John Buie

CEO & Founder of (Salesperson Inc.)

[John Buie @johnbbuie]

The most expensive failures in B2B marketing don't show up in any report.

Take your website chatbot. If its opening line is weak, here's what you see: the bot loads, it greets people, it answers the ones who push through, your dashboard shows conversations happening. Everything looks fine.

What you never see is the cost, because the cost is an absence.

It's the visitor who read "How can I help you?", felt the friction of the blank box, and left without typing a word. They don't appear as a failed conversation. They appear as nothing. There's no row in the report for the lead you never met.

And here's the part that stings: a weak opener doesn't lose you the tire-kickers. It disproportionately loses your best-fit visitors, because the higher their value, the more options they have, and the faster they abandon a conversation that makes them do the work.

You can't fix a leak you can't see. So go read your chatbot's first line right now, and ask whether it's routing people or just greeting them.

#chatbot #aichatbot #b2bmarketing #inboundmarketing #salesleads #leadgeneration #cro #salesperson-engage

[John Buie @johnbbuie]

Unpopular opinion: your website chatbot should not ask for an email in its first message.
I know why people do it. Capture the lead before they bounce. Get the address while you can.

Here's the math nobody runs. Asking for contact details in line one trades a small short-term capture for a large drop in engagement. You catch a few more addresses and lose far more conversations, including the ones that were actually going to buy.

The first thing your bot says has to earn the right to ask. Be useful first. Surface intent first. Help first.

You capture identity after a visitor has signaled what they want and gotten something of value, not before they've said a single word.

A chatbot that asks for your email before it's helped you is just a form with a personality. Buyers can smell it.

#chatbot #aichatbot #b2bmarketing #inboundmarketing #salesleads #leadgeneration #cro #salesperson-engage

[John Buie @johnbbuie]

Two website chatbots. Identical screenshot. Wildly different results.

The difference isn't the software. It's one decision made before anyone sees the widget: what it says first.

Bot A opens with "How can I help you?" The visitor faces a blank box and has to compose a question from nothing.

Bot B opens by naming the three reasons people actually land on that page: "Looking for a quote, checking if a model fits your needs, or need help with an existing unit?"

Watch what Bot B just did in one line:

→ Friction collapsed. Pointing at an option beats writing a question.

→ It qualified instantly. The path chosen tells you intent before message two.

→ It signaled competence. Naming the real options proves it understands your world.

Same tool. One is a greeting. The other is a router.

Only one of them is actually working.

#chatbot #aichatbot #b2bmarketing #inboundmarketing #salesleads #leadgeneration #cro #salesperson-engage

[John Buie @johnbbuie]

The most important line your website chatbot will ever write is the one it says before it knows anything about who's reading.

And almost everyone gets it wrong in the same way.

They treat it as a greeting. "Hi there, how can I help you today?"

It feels right. It's polite. It sounds like a helpful person at a counter.

It's also the moment most of your best visitors quietly leave.

Because "how can I help you" isn't help. It's a blank page. You're asking a stranger to decide if their question is worth typing, phrase it from scratch, and guess whether a bot can even handle it, all before they get anything in return.

The high-value visitors, the ones with options elsewhere, don't do that work. They close the tab.

The first line isn't a greeting. It's your first qualifying question. Treat it like one.

#chatbot #aichatbot #b2bmarketing #inboundmarketing #salesleads #leadgeneration #cro #salesperson-engage

[John Buie @johnbbuie]

Two years on, the book stopped being our product.

When Jason Hagerman and I published Imposters on the Zoom, we thought of it as the deliverable.

People would buy it. Read it. Apply the six steps. Some would hire our agency to help.

That was the business model.

Two years in, that model has inverted.

The book is no longer the thing we sell. It's the source material for the thing we sell. Every product on Salesperson Inc. traces back to a chapter, a template, or a worked example inside the book.

The book became the documentation, not the deliverable.

That changed how we think about who reads it. We don't need every reader to become a customer. We need every reader who's a fit to recognize themselves in the methodology, get the proof they need, and start a conversation from a position of shared context.

The free hardcopy program exists for exactly that reason. We pay Amazon to ship you the book before we ever talk. By the time you and I are on a discovery call, you already know whether the approach works for how you operate.

The book has held up well as source material. Amazon Best Seller list in Marketing. Five awards. Five press features. Goodreads 4.69 out of 5 stars. The methodology in those pages is now running for B2B clients through Salesperson Inc.

First thing Monday morning, my LinkedIn title is changing to reflect what the past 24 months have actually been. The book is the source code. Salesperson .com is the company built on top of it.

More on that Monday. Free hardcopy of the book shipped from Amazon is just a request away.

If you want to skip the book and have the conversation now, send me a DM.

[John Buie @johnbbuie]

We made one prediction in the book that the past 18 months completely rewrote.

The chapter on AI in Imposters on the Zoom argued that B2B marketing teams should use AI to do the work humans weren't paid enough to do. Buyer persona research. Competitor analysis. Content drafting. Email personalization at scale.

That part has held up. If anything, it's understated for 2026.

What we got wrong was who would adopt it.

We assumed adoption would be led by larger B2B companies. The ones with budget for tools, dedicated marketing operations teams, and the technical sophistication to wire AI into existing workflows.

The opposite happened.

The fastest adopters in 2025 and 2026 have been small B2B companies with one-person marketing teams. The Claires running the entire funnel for a $15M industrial distributor have moved faster than the marketing departments of $200M manufacturers.

The reason is simple. The one-person teams didn't have politics. They didn't have a 14-step procurement approval. They didn't have an IT team with opinions about which AI vendor was approved. They opened ChatGPT, did the work, and shipped.

TechTimes covered the book in January 2025 in an article on how the methodology was "redefining B2B customer engagement." Fast Company picked up the remote-team angle a few weeks earlier. Neither article predicted the size inversion that was about to happen. Neither did we.

Today, Salesperson Inc. runs the same methodology for both sides of that gap.

If your B2B marketing team is one person and they're outperforming their old job at a bigger company, send me a DM.

That's the pattern. We have a way to make it more permanent.

[John Buie @johnbbuie]

Five awards. Five press features. The lesson nobody mentioned.

In the year after Imposters on the Zoom shipped, we collected five book awards and five press features.

Amazon Best Seller list in Marketing and Sales categories. Readers' Favorite Finalist. Literary Titan Gold. Nonfiction Authors Association Silver. BookAuthority Top 20 of 2024. Pacific Book Review Notable Book. Coverage in Entrepreneur Magazine, Forbes, Mashable, HackerNoon, TechTimes, and Fast Company.

Every one of these is a credential we reference now in pitches, on the Books landing page on the Salesperson .com website, and in this post. So thank you to the reviewers and editors who pulled the manuscript out of their stacks.

Here's the lesson none of them mentioned, the one I think matters most.

The award I'm proudest of isn't in the list.

It's a Goodreads rating of 4.69 out of 5 stars across 26 ratings and 24 written reviews. Most of those reviews are from B2B operators who paid for the book, read it, and took the time to write down what they got from it.

The awards are a signal. The reviews are the data.

If you're ever in a position where credentials matter in your field, optimize for the 4.69 rating, not for the awards. Awards make the work legitimate to people who haven't read it. Reviews make the work useful to the people who have.

That's the same discipline Salesperson Inc. is built on. Customer outcomes over case studies. Real results over PR.

If you want to read the book that earned the 4.69, free hardcopy shipped from Amazon just DM me (within USA and Canada).

If you want to talk about applying the methodology to your B2B team, send me a DM.

#B2BSales #B2BMarketing #B2BLeadGeneration #ImpostersOnTheZoom #BusinessBooks

[John Buie @johnbbuie]

Imposter syndrome in B2B is not a personal problem. It's a structural one. Most articles treat it as something to fix inside your head. Affirmations. Confidence exercises. "Fake it till you make it."

Two years into publishing Imposters on the Zoom, I'm more convinced than ever that approach is backwards.

The reason B2B marketers and salespeople feel like imposters isn't because they lack confidence. It's because the work they do is poorly documented, rarely measured, and structurally invisible to the people who evaluate them.

A senior marketing manager runs a campaign that brings 14% YoY revenue growth. Her CEO asks what she does all day. She has no clean answer because the work happens in 47 different tools, none of which show the through-line.

Imposter syndrome shows up at the gap between what she did and what she can demonstrate.

The book's whole argument is that you fix this with documentation, not therapy. Six steps. Written down. Measurable. Auditable by anyone who asks "what does the marketing team actually do."

Literary Titan called the methodology "robust, detailed, and highly specific advice on practical implementation." The book won their Gold Book Award, their highest honor for nonfiction.

Today, that same documented methodology runs as Salesperson Inc. The argument has held up. The gap between teams that can document their work and those who can't is wider than it was two years ago.

If you have a sales or marketing team that can describe what they did this quarter but can't defend it to the board, send me a DM, and I will send you a hard copy of the book from Amazon (within the US or Canada). The methodology is built for exactly that gap.

#B2BSales #B2BMarketing #B2BLeadGeneration #ImpostersOnTheZoom #BusinessBooks

[John Buie @johnbbuie]

We cut 18,000 words from the book three weeks before it shipped.

The manuscript for Imposters on the Zoom was almost done. Final edits. Production-ready.

Jason Hagerman and I were on a Zoom (an actual Zoom) doing one last read-through, and we hit Chapter 9.

Chapter 9 was about sales team management. It covered how to structure a B2B sales team for an inbound-heavy methodology, how to compensate them, how to evaluate them. All the things a sales VP would want.

It was a good chapter. We just realized, sitting there, that nobody who would ever read this book would be a B2B sales VP.

The audience for the book was Claire, Charles, and Chris. Marketers, owners, and analysts. The sales VP audience reads totally different books, follows different LinkedIn voices, and uses different vocabulary. Trying to serve them in the same book would have weakened the rest.

We cut Chapter 9. 18,000 words. Three weeks of work. Out.

The book that shipped without it went on to win the Nonfiction Authors Association Silver Book Award, which recognized it as "an innovative approach for B2B businesses to increase their profits." If we'd kept Chapter 9, the book would have been longer, less focused, and probably wouldn't have won.

Two years on, the lesson I keep coming back to is this. The thing that most often improves a book, a product, or a launch isn't another feature. It's the removal of the feature that almost fits.

That's the editorial discipline we apply to Salesperson Inc. Every product we don't ship is part of why the ones we do ship work.

If you're sitting on a B2B marketing project that's gotten too broad to ship, send me a DM. Sometimes the work is the cut.

[John Buie @johnbbuie]

We bet on AI for buyer personas in 2023. Most B2B marketing teams thought we were early.

When Jason Hagerman and I wrote the AI chapter for Imposters on the Zoom, we were betting on something that wasn't obvious yet.

In 2023, AI-assisted buyer personas were a fringe idea. Most B2B marketing teams were still doing personas the old way. A workshop. A whiteboard. A consultant. Six weeks. A deck nobody opened again.

We wrote a chapter that said: feed your customer data, sales notes, support tickets, and win-loss summaries into an AI tool. Get a 40-page persona document in 4 hours. Stress-test it with your actual sales team. Ship.

Two years on, that's the default. Almost every B2B marketing team I talk to is doing some version of it.

Literary Titan's reviewer specifically called out the chapter, praising the book's "robust, detailed, and highly specific advice on practical implementation, from leveraging AI to create detailed buyer personas." That review came when AI in marketing was still treated with skepticism. It aged well.

Here's what we got wrong.

We thought the bottleneck would be the AI's output quality. The output got good fast. The real bottleneck was the marketing team's ability to act on what the persona told them. The personas got 10x sharper. The conversion rates only moved 8%.

That gap is what Salesperson Inc. closes now. We run the persona workflow end to end, so the insight doesn't die in a Google Doc.

If your buyer personas are good and your conversion rates are flat, send me a DM. That's the exact gap we work in.

[John Buie @johnbbuie]

The book was written for three readers. Which one are you? When Jason Hagerman and I planned the manuscript for Imposters on the Zoom, we kept arguing about who the audience was.

I wanted to write it for marketing managers. He wanted to write it for owners and CEOs. We fought for weeks before realizing we'd been forgetting a third reader: the analytical lead trying to figure out what actually worked.

So we wrote it for three.

Claire the Creator. The marketer building the assets, content, and campaigns that bring leads in. Her sections cover content production, asset development, AI-assisted buyer personas, and the day-to-day mechanics of feeding the funnel.

Charles the Conductor. The owner or director coordinating the team. His sections cover strategy, accountability, hiring, and how to audit marketing and sales work quickly in his own language.

Chris the Curator. The analyst interpreting data and refining strategies. Her sections cover measurement, optimization, funnel diagnostics, and what to kill.

You read your section first. Then the others, because the system only works when all three roles are aligned.

BookAuthority placed Imposters on the Zoom on its Top 20 list of Best New Sales Lead Generation Books of 2024, in part because of this structure. Most B2B books pick a reader and ignore the rest. This one assumed you're a team.

Two years on, Salesperson Inc. mirrors the same logic. The book is the documentation. The company is the workflow.

Which of the three are you? Comment below or DM me.

#B2BSales #B2BMarketing #B2BLeadGeneration #ImpostersOnTheZoom #BusinessBooks

[John Buie @johnbbuie]

Most B2B marketing advice fails the Tuesday morning test.

When Jason Hagerman and I were drafting Imposters on the Zoom, we had a rule. Every framework, every template, every recommendation had to pass it.

The Tuesday morning test: could a marketing manager who got back from PTO on Monday, opened her laptop Tuesday morning to a full inbox and three Slack pings, actually use this thing today?

If she had to schedule three internal meetings, read a 40-page primer, or get budget approval before she could apply it, it failed.

About 70% of what we drafted didn't survive the filter.

A four-quadrant strategic framework? Failed. Beautiful in a slide. Useless on a Tuesday morning.

A "buyer journey mapping workshop"? Failed. Requires a meeting she doesn't have time to organize.

A template for a competitor analysis email she could personalize in 8 minutes and send before her 10am call? Passed.

A six-step lead generation system she could start in 90 minutes on her first day back? Passed.

The book that shipped is what survived. It hit Amazon Best Seller in Marketing and earned a 4.69 out of 5 rating on Goodreads, with 24 written reviews from B2B operators who actually used it.

Two years on, the Tuesday morning test is still the filter we apply to everything we ship at Salesperson Inc. If a B2B team can't use it on a Tuesday morning, we don't ship it.

If you've sat through one too many B2B marketing strategy decks that go nowhere, send me a DM. We work differently.

[John Buie @johnbbuie]

We wrote a book about overcoming imposter syndrome while drowning in our own.

Two years on, this is the part of the book story I think about most.

Jason Hagerman and I spent 11 months on the manuscript for Imposters on the Zoom. For six of those months, neither of us was sure we should be the ones writing it.

We're not academics. We're not bestselling authors with track records. We're two B2B operators who ran an agency for laboratory equipment manufacturers and distributors, and figured some things out the hard way.

The whole time we were writing a chapter on how to convert imposter syndrome into documented competency, both of us were privately wondering whether anyone would take a book like this seriously coming from people like us.

The answer surprised us.

Entrepreneur Magazine featured the book in September 2024 in an article titled "How to Treat Imposter Syndrome In B2B Marketing & Sales Roles." Mashable, HackerNoon, TechTimes, and Fast Company picked up the methodology. The book won five awards. It hit Amazon Best Sellers lists in Marketing categories.

Nobody asked who we were. They asked whether the methodology worked.

That's the meta-truth the book got right. The credibility wasn't us. It was the documentation. The thing the imposter syndrome had been telling us we didn't have was the thing the readers couldn't see anyway.

Today that same documentation runs as Salesperson Inc. The book made the argument. The company runs the proof.

If you've been waiting to make a move in your career because you don't feel "qualified enough," send me a DM. The cure isn't more confidence. It's better documentation.

#B2BSales #B2BMarketing #B2BLeadGeneration #ImpostersOnTheZoom #BusinessBooks

[John Buie @johnbbuie]

We almost called the book something else.

Two years ago today, Jason Hagerman and I published Imposters on the Zoom.

The title came out of a phone call in late 2023. We were arguing about a chapter draft. Jason told me a story about a Zoom call that morning where he watched a marketing director, smart and capable with 12 years of experience, freeze during a board update. She knew the answers. She couldn't get the words out because she was convinced everyone in the room would see through her.

We had been calling the book "The B2B Lead Generation Playbook." A working title. I wrote "Imposters on the Zoom" in the margin of a printout and hung up.

The whole book reorganized around the phrase. Imposter syndrome stopped being a chapter. It became the thing the methodology existed to solve. Every step, every template, every diagram was about converting the feeling of being a fraud into documented, defensible competency.

A few months later, the book hit Amazon Best Seller in Marketing. It collected awards from Readers' Favorite, Literary Titan, Nonfiction Authors Association, BookAuthority, and Pacific Book Review. Entrepreneur, Mashable, HackerNoon, TechTimes, and Fast Company covered the book and its methodology in articles.

The same methodology now runs as Salesperson .com We took the six-step system from the book and built it into a service. Two years on, the company is what the book became.

If you run a B2B sales or marketing team and want to talk about the methodology, send me a DM.

#B2BSales #B2BMarketing #B2BLeadGeneration #ImpostersOnTheZoom #BusinessBooks

[John Buie @johnbbuie]

Recognition has a shelf life.

Within 48 hours: full impact.
Within a week: moderate impact.
After a month: almost none.

By the time Q3 achievements are celebrated in December, the behavioral reinforcement window closed months ago.

Immediate beats comprehensive. Every time.

[John Buie @johnbbuie]

Salespeople control effort.

They don't control outcomes.

A rep can do everything right and still lose. Budget gets cut. Champion leaves. Competitor undercuts by 40%.

When we only recognize wins, we teach people that effort without outcome is invisible.

[John Buie @johnbbuie]

"Great job." means almost nothing.
"Great job" is neurologically equivalent to silence.
But specific recognition?
That creates 8-16x more impact.
Because it shows you actually paid attention.
What's the most specific recognition you've ever received—and why did it stick?

[John Buie @johnbbuie]

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[John Buie @johnbbuie]

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[John Buie @johnbbuie]

61% of marketers struggle with quality #B2B leads (@HubSpot). Nurturing leads drives 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% less cost (@DemandGenReport). Ready to transform? DM me to get a free copy of our brochure or book a call. #LeadGeneration #marketing