“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
— Isaac Newton
In a real-world setting, a good salesperson sizes up a new prospect walking in the door and within seconds begins to tailor the conversation to that person’s needs. They read body language, ask the right questions, and adapt. It is instinctive, human, and remarkably effective.
In the digital world, the union of data and content management technologies now allows companies to replicate that same instinct at scale, delivering different content to each customer based on what we know about them in real time. We call this personalization, and it represents a fundamental shift from one-way broadcasting to genuine two-way conversation between brands and their customers.
The impact will be particularly significant in the relationship-based business-to-business space. The technologies for delivering nuanced, personalized content are well established and proven to drive business results through contextual relevancy, higher conversion rates, and long-term customer loyalty. The infrastructure exists. The data exists. The question is why so few companies are doing it well.
The Fired Salesperson
Here is a simple test: if a sales representative sold the way most B2B websites do, they would be fired. Not coached, not retrained. Fired.
For far too long, marketers have gotten away with being terrible salespeople online because they are insulated by the law of large numbers. If they churn through enough people, eventually some small portion will convert to customers. Volume is the name of the game. But volume is also tremendously expensive and inefficient. Worse, it ignores a fundamental truth about customer experience: loyalty is not built in a single transaction. It is the cumulative result of every interaction a customer has with a company, positive and negative alike. Every generic page, every irrelevant recommendation, every moment a website fails to recognize what a customer actually needs is a small withdrawal from that account. Churn enough people through a bad experience and you have not just lost a sale. You have trained your market to expect nothing from you.
The growing gap between truly responsive experiences, those that adapt content to the user based on what we know about the user, and the standard one-size-fits-all content model reveals a fundamental weakness in how most firms sell their products in the digital realm. The technology is not the problem. The thinking is the problem.
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
Our ability to know the customer through data is better and more powerful than ever. The technology is sophisticated enough to make true personalization a reality. But there is more to the arithmetic of marketing than data and technology alone.
Much of the fault for the state of online selling falls at the feet of a simple failure: companies do not understand how their customers become educated about products and services. They treat the buying journey as a funnel to be optimized rather than as a learning process to be designed.
This is where marketers keep making the same mistake. They reinvent the wheel. They build frameworks from scratch, ignoring decades of proven research on how humans actually learn, evaluate, and make decisions. There are entire fields of study, education theory, cognitive science, behavioral economics, that have spent generations answering precisely the questions marketers are struggling with today. The work has been done. The experts have spoken. The principles are proven. The question is whether we are humble enough to use them.
For inspiration, I turned to a principle of education theory known as Learning Models, first developed by the academic Robert Gagné in the 1980s. Gagné identified nine instructional events that move a learner from attention to retention to transfer. Every good teacher knows this sequence. Every good salesperson practices it instinctively. Almost no B2B website reflects it at all.
When you marry Gagné’s Learning Models with digital personalization, you get a comprehensive framework for the customer experience that addresses the full arc: how customers think about their own business problems and potential solutions, the step-by-step process for educating a prospect through digital channels, how to gather accurate data about those customers, and the technology to deliver a relevant experience that actually sells.
Why This Matters Now
This is not just an argument about personalization. It is a first-principles argument about how we should approach the entire customer experience.
If a considered purchase requires some level of education so that the consumer has the information necessary to make a purchasing decision, then we should rely on the experts who have spent their careers studying how people learn. We should not reinvent the wheel. We should stand on the shoulders of the people who have already solved these problems in other domains and apply their insights with the precision that modern technology makes possible.
This principle, leverage proven academic and expert frameworks rather than building from scratch, will only become more important as the tools at our disposal grow more powerful. Artificial intelligence, knowledge graphs, semantic content models, and scoring frameworks all depend on the same foundational insight: technology is only as good as the thinking behind it. Get the thinking right, and the technology becomes transformative. Get it wrong, and you have built an expensive machine that is still a terrible salesperson.
To remain relevant to today’s digitally driven B2B customers, the industry must move toward greater personalization. If today’s leaders do not take up the charge, a competitor will find a better way to meet the needs of those customers. The B2B space is ripe for disruption, and the disruptor will not be the company with the most data or the best technology. It will be the company that understood how customers actually learn and built the experience around that understanding.
To effectively communicate relevant and personalized content means opening the floodgate, but first inviting consumers to explore their options through a process of genuine self-education. Mere presentation of information must progress to a real and lasting conversation between customers and companies. When learning models and digital personalization are truly aligned, then customers are both engaged and educated. That is when great things happen.
Let’s go be great.