How to Sell (And Write) Authentically Without Sounding Like AI

TLDR: Most buyers read your emails, posts, and site long before they ever contact you, which makes the voice on your page your first sales call. David Roy has spent fifteen years in B2B sales, and he breaks down three moves that earn trust on the page and on the call: lead with the reader's problem, say the awkward true thing, and follow up with something useful. Hand AI the research and the scaffolding, then keep yourself in every part where trust gets built. Find him in his newsletter, ENG Sales.

The parts of your work that prompts could never reproduce are the parts worth protecting.

Your judgment. Your taste. The way you sound when you talk to a person you actually want to help.

I usually write about that in the context of writing. Today it shows up in sales … which is nearer to writing than most people know, anyway.

David Roy has spent fifteen years in B2B sales and helped build revenue past $100 million. He now works with technical founders who inherited the sales job by accident and have been running it on instinct ever since.

He’s going to show you why the voice on your page is your first sales call, three moves that build trust whether you are writing an email or sitting across a table, and where AI belongs in that chain.

David’s first message to me was a good example of his expertise. He engaged with my work, got to know me, and showed up as a person before pitching for anything. Fifteen years of selling, and the thing he led with was a connection.

The lessons he’s written here, he practices for his own outreach. He’s established his argument’s credibility in the DMs, before he wrote it down here.

Read it below.

New here? I’m James. I help founders and creators build AI systems that make them impossible to replace. My mission is to help you use AI to become irreplaceable at what you do by turning your expertise into systems no one else can replicate. This week’s piece comes from David Roy , who has sold for a living for fifteen years.

For the foundation underneath it, read How to Train AI on Your Brand Voice.

You wrote the pitch yourself.

Then you handed it to AI to make it better.

It came back cleaner, smoother, and sounding like no one.

That’s the trap. Used one way, AI sharpens your voice. Used the lazy way, it sands your voice off until you sound like everyone else who took the same shortcut. Clean grammar. Balanced sentences. The frictionless tone of a machine that has never once been nervous about losing a deal.

The customers you are reaching out to can feel it. When everyone sounds polished, polish stops being a signal. It becomes noise or worse an indicator of AI. The one thing that cuts through noise is the one thing AI can’t fake for you….YOU, showing up as a person.

I’ve spent 15 years in B2B sales, and these days I help technical founders sell without feeling like they’re wearing a costume. James and I come at the same problem from two doors. He helps you write in your real voice. I help you sell in it. Turns out they were never two problems.

Here’s the part you might not call selling. Every guest-post pitch, every “can I write for your audience,” every DM to someone you want as a client is a sale. You’re asking a human to trust you with their time, their inbox, or their readers.

Sales is all about problem solving with another human. To do that you have to communicate with that other person on a human level. Although AI is getting better it’s still very easy to pick up on AI generated communication. So you have to learn to write and sell in your voice. The people you’re pitching want to engage with you, not your AI.

Today James and I going to walk through that sales process and why selling in your voice is so important.

Think about the last time you got a message clearly written by a machine wearing your prospect’s name. You felt it in the first lines. Something was just…off. We had a version of this long before AI. Every call center script we’ve all hung up on. AI just spread it faster and dressed it up nicer.

That same instinct runs the other way when you’re the one pitching.

When I first started using AI, I was pitching other writers for collabs and guest posts. I wanted connections to my framework and a way to connect to their audience. I found a lot of creators to reach out to and I wanted to reach out to all of them, fast. So I did the lazy thing. Drop the writer’s name and their newsletter into AI, say “here’s what I want to pitch them,” paste the reply, send. Repeat.

Two of them wrote back with the same question:

“Did you just ask AI to come up with these ideas?”

The rest went into a black hole. No reply, no signal. I’ll never know for sure, but I’d bet at least one of those silences was the same thought, unspoken.

What stung is that I did it to writers. People who live and die by voice. I’d skipped the only thing that mattered to them: had I actually read their work, and did I have anything worth bringing to their readers? I had no idea because I did not to any of the work. I was still in funnel mode. Volume over connection.

The pitches that landed were the opposite. Every one started with me connecting to the writer and their audience first, before I ever floated an idea. That happened when I stopped cold pitching with AI alone. Instead I started spending the time to understand the work, then writing to it.

Because pitching a guest post is a sale. You’re asking someone to trust you with the audience they built. Nobody hands that over because your AI wrote a tidy paragraph. Don’t get me wrong, I still use AI at times to help with my pitches, but I make sure I spend the time to understand the value add to their audience before I send over any ideas.

The pattern is always the same. The moment I sound like a script, the other person starts performing back at me. Polite (most of the time 😁) nodding along, then gone. The moment I say the true, slightly awkward thing (I loved this piece, here’s where I’d push back, here’s what I could add for your readers), they lean in. Now there’s a person in the room.

By the time a buyer talks to you, they’ve already done most of the deciding. Consider this:

Most B2B buyers work through 60 to 70 percent of their research before they ever reach out.

They’ve read your site, your posts, your emails. They’ve built a picture of you from your words alone.

So the voice on the page is your first sales call. If your writing sounds like a committee, you’ve told them who to expect before you open your mouth. If it sounds like generic AI-generated copy, they don’t know what to expect and will likely move on to the next. And if they do click through, when the real you shows up on the call sounding like a different person, the difference becomes risk in the buyers mind.

The founders who close fastest collapse that difference. The email sounds like them. The call sounds like the email. The follow-up sounds like the call. One voice, all the way through.

Trust is the absence of a gap between what you wrote and who you are.

Authenticity gets treated like a vibe. In sales it’s a set of moves you can run, the same moves whether you’re writing a post or sitting across from a buyer. Here are the three that have closed the most for me.

The instinct is to lead with what you do your features, but don’t. Instead open with the problem your reader is living in, in their words, before you mention your solution. It works in a cold email and it works in the first five minutes of a call.

A local HVAC company was hesitant to even book a call about their sales process. They knew it needed work. They just weren’t sure I was the right person to fix it. So instead of pitching how I’d help, I answered that doubt with value. Their CRM, ServiceTitan, was new to them, so I pulled three insights they could use to improve their sales process, whether we worked together or not. That’s leading with their problem: solve the real hesitation before you ask for the deal. We’ve been working through their sales process ever since.

The sentence you want to soften is usually the one that earns trust. The price is high. This part won’t fit your setup. That timeline is optimistic. Say it plainly, in the doc and on the call. I learned this by getting it wrong.

Early on, I was shadowing a senior rep on a call to learn the product. He talked the entire time. All the engineer wanted was a rough price for his planning. I could have cut in: “You’re just after a ballpark, right? Here it is. When you’re closer to kicking off, let’s touch base.” I stayed quiet instead. We lost the sale, and any shot at the next one.

The true, slightly awkward line is yours to write. Don’t be afraid of it. We’re all thinking it in the moment anyway.

“Just checking in” is the most sent and most ignored follow-up there is. Every one teaches the buyer you have nothing to add. Trade it for something specific: the example they’ll need next, the answer to a question they haven’t asked yet, the one line that moves their thinking.

A founder I know runs a VA agency that helps hair salons book clients. She wanted a real sales process so she could hire a rep who’d actually succeed. We talked, I followed up but then… quiet. I followed up. Still nothing. So instead of nudging again, I took what I’d learned in our discovery call and built her a sales process outline. I did the value work first, then sent it. That got us back on a call to finalize it. Another ‘just following up’ email and I’d probably still be waiting.

Add value first. That’s the judgment call AI can’t make for you, because only you know what your customer actually needs.

None of this means abandoning AI. I use it every day. The move is knowing which parts of the job are human and which parts aren’t.

AI is excellent at the non-human work. Pulling research on a prospect. Structuring a messy draft. Turning your voice memo into a first pass. Catching the typo you’d have sent at 11pm. I use it for all of these things regularly. But I stay in the loop when connecting with the other human I’m trying to solve a problem with.

AI falls apart on the human work. The diagnosis of what your buyer is actually afraid of. The one specific line only you would write, because only you sat in that meeting. The decision to say the hard true thing instead of the smooth safe one.

So keep the chain honest: AI drafts the scaffolding → you write the sentence that could only come from you → you have the actual conversation.

The human stays in the loop at every point where trust gets built. That’s the whole game.

Take the last pitch you sent: a cold email, a collab ask, a DM to a writer whose audience you want. Read it out loud.

Any line you would never say to that person’s face, cut it. Rewrite it the way you’d actually say it, sitting across the table.

If it now sounds a little more like you and a little less like everyone, you’re doing it right.

AI can draft the words. It can’t be the person. And the person is what the buyer came for.

Show up as yourself in the writing, and you won’t have to become someone else on the call.

Sales is just problem solving with another human.

I keep returning to this line from David. I think about that gap more than most people would expect, because my work can widen it.

Every system I build for a client moves some piece of their thinking out of their hands and into a machine. Handled carelessly, it puts a stranger’s voice in their mouth and they don’t hear it happening. Handled well, it clears out the work that was never theirs to do and leaves them more room to be the person their buyers came for.

The gap never announces itself. Nobody writes back to tell you the email sounded like a template. They just stop replying, and you spend the next quarter wondering why the pipeline went quiet.

So do what David said. Read the last thing you sent out loud. Cut any line you would not say to that person’s face.

David writes ENG Sales at engsales.substack.com. If you defaulted into running sales and want a read on where it’s breaking, his free Flywheel Assessment is the place to start. Subscribe to him. He earned it with this one.

Then look at your own side of the chain. Most of the gap David describes comes from handing AI the work that was supposed to stay yours. The AI Readiness Diagnostic takes five minutes and tells you which parts of your work a machine can carry and which parts it will quietly ruin.

Your voice is the asset. Build the system around it.

PS. If you want to see which parts of your own work AI can safely carry, take the free AI Readiness Diagnostic.