We wrote this one for your boss.

Tell him he needs to pay for more prospect lunches.

It's important.

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A recruiter asked 20 sales leaders how many of their reps do 2–3 in-person meetings a week.

The answer was zero.

But everyone agrees that their people should be doing it.

So what’s really going on here?

When almost no one is getting in front of a customer, the person who does then stops competing on features and starts competing on trust. A category of one.

The uncomfortable truth for those who run their pipeline solely through a keyboard: When researchers had people make the same ask by email versus face-to-face, the in-person asks were 34x more effective. Same ask. 34x. And the emailers thought they were being just as persuasive but it’s not even close. The channel you're most comfortable with just so happens to be the one your buyer trusts least.

But, why lunch specifically? Why not a conference room and a bottle of water?

Because breaking bread does something a meeting can't. In a negotiation study, pairs who ate together created about ~12% more joint profit than pairs with no food on the table. Not "any shared task", but a shared meal. Oxford research goes further: people who eat together are measurably more trusting and more bonded, and the causation runs from the meal to the trust, not the other way around. This isn’t just grabbing food. You're running a trust protocol as old as time

And of course, you then pick up the check. A small, genuine gift opens a debt the buyer's own instincts want to settle. Reciprocity they call it. Don't make it feel transactional. Don’t see this as an invoice, lead with generosity. People will smell the difference.

How do you actually do this?

Book a meal as soon as the ice is broken. Before closing. Waiting until the deal is hot wastes the whole trust-building window. Break bread early, so when the commercial talk arrives, you're negotiating with someone who already trusts you.

Go after the buyers who are hardest to pin down. 68% of B2B buyers read an in-person visit as a sign you value the relationship — and senior decision-makers still want to look you in the eye before they sign. Catch them in transit: conferences, layovers, anyone passing through your city is easier to grab for 45 minutes than to schedule formally.

And read the room more than the CRM can. Who defers to whom at the table, where the hesitation lives. It’s all qualification data you'll never get over email with half the deciding committee on DND.

An important note: this is a scalpel, not a hammer. Travel budgets and remote-first buyers are real, and plenty of deals close fine over video. In-person earns its keep on first-time, complex, high-value stuff.

The objection isn't "lunches don't work." It's "lunches are hard to arrange." That difficulty is the moat. If it were easy, it wouldn't set you apart.

Block the calendar. Book the table. Because hardly anyone else will.