I've been selling One Piece cards on eBay.

Side project. Collector's itch. Not a growth experiment.

It turned into one anyway.

Last week I walked through 29 years of digital marketing's "next big thing" and landed on the one thing that never changed: permission. Selling cards on eBay turns out to be a surprisingly good laboratory for it, and it reminded me of a few things most B2B teams have forgotten.

When someone watches a listing, they've told the platform two things: what they're interested in, and that they're considering paying for it. For eligible buyers, eBay lets the seller send an offer directly.

Think about how different that is from promoting the listing to another thousand people.

One is responding to demonstrated intent.

The other is trying to manufacture it.

Seth Godin described permission marketing as anticipated, personal and relevant, and the watcher model gets remarkably close. The buyer has already shown interest, the offer is about the exact product they were considering, and the message arrives in the context of that interest.

Now look at your funnel. The demo request that never booked. The webinar no-show. The trial user who hit the paywall. Those people aren't a cold audience. They raised a hand.

Yet most companies drop them into the same generic nurture sequence as everyone else.

That's treating a watcher like a stranger.

There's an important distinction here.

Someone visiting your pricing page is showing intent. That doesn't automatically give you permission to contact them. But if they're already a known lead, subscriber, customer or trial user who has agreed to hear from you, that pricing page visit becomes incredibly useful context.

That's the opportunity.

Permission tells you who you're allowed to talk to.

Intent tells you what you should talk to them about.

Modern marketing obsesses over the second while taking the first for granted.

I think that's backwards.

Collectors come back to sellers who describe condition honestly and ship carefully. Not because of a loyalty program, but because the last transaction was exactly what was promised.

Every sale that meets expectations makes the next one more likely. Every "near mint" card that arrives with whitening on the edges spends some of that permission. The buyer might not complain or leave a negative review. They might simply never buy from you again.

That's exactly how an email list works. Every send either earns the next open or makes the unsubscribe button a little more tempting.

Permission isn't something you collect once.

You keep earning it.

On eBay, a stranger's first question often isn't about the card. It's about you. How much feedback do you have, what percentage is positive, and what did the last twenty buyers say?

Your reputation is the price of admission.

That's becoming true everywhere. AI is making competent-looking content cheap. Listings, landing pages, cold emails and LinkedIn posts all look better than they did two years ago.

Being seen gets cheaper.

Being believed gets more expensive.

Proof built from kept promises is one of the few assets that actually compounds. On eBay, that's your feedback history. In B2B, it's reviews, case studies, renewals, referrals and customers willing to take a reference call. Most companies treat those as an afterthought, and marketing goes looking for a testimonial once a quarter because sales suddenly needs one.

But reputation isn't collateral.

It's infrastructure.

You can spot eBay's version of bad outbound instantly: keyword-stuffed titles, Buy It Now prices 40% above the market, stock photos and descriptions that tell you nothing.

Technically visible. Practically ignored.

Collectors are informed buyers who've seen every trick. B2B buyers aren't that different. They just have better spam filters.

None of this is new. What's different on eBay is the speed of the feedback loop. Price something badly and the market tells you within days. Overstate condition and your next review tells everyone. In B2B, the exact same mistakes can take a quarter to surface, so we keep making them, and the attribution model politely hides the damage.

Strip away the intent data, the ABM platforms, the lead scoring models and the twelve-touch nurture flows, and the mechanism is the same one a card seller learns quickly.

Find the people who raised their hand.

Pay attention to what they raised it for.

Talk to them about that.

Deliver exactly what you promised.

Let the proof pile up.

Pull a list of people who have already given you permission to contact them. Then find the ones who have recently shown meaningful intent:

A trial user who stopped halfway through setup.

A prospect who requested a demo and disappeared.

A webinar registrant who didn't attend.

An existing lead who came back and looked at pricing.

Don't dump them into another generic sequence. Look at what they actually did, and send a short, useful message about the thing they appear to care about.

Treat them like a watcher.

Because the advantage isn't having more people to interrupt.

It's knowing what to say when somebody has already raised their hand.