A couple of weeks back I found myself behind a microphone with Lee Levitt on his Thoughts on Selling podcast. The invite was a happy accident after an introduction by my friend Bruce Scheer. Bizarrely enough, I had been an avid listener of his son’s podcast, For The Long Run, while training for a Spartan Ultra (fifty kilometres, sixty-ish obstacles, a life-long lesson in pacing and grit).
Lee and I had overlaps everywhere, yet we had never met. This episode fixed that.
After the pleasantries, we started to unpack how to actually create a customer, not just generate interest.
That line pulled a thread through everything else: where alignment really comes from, what “account-based” means when it is not just a slide, why AI changes how buyers show up, and how brand still does heavy lifting when nobody is watching.
Creating a Customer
Creating a customer begins with a single scoreboard. When sales and marketing chase different prizes, you feel the drag in every meeting and forecast. The fix is not another platform; it is a shared outcome you can point to without debate. Write it down. Make it visible. Cull every metric that does not ladder to it.
The moment both teams agree which customers matter most, momentum appears, and that is exactly where account-based becomes real. It is no longer a label; it is two people at a table with a list of names and a commitment: who we will serve this quarter, what they care about, and the three proofs that reduce their risk. None of that belongs to one team. Co-creation is the job, and it is the moment energy enters the building.
Buyers now walk in carrying more than curiosity. They arrive with AI-generated briefs, competitor grids, and questions that leapfrog your feature tour. If we show up with information, we will lose to a chatbot. If we show up with a point of view, we have a chance.
The discipline sounds simple and feels hard: pick the problem, state the stakes, explain the trade-offs, offer a decision checklist. Leave them clearer than before they met you. That is how trust gets built in the room, one reduced uncertainty at a time.
Brand as a Risk Reducer
Branding is no longer a nice-to-have. In science-heavy markets especially, nobody wants to be the first to make a bad call. A brand is not a polish; it is a purchase risk reducer and guarantee of real customer outcomes. Consistency earns trust. Trust shortens time to buy. Even in a digital-first, bot-enabled world, strong brands tilt decisions because they take weight off the buyer’s shoulders before a salesperson speaks.
Understanding the buyer’s culture tightens the thread. If you have ever walked a customer corridor, you know the signs and symbols tell you as much as any slide deck. Some teams optimise for patient outcomes. Some for revenue growth. Some for risk reduction. When your story tunes to their mission, the conversation feels like recognition, not persuasion.
One Conversation vs 10,000 Touches
All of this is why one conversation can beat no end of email sequences. I have created my share of nurture sequences and watched dashboards light up with activity. It looks productive; it also helps you avoid the harder thing of getting out there and meeting prospects.
A single, well-prepared conversation that lowers risk can change a deal in ways 10,000 email and web touches never will. Efficiency is not effectiveness. If you are keeping score, do not count touches, measure how much uncertainty you have removed. That is a better north star than send count.
Discipline and Preparation
The lessons I learned training for (and finishing) that Spartan Ultra bring me back to sales. Like sales, the preparation was hard work and not at all glamorous, and going in unprepared would have meant abject failure. The discipline to do the hard work is crucial.
If you want to put this to work now, run a short “One North Star” session with sales. Agree the outcome and the five accounts that matter most this quarter. Write a single page that states your point of view on one customer problem.
Then earn twenty minutes with a customer to understand how decisions really get made in their world.
The full conversation is Episode 66 of the Thoughts on Selling podcast “10,000 AI Conversations vs. One Human One: Which Wins?”—thirty-five minutes published 26 August 2025. You can listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or YouTube].
