When I started selling commercial copiers in the Washington, DC area, there was a human being standing between me and every sale I wanted to make. She sat at the front desk of every building and every office I was trying to get into. Call her Mrs. Smith. Her whole job was to decide who was worth her boss’s time and who was not.

You could not sell to anyone until you got past Mrs. Smith. And there were really only two things that worked. The first was a referral, which was massive. The second was a brand she already recognized, where she had decided on her own that you were safe and that you were worth the risk of introducing.

Here is what I want you to think about: referrals and personal branding were never two different things.

The referral and the brand were the same thing, wearing two different coats. And that one thing, the thing that got me past Mrs. Smith in the 1990s, is the exact same thing that is going to get you past the gatekeeper of the 2020s and 2030s. Because the gatekeeper never left. She just got an algorithm and is on the way to becoming a full-blown AI Agent (gatekeeper).

For a long time, marketing meant talking to people because you had their contact information. You had the list, so you broadcast at the list. That era is ending.

The new way is interest marketing. You earn attention because you genuinely share an interest with the people you want to serve. Here is the rule I will not break, and I do not want you to break it either:

Do not manufacture content you do not actually believe.

Do not chase a topic because it is trending.

Start instead with two honest questions. What do you really care about and believe? And what do your clients really care about? Where those two overlap, that is your brand. That overlap is the thing people share, and it is the thing an AI agent will wave through.

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