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12touches.com — Archive · Vol 342 Issue 3

7 articles that week

12touches.com, Friday, September 18th, 2026

Readers Don't Hate Vendor News. They Hate Being Fooled

Vol 342 · Issue 3 · 2026-09-18

Our vendor news sections were built for a defensive reason - filing vendor news under vendor names is what keeps the category sections neutral by construction - and the surprise was that those sections became some of the most-read material published: 2,438 vendor articles drew 172,639 readers and 250,861 clicks across volumes 339–342, counted as unique IPs with crawlers and scrapers filtered out. The explanation is the label.

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Readers Don't Hate Vendor News. They Hate Being Fooled

12touches.com, Friday, September 18th, 2026

To Ask Permission Is to Seek Denial

Vol 342 · Issue 3 · 2026-09-18

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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To Ask Permission Is to Seek Denial

12touches.com, Friday, September 18th, 2026

Being Interesting Is Not the Same as Being Present

Vol 342 · Issue 3 · 2026-09-18

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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Being Interesting Is Not the Same as Being Present

12touches.com, Friday, September 18th, 2026

You're Not in Sales. You Still Need to Be Known

Vol 342 · Issue 3 · 2026-09-18

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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You're Not in Sales. You Still Need to Be Known

12touches.com, Friday, September 18th, 2026

Your Top Performers Don't Want Another Plaque

Vol 342 · Issue 3 · 2026-09-18

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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Your Top Performers Don't Want Another Plaque

12touches.com, Friday, September 18th, 2026

Your Customer Today Is Your Colleague Tomorrow

Vol 342 · Issue 3 · 2026-09-18

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.

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Your Customer Today Is Your Colleague Tomorrow