Personalization that isn't flattery

Personalization isn't about the person. It's about their problem.

A note that mentions a buyer's alma mater, their dog or their latest promotion is personalized in the shallowest way. It proves you looked at their profile. It doesn't prove you understand anything about their job.

The flattery trap

Somewhere along the way, outbound advice decided that personalization meant a custom first line. "Loved your post on leadership." "Congrats on the new role." "Great to see a fellow alum."

Senior buyers see dozens of these a week. They've learned that a compliment in line one means a pitch in line two. So the compliment doesn't warm them up. It tells them to stop reading.

Flattery fails for a deeper reason too. It puts you in the position of asking for approval. You're praising them so they'll like you. That's not how peers talk, and senior buyers buy from peers.

What real personalization looks like

Real personalization connects a public fact to a problem the reader owns. It answers one question. Why this person, at this company, right now?

There are three layers, and the best openers use all three.

The fact. Something that happened at the company, named plainly. A filing, a new hire, a job post, a program announced on a call.

The seat. Why that fact matters to this person in their role. A new CFO and a new CIO read the same 8-K differently.

The problem. What you think the fact creates for them. This is the misery hypothesis, and it's where the real personalization lives.

None of those layers says anything about the person's hobbies, their writing style or their career.

A before and after

Say a VP of supply chain at a food manufacturer just posted about a new plant opening in the Southeast. The flattering version reads like this. "Congrats on the new plant! Looks like an exciting time at the company."

Here's the version that's actually personal.

Your new plant in Georgia comes online this fall, and the job posts say it's running a different MES than your Midwest sites. For a supply chain leader, I'd guess the harder problem is getting one view of inventory across two systems before peak season. Is that right, or is the plan to standardize first?

The second note never says anything nice about them. But it's far more personal. It's about their plant, their systems, their season and their problem. Only this person, at this company, this month, could receive it.

Where the facts come from

Run the 3x3. Public record first, then social context, then the market around them. Three sources, up to three facts each. You're looking for the one fact that connects to a problem you can solve. Research before reach lays out each source.

When you find a post the buyer wrote, read it for the problem, not for something to praise. A post about hiring challenges is a hiring problem. A post about a successful launch might hide a scaling problem behind it.

How to test a line

Read your first line and ask whether it could be sent to anyone else. If it could, it's not personalized.

Then ask whether it praises or observes. "Great post on data quality" praises. "Your post said three teams still reconcile the same customer data by hand" observes. Keep the observations. Cut the praise.

And check whether the note still makes sense with the compliment deleted. If it does, the compliment was never doing any work.

Specific is the respect

Doing the work to understand someone's problem says more than any compliment could.

A senior buyer who reads a note that gets their situation right, or close to right, feels taken seriously. That's the feeling that earns a reply. Flattery never gets there.