Marketing isn’t advertising like it used to be. You’re not buying a Super Bowl ad. You’re not shouting into a megaphone hoping someone pays attention. You’re probably not even running persona-based drip email campaigns anymore.

Today, human-first AI marketing requires sales skills. It’s about personal messaging, trust-first relationship building, and 1:1 conversations, powered by appropriate use of AI research, automation, and generative content. After 15 years inside Sandler, coaching 400+ sales coaches, working with thousands of clients, and rewriting the world-famous sales training program, I’ve learned that the skills great sellers use to start real conversations are what marketers need to break through the noise of AI slop.

Check out this conversation with Michael Ocean on the Sell Me This Pen podcast for the full story.

Here’s what I’ve learned and how we build it into our work at Avenue9.

1. Marketing has become hand-to-hand combat.

When I started my career, marketing meant mass media, branding messages, and getting the phone to ring. Websites, billboards, and direct mail helped you target certain demographics.

Now, with AI, every touchpoint can be personalized for the individual buyer. There are no more mass markets — there are only micro-moments. The four main TV channels have fractured into millions of YouTube channels, streaming services, and influencer Patreons. The algorithms are ruthless when choosing what to show to whom. Your marketing is drowning in a sea of unlimited noise.

So, you can’t out-shout anyone to get attention. You can’t be louder in more places or spend more money than your competition. You must earn your way into a conversation with your buyer by being relevant and human. You have to meet them where they are and show them you are real, in more than one way.

That means:

• DMs from real people
• Personalized content rooted in storytelling
• Sales enablement materials that support the conversations humans are having

2. Marketing now requires sales skills.

As marketing becomes more person-focused, instead of persona-based, it requires the same skill set that great sellers have always had:

• The ability to ask great questions
• The awareness to observe trigger events
• The instincts to build trust and solve problems

Too many marketers still obsess over clicks, impressions, and vanity metrics. At Avenue9, we focus on:

• How many conversations did we start?
• How many problems did we solve?
• How many people trusted us enough to invite us into their world, inbox, and algorithm?

If your team can’t hold a two-way conversation or identify sales-relevant problems in the wild, you have a skill gap, not a marketing funnel problem.

3. AI is fast. Trust is slow.

AI is an amplifier, not a substitute. Used well, it gets you to the conversation faster by surfacing insights, writing first drafts, and flagging opportunities. It can speed up the prep, process, and post-conversation follow-up, but it can’t skip steps or generate trust that isn’t there already.

You still need a human to:

• Understand the context of the situation
• Read the nuance in the conversation with your buyer
• Feel the emotion and understand the pain of their problem
• Decide if and how to act to solve their problem or build consensus

At Avenue9, we don’t just teach you how to use AI for marketing. We help you determine what should be human and what should be automated. And, we help you do both better because automation without empathy is spam, and empathy without scale is a bottleneck. It is about leveraging automation and authenticity.

4. It’s not just about reach. It’s about relationships.

In B2B organizations, you don’t need 10,000 followers. You need 10 decision-makers who believe in you.

Marketing isn’t as much about building a brand anymore as it is about building credibility in every interaction. From your LinkedIn comments to your outbound email to the onboarding experience after a deal closes, your brand is a reflection of the entire lifecycle of the customer.

The buyers who engage with your marketing want answers, not ads. They want insight, not infographics. And they want to know they’re talking to a human who understands their world, not an AI chatbot just trying to sell into their organization.

5. Give first. Be generous and patient.

When in doubt, give away five great ideas to a prospect. Invite them to a community or conversation of extreme value. No one ever gets offended by a great gift or an invitation to a party. However, people hate to be pitched.

This is one of the simplest and most effective pieces of advice I can give any B2B marketer or founder trying to build trust online. Be patient.

You don’t need to pitch. You don’t need to ask for time on their calendar. You don’t need to use an email waterfall technique, a video with their name it, or any other outreach hack popular this quarter.

Just give. Just help. Just invite them to join your community of people trying to solve the same problem.

• Saw someone hiring a new VP of Sales? Send them a few onboarding tips.
• Know your buyer is navigating layoffs or re-orgs? Share a resource to help their team.
• Notice someone liked your content? DM them and ask, “What stood out to you?”

No pressure. No pitch-slaps. Just value.

The worst case? You leave them better than you found them. The best case? You’re building a relationship that actually goes somewhere.

Be human on purpose.

It’s never been easier to automate artificial messaging, but it’s never been harder to be seen and heard by actual humans. In a world of overwhelming noise, be the person who is listening, not the person who is shouting.

The future of marketing isn’t automation, algorithms, or omnichannel orchestration. It’s people who use the best tools available to say something worth hearing, in a way that builds trust, at the right time, with the right person.

That’s Human-First AI Marketing. That’s what we do at Avenue9.

If you want help, let’s talk.