A short, opinionated YouTube commentary (Adam Kay) arguing that AI will eliminate certain sales jobs. The speaker divides sales roles into two categories—value communicators (coordination, qualification, scheduling) and value creators (coaching, problem-framing, strategic advising)—and predicts that value-communicator roles will be automated. He names three sales roles likely to disappear within a few years: inbound SDRs, highly transactional account executives, and underperformers. He also forecasts a reduction in entry-level training roles, which may lower overall sales skill levels.
Chapters
Foreign. Welcome to another episode of the Getting to Club podcast. Today we're going to talk about the question of will AI replace sales jobs? Right at the time of this recording, AI is like the hottest topic in sales and business in general. And a lot of salespeople and sales leaders have it on their minds. Or have the question on their minds, is AI going to replace my sales job? Now, I think 90% of people making predictions in this area are actually getting it wrong. And okay, there's basically two buckets. Number one, they declare that people will always buy from people, and therefore AI is not going to replace any sales jobs, which I think is wrong. And I'll talk about what I mean. Or they go on the other side. They think I can and will do everything a salesperson can do despite the complexity of the sales process. And AI is just going to replace selling roles wholesale. Both of those people, I think are wrong. Now, keep in mind, this is just a prediction, so I could be just as wrong as them. But here's my take and I think here's three roles that I think will be gone and we'll. Let's see if you fall into one of them. First, it's important to know that there are basically two types of sales roles in the world. Number one, there's value communicators, and number two, there's value creators. Value communicators do things like gathering basic info from the buyer, communicating what their product does and some of its benefits, and coordinating logistics like scheduling meetings. That's what value communicators do. Value creators, on the other hand, coach the buyer through a winding, complicated buying process. They help buyers crystallize messy business problems and prioritize things. And they often offer a valuable point of view during the sales process that gets buyers to think differently about the problem that they're trying to tackle. Now, the first group, value communicators, I think that they eventually are going to be wholesale out of a job. AI can do what they do. The second group, value creators, won't. They're going to be protected because they are doing things that create value, which AI struggles to do. It's great at communicating on logistics and coordination and that kind of stuff. But creating value for another human being, that's a little bit different than just communicating value. You. Now, here's what this means in everyday language. There are three types of tech sales roles that I think are going to disappear maybe over the next five years or so. I don't know the exact timeline, but the first One is inbound SDRs, okay, inbound SDRs are going to be gone. Personally, as a business owner and as a CEO, I have zero desire to hire any SDRs that are responsible for responding to inbound leads. I predict this role will go go away because the entire job is a filtering and scheduling job. Leads come in, they ask themselves, do they fit our ideal customer profile? Check. Do they fit our qualification criteria? Check. Schedule them. Okay? That job is a better job for AI or technology, which never sleeps, never calls in sick, never lets leads fall through the cracks. Unlike a human. Jobs like this are a waste of human potential, frankly. And the good news is I don't think anybody plans on being an inbound SDR for their entire career. If you're in an inbound SDR job right now, my guess is you have aspirations to move beyond that. Okay, sure, there are exceptions to this. There's exceptions to everything. But I think in general, inbound SDR is probably won't exist within the next handful of years. The second role that I think is going to be gone is highly transactional account executives. Right? Think AES that sell to single buyers like small business owners, bars, restaurants, like small mom and pop businesses. The AES that sell to a single decision maker and offer a product that can be demoed in like 15 minutes flat. Those types of roles I think are going to be gone or severely reduced. There's not enough value for an AE in that kind of role to offer in these basic transactions. Right? You might be thinking to yourself, well, if I can just become a value creator, then I'll be safe if I'm in that kind of job. But there's just not a lot of value for you to create in a simple transaction like that. Buyers would rather avoid the hassle, watch a demo video on the website and just sign up with a credit card. So that's prediction number two. Prediction number three is I think underperformers of every kind in every sales role are going to be gone. There's going to be almost no tolerance for them. So the tolerance for underperforming or lazy salespeople will reach an all time low. Against the backdrop of AI led buying processes, buyers will have an even greater distaste for for a bad sales experience. They're not going to put it up with it or they're not going to put up with it. And so won't leaders. That's the right way to say that. So won't leaders. Neither will leaders, right? When they see that AI is taking care of their down market and super skilled Salespeople are taking care of mid market and enterprise deals. Well, in that segment, the people who aren't performing, they're just going to be gone. Okay? There's not going to be a lot of tolerance. They're not generating enough revenue to justify their existence in that role. Now here's one unintended consequence of all of this. This is super interesting to think about, by the way. I predict that the quality of sales skills for account executives is actually going to drop when all of this happens. Why? There are going to be fewer entry level sales roles to incubate sales skill sets. Like I said, Inbound SDRs are going to be gone and so will like down market transactional AES. That means today SDRs get promoted to transactional AES. But that role is not going to really exist anymore. So they're going to have to make a bigger leap. They're going to have to go from senior SDR all the way to mid market account executive. And that's a jump that a lot of them are just not going to be ready for. And so their skills are going to be more raw, more green and we're going to see a drop in the collective skill set. Again, this is just a prediction. I'm probably wrong like 80% of the time I make predictions, which is why I don't really like to make predictions. Frankly, most people who make predictions are wrong about the same amount of time. They're just not willing to admit it. But I like to think that I have a little bit of logic and foresight based on the predictions I've made. So you tell me right in the comments if you're watching this on YouTube or Instagram or whatever, if you think I'm wrong, where do you think I got it right? And if you got any value from this video, like it and share it out with the rest of your network and you if and I'll see you in the next episode.
