B2B sales, rehumanised
You're not selling to businesses. You're selling to humans.
We help B2B sales teams win complex, high value deals by understanding the humans who actually make the decision.
Who we are
Org charts don't sign contracts.
Businesses don't feel risk. People do, and they carry the same needs, ambitions and fears into work that they carry everywhere else.
What that costs you: sales teams presenting decks written about a product, not for the person in the meeting. The customer feels unseen, unheard and misunderstood, the deal stalls and nobody can say why.
We fix the words first. We research the people who actually decide, position you against the alternatives they are weighing, and rewrite your value proposition in their language. Then we train the team to use it, and evaluate every deal with the buyer afterwards.
How we work
Products and services
The journey to a first-class selling programme.
Every product and service we offer is a step on that journey. Four steps, taken in order. Each one is built on the one before it, and the last one feeds straight back into the first, so the programme keeps sharpening instead of gathering dust.
Step one
Know your customer
Personas built from real conversations, positioned against the alternatives your buyer is actually weighing.
In practice: A $49M win in life sciences AIStep two
Prepare the sales team
Sales toolkits and training delivered through a human-centric sales motion, designed to build deep human connections.
Step three
Open doors and build connection
Not cold, hard selling. A customer needs something different at every stage of the funnel: first contact, evaluation, decision, renewal. We help you start those relationships and then deepen the bond as each one matures.
In practice: Opening doors before the tender dropsStep four
Evaluate
We ask the buyer why you won or lost, then feed the answer straight back into the positioning.
In practice: The small fish problemAnd back to step one. What you learn in evaluation rewrites what you know about the customer, so the programme compounds rather than resets.
Who we help
Built for B2B teams selling complex, high-value solutions.
Particularly useful when
Deals involve multiple stakeholders.
Sales cycles are getting longer.
Competitors are winning despite having similar products.
Your sales team struggles to articulate differentiated value.
Marketing and sales are not aligned around the buyer.
Latest work
What changed when they stopped pitching.
How a $31M miss became a $49M win
A global scientific publisher was pitching pharma R&D the way it had always pitched librarians. The real blocker was trust, not content.
Read the case study
The red object problem
Product-first training teaches a team what to look for. We ran the workshop backwards, and they stopped leading with product.
Read the case study
Finding the front door into hospitals
Hospitals have no single buyer and no clear channel. The persona work found the tool clinicians were already using instead.
Read the case study
Partnership beat technology, and the brand changed to say so
A market leader assumed technology kept customers loyal. Asked directly, they ranked partnership above it, and were leaving for a worse product.
Read the case studyWhy work with us
Built by two people who have carried the number themselves.
Selling2Humans is Stuart and Kin Maclachlan. Husband and wife, colleagues for over twenty years, sat on opposite sides of the same table. One has led sales, one has led marketing, and both keep landing on the same conclusion: you win the deal when you understand the human deciding it.
Sales and revenue leadership
Stuart Maclachlan
Fifteen years building and running sales teams, from Unilever and Kellogg’s, where he led a group accounts team carrying £275m of revenue, to founding a strategy consultancy he grew from two people to forty before selling it in 2018.
As Chief Revenue Officer and Partner at Cognosis he has doubled company revenue and lifted new business from 6% to 30% of the book, working directly with executive teams at AB InBev, LVMH and Beiersdorf. He knows what it takes to carry a number, and how to build a team who can carry it with him.
Group accounts revenue carried
Company revenue, new business 6% to 30%
Product and marketing leadership
Kin Maclachlan
Twenty years in marketing, most recently specialising in B2B SaaS, AI and data. She built the product marketing function behind a leading global SaaS business’s new AI and data division from nothing: the personas, the positioning, the go to market strategy and the enablement that put it all in front of buyers.
That work supported $49.1m of revenue against an $18.8m plan, and helped win seven of the ten largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. She turns customer insight into words a sales team actually says out loud, rather than slideware that sits in a shared drive.
Delivered against an $18.8m plan
Largest global pharma companies won
Thoughts & insights
Same game. Two realities.
Your salesperson and your customer walked out of two different meetings.
Read the articleThe market leader nobody wanted to marry.
Being chosen once is not the same as being chosen again.
Read the article
The pitch we lost, and the five people we finally learned to see.
Winning the room means knowing which person in it actually has the power to say yes.
Read the article
You can be the market leader and still lose every deal to a worse product.
Everyone in the room was certain it was about price. It was not.
Read the article
What twelve tired buyers taught me about winning the room.
The room does not reward the supplier who knows their own product best.
Read the article
The year I said no to almost every client I could have had.
Trying to serve everyone is not ambition. It is the absence of strategy.
Read the article
The day nobody called me back.
The brand that gets your calls returned at home is silent in a market that does not know you.
Read the article
Why “accidentally good at sales” always runs out.
A sales function is a system, and systems can be built.
Read the articleGet things moving. We'd love to hear from you.
A 30-minute call on one real deal in your pipeline, and the person you actually need to win. Bring your sales lead and your product marketing lead; the answer usually sits between them.