There is a shift happening, and it is not subtle.
People are waking up. Not on some timeline that respects your sales quarter or your product roadmap. On their own timeline. Through loss, through watching the world fracture, through the slow and sometimes sudden realization that who they were trying to be was never who they were meant to be. And that changes everything about how they show up. Including how they show up to you.
I am not here to give you a framework. Not “5 things every salesperson must do” or “10 habits of elite product managers.” The world is literally on fire in places, people are resisting systems that no longer serve them, and we are still publishing playbooks like nothing has changed. Something has changed. Your buyer is not the same persona they were two years ago. Maybe they went through something that cracked them open. Maybe the macro chaos of the world reached their doorstep. Either way, the person sitting across from you, reading your email, taking your call, is not operating from the same place anymore. And if you are still selling to who they were, you have already lost.
We see through our own eyes. Obviously. But we forget, constantly, that the person on the other side has their own heartbeat. Their own pair of legs carrying them through their own life. Their own experiences reshaping how they see everything, including you. This is not soft. This is the hardest, most important thing to actually internalize: other people are real. Fully, completely, inconveniently real. And they are changing.
What works now is authenticity. Not the buzzword version. The version where you are simply honest about who you are, and you create a space where the other person can be honest too. That does not mean becoming best friends with your buyer. It means they can tell you something without worrying you are going to weaponize it into a closing strategy. It means the conversation is not a funnel. It is a conversation.
This used to be an age thing. You would watch people hit 40, 50, and slowly come to terms with what mattered. That timeline has collapsed. Younger generations are watching the ugliness in real time and they are not waiting decades to decide they will not accept it. Abuse of power, inauthenticity, performative nonsense: they see it, and they are done.
The generation coming next is not going to tolerate what we have normalized. That is not a threat. It is an invitation.
Racism, inequality, institutional failure: these are not just headlines. They trickle into households, into workplaces, into how your colleague responds in a meeting, into why your prospect went cold. Everything is connected. If the state of the world is not affecting how you think about your work, even in some small way, you might be looking at too small a frame. I am not asking anyone to be overwhelmed. I am asking you to be aware.
Stop living in what was. The old playbook, the old personas, the old transactional dance. It served a version of the world that is leaving. What could be is better. But it requires you to see the other heartbeat in the room. And actually give a damn about it.
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