't set. When marketing's engine is humming and pointed at your accounts, life is good. When it isn't - when the leads dry up, the campaigns target the wrong segment, or the content doesn't fit your deals - you're stuck. And you have no lever to pull.
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12touches.com, Friday, September 4th, 2026
Sales careers are mobile. The average enterprise IT rep will change companies several times over a career - chasing a better product, a bigger territory, a stronger comp plan, or simply a fresh start after a reorg. And every time a rep makes that move, they typically leave something valuable behind: the relationships, the visibility, and the market presence they spent years building, all of it tied to an employer that keeps it when they walk out the door.
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12touches.com, Friday, September 4th, 2026
Every sales professional wants a shorter sales cycle. Faster cycles mean more deals per quarter, quicker commissions, less pipeline slippage, and less of the exhausting effort that goes into dragging a hesitant buyer across the line. We tend to chase that speed inside the deal — sharper demos, tighter proposals, better objection handling. But the biggest lever on cycle length often sits before the deal even starts, in how well-educated the buyer is when they first engage.
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12touches.com, Friday, September 4th, 2026
Let's start with the part nobody enjoys saying out loud: the last several years of enterprise technology have been full of layoffs that had nothing to do with performance. Whole sales teams cut because a segment got deprioritized. Territories dissolved in a reorg. Solid reps let go sixty days after a president's club trip, because a board wanted a different number on a slide.
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12touches.com, Friday, September 4th, 2026
There's a reason a lot of enterprise IT reps think about starting an industry newsletter and then quietly drop the idea. It isn't the writing. It isn't even the time, though that's the one they'll say out loud. It's a specific, uncomfortable scenario that occurs to them about ten minutes in: What happens the week my biggest competitor announces something great?
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12touches.com, Thursday, August 25th, 2026
Alan Shimel's argument that Google's AI Overviews are engineered to make the click unnecessary - his "Google Zero" - lands as hard on technology vendors as on publishers, because organic search was always rented distribution that merely felt owned. The largest untapped alternative is already on staff: a few hundred customer-facing employees, each publishing a weekly newsletter carrying the company's news section, is hundreds of trusted channels reaching the market with no algorithm in between. It succeeds where employee advocacy usually fails because the employee owns the asset, and the resulting traffic is attributable and rewardable per person. Enterprise IT is a small, circulating world: vendor people become customers, skilled customers get recruited into field roles by the engineers who worked with them, and the boundary between customers and network dissolves over a career. Publishing isn't self-promotion - it's the filtering you already do, done in public.
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12touches.com, Wednesday, August 25th, 2026
In most enterprise deals the most trusted person isn't the account executive but the sales engineer, precisely because they'll say what won't work - yet that credibility is invisible outside the few accounts they're staffed on, living in the memories of a few dozen people and a CRM someone else owns. Enterprise IT is a small, circulating world: vendor people become customers, skilled customers get recruited into field roles by the engineers who worked with them, and the boundary between customers and network dissolves over a career. Publishing isn't self-promotion - it's the filtering you already do, done in public.
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12touches.com, Wednesday, August 26th, 2026
Top sellers are the hardest people in the company to reward - cash is already maxed, the incentive trip ends, and promotion into management is often unwanted - while the independent streak that makes them outperform is exactly what makes corporate advocacy mandates slide off them.
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12touches.com, Wednesday, August 26th, 2026
Enterprise IT is a few thousand people per specialty, and a dozen professions orbit them with the same dependency and the same structural problem: the only contact their job naturally supplies is the contact that asks for something.
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12touches.com, Wednesday, August 26th, 2026
Advisors, speakers and fractional CIOs don't have a lead generation problem, they have a recall problem - and their visibility is event-shaped, producing four tall spikes and forty-eight flat weeks, with the moment that mattered almost certainly landing in the flat part.
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12touches.com, Wednesday, August 26th, 2026
Sellers at large firms routinely stall on a personal newsletter because they haven't been approved to run one - and Scott McNealy's Sun-era mantra explains why asking is the wrong move: the person receiving an unprecedented request has no upside for yes and all the downside, so the safe answer is defer or decline, and a "no" on the record is far harder to reverse than a question nobody formally raised.
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Staying Top-Of-Mind for Customers and Prospects is Hard As They Value Their Time and Attention
The "12Touches" approach states that a prospect needs to have 12 to 15 interactions with a brand before they consider making a purchase or taking the next step. A weekly, informative, industry newsletter is a great way to "touch" your customers and prospects!
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