Be Seen as an Advisor, Not Just Another Vendor
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.
Buyers discount everything said inside a pitch, because they know how the rep is compensated — which means authority cannot be built there. It has to be established earlier, in a context where you're plainly not selling.
Curation is the fastest route: you don't need original research to be seen as the informed person in your category, only the judgment to filter what matters from the noise.
Do that consistently and you stop being "the rep from [vendor]" and become the person who always knows what's happening in the space.
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