Gerhard Gschwandtner talks with John Stopper about AI's impact on sales. Stopper predicts GPT-5 and GPT-6 will enable autonomous sales agents, requiring fewer but better salespeople and larger manager teams. He expects a shift toward trust, relationships, and hyper-personalization.
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Hi, my name is Garage Schwadner and welcome to Selling Power tv. Today we have the great pleasure of meeting with John Stopper. He is the founder of North Star 8. Welcome, John.
Hello, Gerhardt. Thanks for having me.
We live in a funny age where everything is changing very, very rapidly through AI. So what is your take on AI?
Let's look at where we're at. GPT4 chat. GPT 2.0 was the equivalent of a grammar school kid. We're now at GPT4, which is the equivalent of a smart high school kid. They're projecting In January, early 2025, GPT5 will be released, which is the equivalent of a PhD working on your problem, not style. And then next year around this time, let's say Q1 of 2026, GPT6, which will be the equivalent of a hundred PhDs working on your business full time.
How will it reshape sales?
We'll have sales agents. And a difference between a chatbot and an agent is an agent can operate independently. It could go and operate on your behalf, finding leads, opportunities. However, the buyers are going to have them as well. And they're going to be using their agents to screen and only find those offerings that are of genuine interest. They won't have to talk to salespeople to learn stuff. They'll. They'll get all that. The other thing that's going to change is all of the processes, sales processes, methodologies, systems that we have today were developed in an analog age. People engaging with people. Now they're going to have to be completely redone to work in what we'll call this age of intelligence. It's an exciting time, but a very challenging one.
That obviously brings up the question of the skill set that salespeople need to develop in order to harness the power.
We have to be ready today. We have to get our new skill sets in place. You're going to need to be able to navigate deals and not just follow playbooks. Things are going to move too fast. You're going to have to be really good on your feet, very agile. So navigation skills will be key. You're going to have to be good at strategy because you're going to have to work with the buyer on strategizing how to implement your solution in creative ways.
How do companies now reorganize the sales function? What do they need to be mindful of?
I think you're going to have fewer salespeople. Companies have been throwing money at sales, right? They've been throwing bodies at the problem and they've been churning through salespeople pretty rapidly. I think there'll be fewer salespeople, but there'll be more high performing, there's going to be fewer sales managers.
Are you also implying that the sales managers will have more salespeople reporting to him?
You've probably seen this. I recall it used to be the ideal mix of a sales manager to Salespeople was like 5, 6 to 1. And I think you'll see that go 20 to 30 to 1. You're going to need a sales manager who's more around a strategist participating in bridging with customer, you know, your high value customers. We'll have the technology that will automate forecasting and updating the CRM and all that kind of stuff.
So how will sales leadership evolve in that new environment?
It's going to fall on sales leaders, which is already a really probably the hardest job in business to. You're going to have to put all new systems in place. What agents do you buy and what they're projecting is it's not going to be one big agent. It's going to be a plethora of micro agents each doing discrete taps. How do you assemble those right and make them available to your sales team is going to be part of the job.
So my final question is how do sales leaders help sort of restore humanity as technology becomes more intelligent, faster, more dynamic. To me it's like a wild horse that needs to be tamed.
We're going to be moving into an area of hyper personalization. AI is going to bring a level of transparency to business so it'll be more open. It's going to handle a lot of the negotiations and the contract works which sometimes gets in the way of having good trusting relationships. So if that's out of the way, I think we're moving into an area that's going to require collaboration between buyers and sellers and it'll really what's left is communicating and engaging at a very humane level. And I think it's all going to come down to trust and relationships still, as it always has.
I want to let your audience know that you will be speaking at our next Virtual AI Summit. That is a sales training and enablement summit. Can you give us a teaser of what you're going to talk about?
One of the things that I'm working on is the agents that will operate in enterprise sales in the future. You know, just some of the requirements that we need in those tools and how salespeople are going to execute in that environment.
Click on the link below if you want to know more about John Stopper's company. And also we share a link where you can sign up for that AI summit.
