The Human Equation: Andrew Milbourn on Why Emotional Intelligence Will Always Outsell Artificial Intelligence

Few business leaders can claim a background that spans social anthropology, corporate boardrooms, near-bankruptcy, and a swimming pool in Kentucky but Andrew Milbourn is not most business leaders. The CEO of Kiss the Fish Ltd has spent nearly two decades challenging the conventions of sales thinking, arguing that human curiosity, emotional intelligence, and a willingness to embrace fear are far more powerful commercial tools than any process-driven methodology.

GER sat down with Andrew for an in-depth conversation covering the full arc of his journey: from ambitious young sales director to fractional sales strategist, from the lessons learned at Future Publishing to the neuroscience that now underpins his new learning platform, Customer Curious Selling.

The Journey: From Sales Director to Transformation Leader

You’ve spent decades transforming sales teams into high-performing units. What first sparked your passion for sales leadership and behavioural change?

I’ve always been a rebel. I never really wanted to work for anyone else. I studied anthropology and have always been fascinated by my own behaviour and the behaviour of others. That natural curiosity is what ultimately drew me into sales. I’m not highly academic, but I found ways to succeed quickly, driven by ambition and a desire to get to the top.

What sealed it was observing poor management around me early in my career. I noticed that many brilliant salespeople made ineffective managers, and I saw an opportunity to do something about that. I genuinely enjoyed leadership and helping others perform at their best. The two things: curiosity about human behaviour and a drive to lead turned out to be the perfect combination for a career in sales transformation.

Looking back at your time at Future Publishing, what leadership lessons still guide you today?

Future Publishing gave me an extraordinary view of the corporate world at board level. The first revelation was that high-ranking leaders are often flawed individuals, not the titans they appear from the outside. Everyone at the senior level wore a mask and pretended they never made mistakes. I found that culture deeply troubling.

The most important lesson I took from it was this: great leaders must own their mistakes without fear. They don’t need to prove anything to anyone. Humility is non-negotiable. Some of your team will be better than you at certain things, and acknowledging that is a strength, not a weakness. And respect is everything. The moment you lose the respect of your team, your influence is gone.

I also witnessed the consequences of a business that couldn’t innovate fast enough when the internet bubble burst. We hadn’t built contingency into our leadership plans. Revenues dropped dramatically. That taught me that agility, the ability to make fast decisions is as important as vision itself.

What was the defining moment that led you to establish Kiss the Fish Ltd?

The name goes back to 1987. I witnessed a swimming coach at Lake Kentucky encouraging terrified children to “kiss the fish” the giant catfish that lurked in the water. It was a metaphor for walking toward your fear and turning something horrible into something positive. That idea never left me.

I set up the first incarnation of Kiss the Fish in 2007 after years of telling myself I wasn’t ready. Impostor syndrome had kept me waiting until my early thirties, even though I had the knowledge and skills at 25. I moved back in with my parents, gave up a strong corporate income, and stepped into the unknown. Within six months I had signed two major corporate training contracts. Then the 2010 recession nearly destroyed everything bailiffs at the door, the works.

But a mentor gave me advice I’ve never forgotten: every crisis is simply a problem to be solved, step by step. That problem-solving mindset, combined with a willingness to continuously reinvent the business model, is what eventually led to Kiss the Fish as it stands today, a scaling fractional sales director practice built on genuine human connection.

Relationship Management as a Revenue Strategy

You emphasise relationship management as a core growth driver. Why do most companies underestimate its commercial power?

Because most businesses measure what is easy to measure transactions, pipeline, close ratios and relationship quality is harder to put in a spreadsheet. But consider this: 68% of contracts are lost due to a lack of engagement, not price, not competition. The enemy of selling is indifference, and indifference is the direct result of neglected relationships.

I’ve seen an advertising agency nearly lose a million-pound profit account not because their work was poor, but because their smart, analytically-driven team simply failed to provide consistent human contact. The client felt forgotten. That account was one phone call away from walking out the door.

How can businesses increase revenue from existing clients without aggressive selling?

The answer is insight. To increase revenue with existing clients, you must add value they don’t already possess and that requires dedicated research and genuine thinking time. I call it strategic selling: understanding your client’s transformation piece and contributing expertise that supplements what they lack.

I’ll give you a concrete example. We worked with a client selling pressure management products. By researching sector trends, we identified a real concern about potential power supply issues in the care home sector. We brought that insight to clients before they had considered it themselves. We weren’t pitching, we were being genuinely useful. The sales followed naturally.

The goal is not to sell. The goal is to become so integrated and useful within your customer’s world that you naturally achieve trusted advisor status. That is when commercial relationships become truly durable.

In today’s digital-first world, how do you maintain authenticity in client relationships?

Technology is a tool, not a substitute for connection. Online, the single most impactful habit is training yourself to look directly into the camera lens, not at the screen. It sounds trivial but it fundamentally changes the emotional quality of the interaction, it simulates eye contact and all the trust signals that come with it.

Beyond the screen, I’m a strong advocate for old-school approaches. Send a letter. Post something memorable. In a world of instant digital noise, a physical piece of communication achieves extraordinary standout. The fundamental principle remains unchanged: people won’t remember what you said or what you did, but they will always remember how you made them feel.

Operational Excellence in Sales

What does “operational excellence” in sales truly mean beyond hitting targets?

The numbers matter, accountability is real and targets must be met. But the daily focus of a sales leader should be a single question: how can I help my customers make more money? If you orient your team around genuinely improving the commercial outcomes of the people they serve, the performance metrics tend to take care of themselves.

Operational excellence also requires purpose. Businesses need a reason to exist beyond profit. When a team understands their empowering context why they are fundamentally in the room their commitment shifts from transactional to transformational. I worked with a window manufacturing company that had lost its way. We went back to basics, back to the founder Jim’s original story: a man who went door to door after redundancy, built a business on commitment and quality. Reconnecting the sales team to that founding story changed everything about how they sold.

When you step into an underperforming sales team, what are the first three areas you assess?

First, culture their current decision-making patterns and underlying motivations. I map where they are before I try to move them anywhere. Second, vision alignment: do they actually believe in the journey, and do they understand their individual role within it? Without this, all the process improvement in the world is cosmetic. Third, accountability structures are there clear, signed commitments to specific behavioural changes, with measurable outcomes and genuine consequences if those commitments aren’t met?

I work individually with team members to review their current metrics, close ratios, activity levels and set explicit targets for improvement. Those commitments are documented and agreed with HR if necessary. Failure to deliver for three consecutive months triggers a disciplinary process. This creates a culture where hard work and real execution are genuinely valued, not just talked about.

How do you align sales behaviour with long-term company strategy?

Alignment depends on people believing in the journey and understanding their role within it which is why I often start by rewriting job descriptions. Not as a bureaucratic exercise, but as a genuine conversation about what each person is truly there to do.

The real motivators are not hygiene factors, free breakfast, flexible hours, and a new office. Those prevent demotivation, but they don’t inspire. What actually drives people is the desire to develop, to be part of something moving toward a meaningful goal. Self-actualisation is the most powerful motivator in any commercial organisation. When a leader creates that journey authentically, alignment follows.

Behavioural Change & Leadership Development

Why do traditional sales training programmes often fail to create lasting impact?

Because they focus on mechanistic processes A, B, C steps; objection handling scripts and entirely miss the human factor. The subconscious mind is primarily driven by self-interest. If a salesperson’s inner voice is preoccupied with financial anxiety or self-doubt, no amount of process will overcome that.

My new platform, Customer Curious Selling, is built on the premise that self-awareness and curiosity are the foundations of sales performance. If a person is not genuinely curious about the human being across the table, no technique will save them. Training must address the inner struggle the beliefs people hold about themselves and their value before it addresses methodology.

What distinguishes a high-performing sales leader from a high-performing salesperson?

Core motivation. I measure individuals across three human drivers: the need to win, the need to help, and the need to solve problems. A high-performing salesperson the “lone wolf” is typically driven by winning. Their ego is tied to their personal performance. Promoting them into a management role is often the worst thing you can do for both the individual and the team.

Effective sales leaders are primarily driven by the need to nurture. They find genuine fulfillment in seeing others succeed. The best thing many businesses can do is create a compensation structure that richly rewards top individual contributors so that excellent salespeople are celebrated for what they are, rather than being pushed into roles they will find unfulfilling and in which they will ultimately underperform.

Innovation & The Future of Sales

With AI and automation reshaping business, how should sales teams evolve?

My view is that we are in a short-term window of significant human advantage, followed by a medium-term period of genuine disruption, followed by a long-term future in which technology handles the majority of programmatic commercial activity. For the next five years, human decision-making remains emotionally wired in ways that AI has not yet replicated. That is a tremendous opportunity for those who invest in their people skills now.

Sales teams should absolutely maximise AI for process speed, customer insights, staff training, and research. But the human element will remain the decisive factor in the majority of complex selling for years to come. The emotional brain drives decisions. If you cannot create a feeling of trust and genuine interest in a meeting, a long-term relationship will not be established. No algorithm yet built can substitute for that.

What skills will define successful sales professionals over the next decade?

Curiosity, emotional intelligence, and the ability to think abundantly rather than scarcely. The coming generation of workers is, broadly speaking, less inclined toward selling as a vocation, which creates a significant income opportunity for those who commit and excel. Human contact will become a premium differentiator precisely because it will be rarer.

The sales professional of the next decade must focus harder on the people piece: genuine curiosity about the customer’s world, problem-solving orientation rather than product-pushing, and the resilience to sustain authentic engagement across long relationship cycles.

Strategic Insight for Business Leaders

What is the most common strategic mistake CEOs make regarding their sales function?

For SMEs, it is failing to give the sales team a genuine point of difference in the marketplace. CEOs often put their heads in the sand as innovation erodes their competitive advantage. I think of Sage’s notoriously slow response when Xero arrived. By the time they recognised the threat, significant market share had gone.

The second mistake is attributing flat or declining sales to poor salesmanship, when the real issue is that the founder’s initial network has been exhausted and the product itself needs refreshing. Too many CEOs look inward for the problem when the answer is sitting in the marketplace, waiting to be heard.

If you could give one piece of advice to fast-growing companies about revenue strategy, what would it be?

Protect agility at all costs. Every fast-growing company eventually creates the bureaucracy that kills its layers of management, approval chains, internal politics that prioritise control over customer experience. I have watched companies fail not because the market changed, but because they lost the ability to respond to change quickly.

CEOs must talk to customers directly, at least once a month. Not through surveys, not through data dashboards direct conversations. And they must resist the temptation to build internal empires. Every business decision must revolve around the customer, not around internal desires for safety or control.

Personal Philosophy & Leadership Perspective

Your background in Social Anthropology and Sociology is unusual for a sales strategist. How has it shaped your understanding of human behaviour in business?

Profoundly. Sales, at its core, is applied anthropology. You are studying how human beings make decisions, form trust, establish hierarchies, and communicate meaning. My academic training gave me a framework for understanding those dynamics long before I had a commercial vocabulary for them.

During the pandemic, I deepened that understanding by studying neuroscience specifically how trust is built and how the limbic brain functions as the real decision-making centre. What I learned confirmed what I had intuited for years: buying is an emotional act, rationalised after the fact. Salespeople who lead with product features are appealing to the wrong part of the brain. Those who create genuine curiosity and emotional engagement are speaking to the part that actually makes decisions.

What motivates you after nearly two decades leading Kiss the Fish?

At a personal level, providing security for my family. But the deeper motivation is the life goal of helping every individual I encounter genuinely enjoy the process of their work and become better at it. When I see someone transform when a nervous, self-doubting salesperson becomes a confident, curious professional who is winning deals they never thought possible, that is profoundly satisfying.

I’ve grown this business 70% year-on-year recently. But I celebrate just as hard when a client I’ve developed goes on to achieve something remarkable after we’ve parted ways. An abundant mindset means that the success I contributed to even if someone else receives the credit is a win worth celebrating. Those stories come back as referrals and reputation.

What does long-term business success mean to you today?

It means building something that outlasts any single commercial cycle: a body of thinking, a methodology, a community of people who approach selling with genuine curiosity and abundant intent. I’m about to launch Customer Curious Selling, a learning platform that distills everything I’ve learned about the inner game of sales. That feels like the most important work of my career.

But ultimately, success is about impact. The question I ask myself is: did the people I worked with leave that engagement better equipped to navigate their world? If the answer is yes, that is enough.

Buying happens through emotion, not logic. Most salespeople focus on describing their product when they should be creating a feeling.

Editor’s closing note

Speaking with Andrew Milbourn is a reminder that the most enduring commercial thinking is rarely born in lecture theatres or boardrooms. It is forged through failure, humility, and an unflinching commitment to understanding other people. From near-bankruptcy in 2010 to growing Kiss the Fish by 70% year-on-year, his is not a story of linear success but of relentless reinvention.

What GER takes from this conversation is a simple but countercultural truth: in a world racing toward automation, the sales professionals and business leaders who will matter most are those who invest most deeply in being human. Curious. Humble. Present. Useful.

Andrew’s forthcoming platform, Customer Curious Selling, promises to bring that philosophy to a wider audience. We will be watching, and we suspect the market will be too.