About Intelligent Handshake.

We change the conversation.

Intelligent Handshake began with an observation: most brands try to predict what a buyer will buy and when. The more valuable variable is who. Resolve who is on the line or on the page, and the offer, the route, and the risk posture follow.

Years of self-funded development turned that into a process patent, held in the United States and in multiple countries, and into infrastructure that runs in the live revenue path for direct-to-consumer brands and the call centers behind them. The company is based in Santa Monica, California.

Founder story

It started with the sugar packets.

Eileen first explained Intelligent Handshake at a restaurant table. She emptied the bowl of sugar packets and sorted them: the raw, the pink, the blue, the yellow, the white, the green. Each one, she said, is a buyer.

They sit in the same bowl and reach for the same cup of coffee. To the brand selling to them, they are worth completely different amounts, want different things, and carry different risks. From the outside, at the moment they reach for you, they look the same.

The question every seller faces is which packet is in front of them right now, and what to offer it. The IH Score answers that on the fly, before the page paints or the agent speaks.

The original art

Where the dahlia comes from.

The Intelligent Handshake mark began with this flower. Its story is Eileen's, and it will be told here.

Open the original, full size

In their words.

• Telebrands

  Intelligent Handshake has significantly improved conversion and net revenues on all the brands where we have it deployed.
  Shail Prasad, Senior VP of Marketing

• Reliefband

  Eileen stepped in to set up a complete direct-to-consumer operation that did not exist before, and helped grow the brand by double digits in back-to-back years.
  Rich Ransom, President and CEO

• Brainetics

  Eileen helped us significantly improve sales on every measure, including MER, average order value and return rates.
  Joel Appel, President

Everything in your stack records.
One thing decides.

Four layers define the commerce stack. Intelligent Handshake works alongside the first three and adds the one none of them was built to be: the one that chooses, while the visitor is still there.

1. Decision

   System of decision

   What do we do with this visitor, right now?

   Intelligent Handshake, at first contact, on every channel.

2. Intelligence

   System of intelligence

   What does the data mean?

   Analytics, machine learning, customer data platforms, personalization.

3. Engagement

   System of engagement

   How do we reach the buyer?

   Email, SMS, contact centers, web, marketplaces.

4. Record

   System of record

   What happened?

   Commerce platforms, CRM, ERP.

• AI moves value to the decision

  Models make prediction cheap. The scarce asset is the moment where a prediction becomes an action, and the outcome that comes back.

• The category is forming

  Decision platforms now exist for enterprise operations. None decides the buyer. How the layers arrived

• Commerce is open

  No one decides the buyer at first contact across calls and web. That is the layer Intelligent Handshake owns.

Every moment has a name. The one that closes the sale is the moment of decision.

Since 1987 the industry has named the moments of truth: the zero moment of research, the first moment at the shelf, the second moment of using what was bought, the ultimate moment of telling everyone else. Each describes what the buyer feels. None describes what the seller does about it.

Every other moment is something the buyer experiences. The moment of decision is the one the seller can act on, and its outcome comes back in seconds, not quarters.

From the moment of truth to the moment of decision.

For forty years marketing has named the moments a buyer goes through, and technology has built the layers that sell to them. Each moment describes what the buyer feels. Each layer named a generation of winners. Both arrive at the same place: the decision.

1. 1987Moments of truthJan Carlzon, SASEvery contact shapes the relationship.
2. 1990sRecordSystem of recordWhat happened?
3. 2005First and secondA.G. Lafley, P&GThe shelf, then using what was bought.
4. 2006ThirdPete BlackshawWhat the customer says in public.
5. 2011ZeroGoogleResearch, before the shelf.
6. 2011EngagementSystem of engagementHow do we reach the buyer?
7. 2013UltimateBrian SolisOne buyer’s experience becomes the next one’s zero moment.
8. 2017IntelligenceSystem of intelligenceWhat does the data mean?
9. 2026DecisionEileen Fraser, Intelligent HandshakeThe moment of decision, and the system that acts on it. What do we do with this visitor, right now?

What we believe.

• The buyer is always right about how they buy.

  Brands push buyers into the channel they prefer. We offer every path and let the order change. The buyer's choice is the feedback that trains the next decision.

• A record describes. A decision changes.

  Commerce has spent decades getting better at recording what happened. The leverage is in choosing what happens next, while the visitor is still there.

• Decisions are the unit.

  A decision is one scored interaction: who arrived, what they are worth, and what to show them. It can be produced, measured, and improved, one at a time and at scale.

• Decisions compound.

  Every decision writes back what the buyer did. That ledger can only be built by being in the moment, and it cannot be bought back by starting later.

The team.

Eileen Fraser

Founder, CEO and President

An award-winning direct marketing professional who has led campaigns for Chevrolet, Beachbody, Princess Cruises, Mattel and T-fal, and helped grow P90X, Insanity and Derm Exclusive. Her previous firm, Vintage Marketing, launched more than a hundred infomercial, short-form and online products. She has carried bottom-line responsibility for $75 million programs and teams of up to fifty people. In 2012 she recognized that data could break the patterns direct marketing had relied on, and has been building Intelligent Handshake ever since.

Douglas Plank

Chief Operations Officer

A repeat founder. He founded and led MobileCause, the mobile fundraising and communications platform, co-founded Telesis MG in electronic medical claims, and co-founded Scimitar, a corporate accelerator and fund-to-fund investing partner with Silicon Valley Bank. He co-founded two nonprofits and grew them to $20 million and $30 million in annual revenue, and serves on nonprofit and private company boards.

Dan Otto

Chief Science Officer

An econometrician specializing in media mix modeling, optimization and predictive analytics, building cross-sectional time series models of marketing performance for Fortune 500 companies. His engineering background spans General Electric, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin. He has been developing the Intelligent Handshake models since 2013.

The brand.

The mark is a dahlia: one center, many petals, every one of them a different visitor. Sapphire carries the decision; turquoise marks what is live.

• Midnight#0E1726
• Sapphire#0F52BA
• Turquoise#1FB3AC
• Tint#D4F1EC
• Paper#F5F7F6

Display

Newsreader

Text

Inter

Telemetry

IBM Plex Mono

Intelligent Handshake^® is a registered trademark. The wordmark is always written in full; IH on its own is for the score and the telemetry.