Write to each person about the thing they reacted to, and tell them all the same story about what the deal is for. Gartner found that tailoring to individuals cut group consensus.
Six people sat through your demo. Tomorrow you will send one thank-you email to all six.
Write to each person separately instead, about the thing that person asked about or reacted to, with whatever answers it. Six people who sat through the same demo get six different emails, and one big copied thread becomes several short ones.
The sceptic gets a message too, and it does not argue. Work out what that person is protecting and speak to that, instead of answering the objection they raised.
Nate Nasralla's group demo follow-up at Fluint, from June 2026. It replaces the single thank-you to the whole group. One of his two example lines: "Susan, you perked up at the API integration, here's the documentation." The other sends the SOC 2 report to the person who asked about security.
Nasralla's sceptic play, in the same post. No wording is published. Treat the sceptic as the most honest person in the deal. Work out what they are protecting, which he lists as budget, time, security or their standing inside the company, and reshape the offer so it serves that instead of threatening it. He says this is a judgement call, not a script.
Aligned's version, crediting Krysten Conner. Six steps, run before the meeting rather than after: share a deal room with a new stakeholder before you meet them, ask for their input so their priorities are on the agenda, give them context so nothing surprises them, build each relationship on its own, learn each person's decision criteria, and avoid the big copied thread. Aligned sells the deal-room software the first step asks for.
Nobody has measured the move. No study compares individual follow-ups with one email to the group. Fluint says its play came out of patterns across more than 150,000 deal cycles in its own product, and publishes no method, numbers or comparison. Fluint sells the software that produces the plays.
What Gartner measured points the other way. In a survey of 632 B2B buyers in 2024, Gartner found that content tailored to what the buying group had in common raised consensus by 20%, while content tailored to each individual lowered it by 59%. Buyers who got group-level relevance were three times more likely to report a high-quality deal. Delainey Kirkwood of Gartner puts the individual effect down to confirmation bias: each person's own view gets reinforced until the group is less willing to move together. Gartner sells advice to the sales leaders it surveys.
The nearest supporting number is about breadth, not tailoring. Gong states that won deals include 67% more contacts than lost ones, from sales interactions recorded in its product. Gong sells the software that counts the contacts, the comparison is between deals that went well and deals that did not, and it says nothing about whether those contacts were written to one at a time.
Writing to people about what they told you works, a little. Paul Krebs, James Prochaska and Joseph Rossi pooled 88 health programmes that tailored their messages to what each person had reported, on smoking, exercise, diet and mammograms. The effect was small but real, and a little larger when the tailoring was updated as people answered again. Every study was an individual changing their own behaviour, with no group that had to agree.
Hearing out resistance instead of arguing with it. Helen Frost and colleagues' review of 104 reviews of motivational interviewing, published in 2018, graded most of the evidence low or very low quality. Moderate-quality evidence of a small, mostly short-term benefit appeared for binge drinking, substance misuse and physical activity. None of it involves a person defending a budget inside a company.
The only measurement that speaks to this move is Gartner's, and it asked buyers how relevant content felt, not what happened after per-person emails, so it does not show that individual follow-ups lose deals. The tailoring and interviewing evidence comes from individuals changing their own health habits, where no group has to stay in step.
Write to each person about the thing they reacted to, and tell every one of them the same story about what the deal is for. The one measured finding says relevance aimed at the group raises consensus and relevance aimed at the individual cuts it hard. So personalise what you attach, not the reason to buy. The sceptic half rests on practitioner judgement.