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The B2C Personalization Playbook Comes to B2B: How Product-Trained Agents Are Reshaping Presales
When was the last time Netflix showed you a generic "Acme Corp" homepage? Or Spotify greeted you with a playlist designed for "Mickey Mouse"? The answer is never because in B2C, personalization at scale isn't a luxury. Yet in B2B software, where the stakes are exponentially higher and deals can reach millions of dollars, buyers routinely sit through demos filled with fake data, irrelevant use cases, and generic narratives designed for someone else's business.
Episode 193 of The Presales Podcast tackled this paradox head-on. Hosted by Jack Cochran, General Manager of Presales Collective, and Matthew James, the conversation with Kintan Brahmbhatt (CEO and co-founder of Olto and former Amazon veteran who spent over a decade building personalized experiences) explored how product-trained AI agents can finally bring B2C-level personalization to B2B buying experiences, and what that means for the future of presales.
Listen to the full episode now!
The Personalization Gap: Why B2B Lags Behind B2C
Kintan's perspective is informed by more than 12 years creating some of the most sophisticated personalization systems in the world, at places you recognize (Amazon). The insight that drove him to co-found Alto was simple but striking: "the same consumers to the same buyers and it's not just Amazon you know Amazon is where i had first-hand experience but no netflix also has really good recommendations so does spotify and so do many other products the same consumer would typically experience a contextually relevant experience."
Yet when those same people evaluate enterprise software? "when i went to you know when we studied the b2b buying experiences the buyers often got a demo that was designed for fictitious organizations acme or you know their users were Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck or some Disney characters or F1 race drivers or they were designed for some other companies and they were just getting repurposed."
The irony isn't lost on anyone in presales. As Kintan pointed out, "when the stakes are so high a good demo or a great demo really helps tell the story helps you know reduce friction in the buyer's mind that whether or not this product will solve their problem whether this makes sense for them or not the stakes are so high why aren't folks investing so much in this?"
The answer, unsurprisingly, is economics. "the time it takes to tailor the demos to tailor the conversations to make sure each conversation is contextually relevant for every buyer and so on and so on it's just very expensive so it's kind of cost prohibitive for them to do it for a lot of folks."
The Unspoken Rule About SE Capacity
This cost constraint has created what Kintan calls an "unspoken rule" in presales organizations: "in so many teams so many very successful companies teams i've seen that there is an unspoken or unwritten rule that se capacity is not the same as the capacity of the [cut off]." SE time is prioritized on the larger, later stage deals, and things like early-stage prospects or smaller deals don’t receive the attention they need. Everyone else gets a one-size-fits-all experience without the personalization that matters.
Contrast that with B2C. "in Amazon for instance you only get a personalized experience if your annual spend on Amazon is over ten thousand dollars whether you're buying a one dollar item or a hundred dollar item you get the same personalized experience." The democratization of quality experiences, regardless of transaction size, is what allows consumer platforms to scale. B2B has historically lacked this capability because manual customization simply doesn't scale economically, but this is changing.
What Makes an Agent Actually Useful
The conversation wasn't a blanket endorsement of AI agents. Jack, who once participated in a hackathon to build an Alexa integration for presales ("it worked people really like the feature but we never actually deployed it for a single customer").
When asked what makes agents truly valuable verus just a novelty, Kintan's answer was unequivocal: product training. "Think of Olto as a single platform with a bunch of product trained ai agents that power every revenue critical product experience." You need to spend time training your agents on your product. They need to know the information and how ot use the information. What matters is whether the agent has specific understanding of your product, user cases, and customer context, and is able to deliver relevant information back according to all of that.
All touchpoints with an agent should have shared intelligence. Agents operating in silos create fragmentation and inaccurate information, which is worse then getting no answer at all.
Why Now Is Different Than a Year Ago
Matthew made an astute observation: "I think AI is more interesting now than it was a year ago … [it] is less about like tools you use and more of how you can actually utilize it in a way that it actually changes and impacts your work."
Kintan agreed and pushed further. The typical narrative around AI in go-to-market focuses narrowly on productivity: "a lot of what you hear even on linkedin and twitter and blogs is when it comes to AI and GTM it's all about … i can do a lot more work faster." But that misses the bigger story: "the buyer has also changed and the products have changed the role of the SE has changed and … almost nobody's metrics or comp plans or … tooling has evolved has kept up with the pace of change on the other metrics."
This is the misalignment that most of us are feeling today. Buyers expect self-service, product-led experiences that help them understand things before they talk to sellers. Sellers expect to be the ones to do that informing their clients. This needs to get into alignment. Solutions roles have shifted from demo deliver to strategic consulting an sense-making, but most organizations still measure SE performance along capacity allocation and demo-requests.
The New SE Workflow: From Hero to Orchestrator
So what does the future actually look like? Jack, drawing on past experience, painted a vivid picture of the status quo: spending more than half his time wrestling with demo environments, spinning up servers at home, managing VMs, fighting configurations, all before ever getting in front of a customer.
The agent-assisted workflow should invert this. Agents need to handle early-stage discovery, basic product navigation, qualification questions, and routine interactions. This allows Solutions teams to deliver personalized and contextually relevant experiences to all prospects, not just late-stage deals. Kintan calls this the core value of presales: "we are in the business of sense making as sellers as GTM professionals and specifically as scs so you want to make sure that reduce friction in sense making."
The Bottom Line: Presales Is Evolving, Are Your Systems?
Solutions as a profession is changing. Buyers require the type of experiences they have in their lives as B2C customers. B2B interactions need to catch up.
Products are changing faster than ever, and AI agents need to fill the gap on personalization and helping Solutions teams to scale economically. We need to get out of the AI-tooling era, and into the AI-personalization era.
Solutions teams filled with SEs, FDEs, Value Engineers and more are not becoming obsolete. We are in a unique position to be “sense-makers” and help buyers in their journey. The technology is ready. The question is whether we are ready to evolve ourselves to this new reality.
Join the Presales Collective Slack community at presalescollective.com/slack and join the #presales-podcast channel to stay updated on future episodes and join the conversation after each show. Follow the PSC LinkedIn page for upcoming events and information.
