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Nobody Knows Your Name Anymore
A few years ago I was on a call with a prospect in Boston. We'd traded a couple of emails before, nothing memorable, and now it was time for the real conversation. I'd done my homework the way I always do, LinkedIn, Facebook, a little digging. Grew up in Boston. Huge Red Sox fan. Two kids. Nothing that would win me the deal, just enough to know who I was talking to.
Somewhere in the middle of the call, he got a little sharp with me. "I suspect your sales efforts aren't exactly hard fought for a company where everybody knows your name," he said. He meant it as a jab, the kind people throw when they assume you're just another rep working a script.
And there it was, that little spark. Not because I planned it, but because somewhere in the back of my brain, a bar in Boston started playing. I'd been there with my family a couple of years earlier, the actual bar the show Cheers was filmed in, and before I even decided to say anything, I was singing it back to him. "Where everybody knows your name..."
He went quiet for a second. Then he laughed. "Ha, I didn't even mean it that way, but yeah, I get it. Good show. I actually had guests in town last week and took them to see that bar."
We talked about it for another minute before getting back to business. I told him, honestly, that I'd been to that same bar. He assumed I'd caught his reference on purpose. I hadn't, not really, but I also wasn't about to correct him. What mattered wasn't whether I'd planned it. What mattered was that for about ninety seconds, neither of us was performing a sales call. We were just two people who happened to know the same bar in Boston.
That call turned into a real relationship. Not because of the pitch. Because of the thing that had nothing to do with the pitch.
“Remember that a person's name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.”
– Dale Carnegie
I bring this up now because I've been spending a lot of time lately thinking about what AI is doing to moments like that one, and the data is starting to catch up with what I've felt in my gut for a while. A survey run by Klaviyo and Datalily late last year asked consumers a simple question: when you notice AI-generated content from a brand, does it make you trust that brand more? Only 7 percent said yes. Thirty-one percent said it actually made them trust the brand less. And a separate study from Fractl earlier this year found something even sharper: the share of people who say heavy AI use would make them trust a brand less nearly doubled in a single year, from 20 percent to 39 percent.
Read that twice. It didn't stay flat. It nearly doubled. In twelve months.
Here's what I think is actually happening. AI got very good, very fast, at producing the thing that used to prove you cared: the well-written email, the thoughtful-sounding follow-up, the personalized subject line. And the moment everyone could produce that, at scale, for free, it stopped meaning anything. A prospect can't tell anymore whether "I saw your post about the marathon and wanted to reach out" came from a person who actually saw it, or from a tool that scraped it. So they've started assuming the worst, and honestly, more often than not, they're right to.
Which is exactly why that Boston call still means something to me, and why I think it means even more now than it did then. Nobody scripted that. Nobody could have. It came from an actual memory, an actual trip, an actual family, colliding by accident with an actual moment on an actual phone call. You cannot prompt your way into that kind of collision. You can only be paying enough attention that when it happens, you notice.
This is Stand Out, the first pillar of Emotional Relevance, and it has never been about being different for the sake of being different. It's about being the one thing in an otherwise identical stack of interactions that couldn't have come from anywhere else. AI can write you a hundred emails that sound personal. It cannot have actually been to the bar. It cannot have actually raised two kids and remember what that felt like. It cannot get sharp with you on a call and then laugh, genuinely, thirty seconds later, because something true just happened between two people instead of between a person and a script.
I'm not anti-AI. I use it constantly, and it's made parts of my work faster and better. But I've started treating it like I'd treat a very capable assistant who has never once met my clients: wonderful for the first draft, useless for the moment that actually matters. That moment still has to be mine. It still has to be yours.
So here's my ask, the same one I've been making in this space for years now, just with a sharper edge to it: the next time you're on a call and something true surfaces, a memory, a place, a name, don't smooth it over and get back to the agenda. Follow it. That's not a distraction from the deal. Lately, it might be the only part of the deal an algorithm can't take from you.
Be the reason somebody still knows your name.
Tags: Client Relationships · Being Relevant · Stand Out · Emotional Connections · AI in Sales · Trust · Client Engagement
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