Ideas, analysis and communication insight for strategic thinkers in B2B tech
LEADERSHIP COMMS
The Executive Voice
This is the second week of a series called ‘Communicate like a …‘, where we look at how professionals outside of tech communicate and what we can learn from their approach.
Communicate like a DIPLOMAT
Real Diplomacy Is Precise, Careful and Intentional
Being diplomatic is often seen as weak: taking the ‘softly’ approach to avoid offending or to side-step difficult or awkward situations. However, real diplomacy is the opposite. It’s about using restraint when communicating. It’s the ability to stand your ground calmly, without descending into ugly conflict (an energy stealer that hinders problem-solving and removal of blockers).
Diplomats sometimes operate in enemy territory, and regardless of whether the crowd is oppositional or friendly, saying the wrong thing is like stepping on a land mine, so they’re careful and considerate when communicating. They’re often tasked with influencing shifting alliances or building new ones. They’re constantly walking a tightrope, and this requires advanced communication skills plus a deep understanding of people’s motivations, not just where their loyalties lie.
Top diplomats are excellent listeners; they’re good at reading subtext, picking up on covert communication signals and knowing what and when to reveal something or hold back. Another analogy for a diplomat is that of a master chess player: strategic, analytical, calculating, observant, methodical, yet adaptable. They’re mentally agile, tactically sharp, and most of all, able to think several moves ahead.
For tech leaders, communicating like a diplomat is needed right now. Many conversations have the potential to be emotionally charged due to layoffs, restructures, delayed delivery, anxious customers, impatient investors, and divided boards. In those moments, the leader who communicates like a diplomat does three things well.
They protect the relationship while addressing the problem.
They choose process as carefully as they choose words: who needs to hear what, in what order, and in which setting.
They avoid humiliating the other side just to win a point.
The U.S. Diplomacy Centre defines diplomacy as “the art and practice of building and maintaining relationships and conducting negotiations with people using tact and mutual respect.”
Australia’s Gareth Evans framed diplomacy as: “All diplomacy is an exercise in persuasion and influence.” Not brute force, loud declarations or threats, but the disciplined art of shifting how people think, respond and what they do next.
REVENUE COMMS
Communication That Earns Influence
Revisiting Negotiation Fundamentals We Sometimes Forget
Negotiation is about solving the right problem: At its core, it’s about shaping the other side’s choice so that saying yes serves their interests better than walking away. As the Italian diplomat Daniele Vare said long ago, negotiation is “the art of letting them have your way”. Yet, even experienced negotiators make six common mistakes that keep them from solving the right problem:
Focusing too much on your needs, when the other side will say yes for their reasons, not yours. The better approach is to understand their pressures, priorities and internal sell-in problem, then shape the deal so it helps them choose what you want.
Price matters, but when it bulldozes everything else, negotiation becomes harder, narrower and more adversarial. In B2B tech sales, this is a big trap: customers may care about cost, but they’re also weighing risk, trust, internal politics, implementation effort, reputation, fairness and whether they can defend the decision internally.
Treating stated positions as the real negotiation, when they’re often only the surface version of deeper interests. The better move is to look behind what someone says they want and understand why they want it, because that’s where new options, trade-offs and value often appear.
Assuming value only comes from common ground, when differences can often create the deal. The smarter move is to identify where each side values things differently, like timing, risk, reputation, control, certainty, price, future upside, and then structure the agreement so each party gets more of what matters most to them.
BATNA, your Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement, defines whether a deal is actually worth taking. In B2B tech sales, this means you need to know the customer’s fallback option as well as your own. If they can delay, build internally, choose another vendor or do nothing, that shapes how much urgency they feel, and how much leverage you really have.
Assuming you’re seeing the negotiation clearly, when your own role, biases, pressures and assumptions may be distorting the picture. Good negotiators deliberately correct for this by reality-testing their view, seeking outside perspectives, and deliberately building the strongest possible argument from the other side’s perspective before they walk into the room
As summarised from the HBR archives.
The New Rules of Selling in Tech
Part 2 of a four-part series exploring how AI is changing the B2B sales function and what you need to do to continue succeeding.
When AI Qualifies, Humans Connect
Last week, I argued that the middle ground of B2B sales is disappearing.
AI is taking over the predictable - like slide decks, feature comparisons, and follow-ups. What’s left is a split path. On one side, proprietary AI-driven intelligence that makes your product visible in machine-to-machine buying. On the other hand, a rising Human Premium, where critical thinking, judgement and communication become the differentiator, is this week’s focus.
Because when AI does most of the vetting, what’s left for humans is not more communication, it’s better communication. And that’s where the gap is widening. We’ve never had more tools, more channels, more content, yet trusted advice is in short supply.
If most of the buying journey is rep-free, that final human interaction carries disproportionate weight. It has to resolve tension, not just deliver information.
In 2026, information is cheap. What matters is what you do with it. The best sellers are shifting from presenting answers to navigating uncertainty with confidence.
This means that if you’re still talking at your buyers (delivering a 20 to 50-slide deck), you’re not communicating effectively. You have to go from telling to probing and from pitching to diagnosing.
AI is pushing us to improve how we communicate even more
Because AI has already answered the obvious questions, our role is to ask the questions it didn’t think to ask and help the buyer make a decision they can defend.
The next two articles will cover:
The Data Sandbox (proving value in the buyer’s ‘messy reality’)
Outcome-based Influence (changing the language of the deal)
The strongest seller in tech today won’t be the one with the slickest presentation; it will be the one who helps the customer think better.
MARKET PULSE
In The News
Apple’s New Leader Lauded by Outgoing CEO
The biggest news this past week is Apple’s long-term CEO, Tim Cook, stepping down and anointing John Ternus as his successor, calling him “a brilliant engineer and thinker.” In his letter to the Apple Community, he rhapsodises: “John cares so much about who we are at Apple, what we do at Apple, who we want to reach at Apple, and he has the heart and character to lead with extraordinary integrity … This company will reach such incredible heights under his leadership.”
POV: Warm words, even gushing, but time will tell if Ternus has what it takes to lead Apple in the new AI era, even if right now it‘s the ‘Wild, Wild West’ filled with AI cowboys ranging from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
AI Boom Creating More Mess
According to this Business Insider article, “AI is creating a mess of duplicate tools and data” inside Amazon. This is what happens when your CEO (Andy Jassy) urges employees to adopt the technology or risk falling behind. As AI tools spread faster than governance, everyone (and not just Amazon) risks data exposure, compliance gaps and system disruption from unapproved use
POV: Maybe Andy Jassy’s message should have gone further, spelling out the governance process that many AI pilots still lack, and which is often what holds them back from delivering real ROI.
Phrase of the Week
AI Sprawl: A surge of AI tools and autonomous agents that risks overwhelming companies’ centralised oversight and security controls.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
”I feel a gratitude that I cannot put into words, that I somehow got to be … the leader of a company that ignites imaginations and enriches lives in such profound ways it defies description. What an honour and a privilege it has been.”
SOMETHING EXTRA
Is Your AI Story Too Safe?
In B2B tech, storytelling often defaults to features, roadmaps and safe outcomes. The problem is, without showing what’s truly at risk, nothing feels urgent.
This is where ‘Action’ storylines can work, especially in telling your AI journey or that of your client’s journey using your AI solutions.
My favourite storytelling teacher, Robert McKee, makes the point that “Well written action inspires high excitement.”
Use the Duality of Danger and Safety to Create Excitement
McKee goes on to say that “it’s about leading your audience through a dance between jeopardy and security. Like a ride on a plunging roller-coaster, audiences feel a blast of disaster while hugged securely in a harness.”
He adds, “A well-told action story is not just a sequence of meaningless acrobatics, explosions and derring-do. Spectacle isn’t meaning. Unless life is at stake, excitement melts into boredom.”
So what’s at stake for your tech company or that of your clients that you can turn into an exciting story about safely navigating the AI disruption? Are you gutsy enough to talk about it? Because if you are, it creates excitement (buzz).
With the Action storyline, when others go bland, you go cinematic.
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