Adriaan ten Bosch

My reply to this horrendous sales email: “Hi (rep), I don't quite understand your AI-generated message. What, exactly, is your question?” This is the nonsense DIY Claude / Clay setups spit out from bloated prompt wrappers. RELEVANCE is the new personalisation. Nobody cares what your bot found on their profile. Five years ago I did deep research before trying to sell anything to anyone. Looking for a funny angle. Something they posted, or about their studies, or a weird language. I'd google their name+company and check 'news'. Anything that proved I made an effort. It worked like crazy. In 2020 when I launched Bluebird, we had a cold outbound email sequence with a 41% reply rate. REPLY rate. Those days are over. “Saw you liked a post about cats. Want to buy my automation?” “Congrats on the recent job change you made 9 months ago” It hurts more than it helps. You know what works? Relevance. That does NOT look like this: “Curious: is growing your topline revenue a priority for you this year, Adriaan?” Nah, thanks. I’m really focussed on sinking the company this year. #sales #ai #clay #claude

Watch: 3 sales tips to close your deals. Sales advice is usually too polite. So I recorded the closing tips you secretly want to say. In enterprise sales the last 10% is where good deals go to die. You can run a clean sales process, do the discovery, quantify the pain, align on value, even get the verbal yes… and then it turns into “let me discuss it internally” forever. So here’s the unfiltered version. Three sales tips that will ’'close’’ the deal one way or another. Try this in a real deal at your own risk. And let me know how that goes please! #Sales #SalesCareers

The best meal I had in Bangkok? Frog. On a plastic plate, on the street. Best food in Hanoi? Snails. Sitting on a toddler-sized stool, next to a motorbike exhaust. On the street. Tel Aviv? Lamb shawarma. Garlic sauce dripping from my chin to my knees. Also on the street. So what does any of this have to do with business? With sales? Absolutely nothing. Use Rembrandt. Sell more. Eat where you want. Huh? Anyway. PS: Picture = street food market in Vientiane. We both got sick. #sales #SaaSpocalypse

Only small folks talk down on you in meetings. True leaders never do. Over the years I have met and worked with very senior leaders at fantastic companies. C-level executives of publicly listed businesses. Founders of unicorns. You name it. Early on, as a young entrepreneur those meetings would make me nervous. In my head I’d built this caricature: a bully in a suit wreaking havoc from their corner office on the 50-something floor. Their cold gaze staring through me as they wondered why on earth I had the guts to dare waste their time. This never happened. They would be humble. Often funny. Ask a few sharp questions about my business and then actually listen to the answer. It would get personal in a good way. Something about a picture in the background. About why we’re doing what we’re doing. I even once talked about watches for 20 minutes before we'd do the actual deal in the remaining 10. They would offer advice. Be direct. Tell me if they disagreed with me, but respectfully and in a constructive way. You know who would be rude? Who’d push me around just because I was a vendor who they felt they could wield power over? Small people. The insecure ones. The ones who confuse seniority with permission to be rude. It became a useful filter. If someone needs to put you down in a meeting, they’re telling you exactly who they are. ''Strong people don't put others down. They lift them up.'' Somehow, at serious companies, life has its way of making sure those are the ones who reach the top. Now, the more senior the person I meet with, the more relaxed I am. It’s the amateurs who are exhausting. #SalesTips #gtm #TechDeals

Please stop sharing your AI-generated posts. They make my face itch. ’’Because here’s the truth: it’s not blablabla It’s blablabla’’ ‘’Let that sink in’’ Mostly everyone’s posts seem to be the same warm fart in three bulletpoints these days. Those fake-authentic posts stitched together by the famous ChatGPT emdash you wouldn’t be able to find on your own keyboard, probably do more harm than good. If a post could have been written by anyone, it will be remembered by no one. Let that sink in. Thank you for your attention to this matter. #AI #chatgpt #contentincoming