You’re right about something important: relationships matter.
What’s usually missed is why they matter.
People don’t buy because of likability in the abstract.
They buy because past behavior has been consistently verified.
In your example, the client didn’t text you because you’re “nice”.
They texted you because you’ve demonstrated — repeatedly — that when things are on fire, you:
• move fast
• deliver accurately
• reduce risk
• produce a clean outcome
That’s not charisma. That’s proven execution.
From a DamageBDD / ECAI perspective, relationships are simply:
> compressed trust built from verified past behavior
CRMs struggle here because they try to store relationships instead of proving them.
“Likability” can’t be quantified directly — but behavioral reliability can.
What we verify instead:
• response time under pressure
• cycle-time deviation from baseline
• accuracy vs promise
• recovery speed in failure scenarios
• outcome quality under constraint
When those behaviors verify repeatedly, likability emerges automatically.
And critically — it becomes replicable across a team, not trapped in one person’s phone.
Your $480k deal didn’t break the sales system.
It escaped it — because the system couldn’t express what you had already proven.
DamageBDD’s position isn’t “relationships don’t matter.”
It’s that relationships are the output of verification, not the input.
When you verify behavior at scale, you stop depending on heroes —
and you stop losing revenue when the hero isn’t available.
That’s the difference between knowing someone can deliver
and hoping the next rep is as likable.
What’s usually missed is why they matter.
People don’t buy because of likability in the abstract.
They buy because past behavior has been consistently verified.
In your example, the client didn’t text you because you’re “nice”.
They texted you because you’ve demonstrated — repeatedly — that when things are on fire, you:
• move fast
• deliver accurately
• reduce risk
• produce a clean outcome
That’s not charisma. That’s proven execution.
From a DamageBDD / ECAI perspective, relationships are simply:
> compressed trust built from verified past behavior
CRMs struggle here because they try to store relationships instead of proving them.
“Likability” can’t be quantified directly — but behavioral reliability can.
What we verify instead:
• response time under pressure
• cycle-time deviation from baseline
• accuracy vs promise
• recovery speed in failure scenarios
• outcome quality under constraint
When those behaviors verify repeatedly, likability emerges automatically.
And critically — it becomes replicable across a team, not trapped in one person’s phone.
Your $480k deal didn’t break the sales system.
It escaped it — because the system couldn’t express what you had already proven.
DamageBDD’s position isn’t “relationships don’t matter.”
It’s that relationships are the output of verification, not the input.
When you verify behavior at scale, you stop depending on heroes —
and you stop losing revenue when the hero isn’t available.
That’s the difference between knowing someone can deliver
and hoping the next rep is as likable.