Don’t Let AI Run Your Deals

Does anybody remember ‘The Game’? If you do then, sorry. If not, then the purpose of The Game is to not think about The Game and the second you do, you lose. In writing this, I just lost about a 5 year streak. 

Imagine how many times you would lose The Game each hour if it was about thinking about AI. A lot right?

AI is impossible to ignore, it’s absolutely dominating the professional world from tooling to thought leadership and everything in between. It cannot be avoided, no matter how hard you try. 

The hype cycle is real but here’s the big question… is AI actually making salespeople worse? 

It’s a recipe for disaster

Following a recipe to make a meal is still ‘cooking’, but what happens if an ingredient is missing, the oven stops working or one person in the family doesn’t like spice but the others demand it? That’s where the person cooking becomes a cook.

When we turn this analogy back to sales, how many deals actually go as planned? How many follow a textbook approach or a prescriptive framework from start to finish? I’m willing to bet it’s very close to zero. 

Because humans aren’t machines and sales is as much art as science, just like cooking.

Are we overcooking AI?

Automation is a pretty attractive proposition, especially to folk in leadership, enablement and ops who are frustrated with the status quo but often not willing to put in the hours to fix it. 

It sounds like an absolute dream:

• AI does all the research, writes the emails and call scripts, handles the follow up. 
• AI writes the discovery questions and coaches the rep in real-time on the call
• AI writes the follow up emails 
• AI selects the relevant collateral and personalizes it, including writing your proposals

I’m excited just writing that bullet point list and I know what happens next. It’s seductive, but it’s also exceptionally dangerous. 

The question we should be asking is what does an SDR or an AE do if they’re not learning about their buyer, crafting their own message, running discovery from a place of curiosity, following up in the buyer’s language or connecting the dots in collateral and proposals?

What’s actually left? Not much. 

Now consider a rep that actually does all of those things themselves. What do they personally gain from it? They would understand their prospect deeply, know what keeps them up at night and find a way to genuinely help them. 

By essentially outsourcing the playbook to a machine, a machine which is incapable of understanding, we are not building the necessary skills to actually sell.

The real decline of skill comes in the components that require actual thought. So research for example is something that could be ingested knowledge vs the need to do the repetitive exercise of searching and seeking information. 

Knowledge vs. Information

AI is a specialist in information and patterns. It is exceptional at finding and summarizing vast amounts of data and using it to build predictable patterns. 

Salespeople are specialists in knowledge. The ability to take information and apply it in a way that is relevant to the exact situation no matter how unpredictable. 

Humans trying to be experts in information are wasting their time.

AI being positioned as an expert in knowledge is wasting the buyers time. 

Never forget what makes you human

The difference between human beings and almost every other living thing on the planet is the ability to apply knowledge in new ways.

Beavers for example, are capable of building intricate and complex dams, but they do so based on instinctive knowledge, it’s ingrained, genetically passed down. A beaver who has never seen another beaver build a dam, still knows how to do it. 

Humans learn, adapt and evolve their skills over time, all through direct experience. We are literally built to continuously improve and are instinctively against doing the same thing over and over again. 

Don’t be lazy

AI is not the enemy, it’s there to help and it’s fantastic at what humans are bad at. 

But, just as it’s human nature to learn and adapt, it’s also modern human nature to seek shortcuts. AI on the face of it looks like a cracking shortcut, but it won’t be as effective and if you let it do the human role, it will erode your skills, erode your business and erode what makes sales so unique (the art and the science).