The Impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in B2B Sales

One of the more frequently requested topics is AI in sales, specifically how it's going to impact sellers. And then the ultimate question is it going to replace sellers and cost a bunch of us our jobs? So let's talk a little bit about my opinions. Be clear my opinions on how I think AI is going to impact sellers in their day to day and also whether or not it is going to cost all of us our roles in sales as we move to this AI future. So to begin, what are going to be the short term impacts? The first one is saturation in the market. With AI tools, it has never been faster and easier for people to build applications. We talk about the goal that I think OpenAI has to enable somebody to build a billion dollar business with one employee. We're not that far, I think from a situation like that. It's never been easier or faster to build applications, even if you're not an expert engineer. So if you think about what that means, competitors sprouting up everywhere for different use cases, different industries, the barrier to entry has never been lower. And so from the buyer perspective, it's going to be all these solutions popping up and all these people trying to pitch, market and sell those solutions. And so as saturated as a SaaS market has become, it's only going to become more saturated. However, in more competitive markets compared to what it was several years ago. In the saturated market there will be fewer winners. So more noise, lower win rate leads to a pretty challenging environment of saturation. And that noise element is important to consider as well. If you think about 10 years ago when I was in AE, it wasn't that hard to stand out with prospecting. If I was personalized and slightly relevant, people would generally respond. Today, no chance. It is so easy to use AI to personalize messaging even at scale, pulling insights about individuals, companies, industries, competitive markets, recent news AI can pull all of those things to hyper personalize messages. AI can also make messages hyper relevant based on firmographics and Persona information. And so all of a sudden what used to be a standout email is now the bare minimum, because AI can do that at scale. And so you think about your buyer's inbox as being bombarded by all this messaging. All of it in the next couple of years is going to look pretty good because AI is going to improve. That means you're going to find other channels that are less noisy and less influenced by AI, maybe even cold calls to help you stand out in a way that AI can't quite replicate. Another big impact, AI is going to have on sellers is decreased trust. People are going to be skeptical about what's human, what's AI. Then if it's AI, what bias was built into the AI? There's going to be a lot of skepticism across a lot of buyers around how to handle all this noise and all the saturation and not knowing what solutions look really good versus what solutions are actually legitimate, scalable, and will be around for a while. Now, all that together, in my opinion, is going to lead to the best reps being more efficient than ever. They're going to leverage AI to help them build a point of view to understand their buyers and actually master the sales process in a way that allows them to connect with humans in a deeper, more connective way. The mediocre sellers are going to be lower than before because they're going to rely on AI to do as much of the process as possible. They're going to use AI for their prospecting, they're going to use it to generate discovery questions, they're going to use it to generate demo flow, they're going to use it for negotiation, they're going to use it for everything. And the problem with that is the sellers that use it for everything are going to seem the same as everybody else using those same tools in a saturated, noisy market. But the best are going to be using it to actually up level themselves with an understanding. So when they're actually sitting face to face with a buyer and they don't have a chatbot reading the script to them on what to say next, they're going to be able to connect, gain that trust and show true mastery of the buyer situation and how their solution can help them solve their problems. And so, great news for the great sellers out there. You're about to have this whole arsenal of tools that's going to take all the busy work out of sales forever. The research aspect, understanding aspect. The bad news is it's going to be easier than ever to seem like you're good enough with very minimal effort, but that good enough is not going to be good enough a year or two from now as the baseline for preparation becomes much higher because everybody has access to those kind of insights from a go to market standpoint. I think there's going to be a big shift to offset the lack of trust. I think selling through partners and referrals will will be more important than ever because as buyers are bombarded by marketing and sellers promising these incredible outcomes from these AI solutions that look really cool in a demo video, people are going to wonder what is Real what is vaporware? I can't tell you how many times I see these AI demos and I'm just so skeptical of what's actually real life and what can actually be put to an environment customized and still work when you're off the script of what the demo, the demo showed. And so having that trust base of partners that can refer you to people that they know and have respect from, and referrals that actually use your solution will be essential for go to market strategies and so for executives and for go to market leaders. If you don't have a strong base of that right now, start building it. Because as skepticism increases, those warmer referrals are going to become more essential. And if you're a seller in an environment where that's not prioritized, I would consider a new environment because it's going to be very, very difficult to close deals with no referral, no partner, and no connection as we get into that really noisy, saturated environment. Now from the big question is, will AI cost all of us our jobs? And I don't think it will for a while. And that's not just me being arrogant as a salesperson, like, oh, I can't be replaced, because I actually think we could be replaced by AI in a lot of places. But the reason why we won't be is adoption. Look at so many companies today. How many of them have actually adopted all of the best, most recent technology? Very few. There are Fortune 100 companies that still have infrastructure built out on ancient technology, that are far from modernized, that are far from efficient, that have massive amounts of tech debt, that prevent them from going as fast as they would like to go. And so these laggards are going to keep jobs open for a long time. Because even if a company launched tomorrow, a solution that fully outsourced your sales team through AI, not every company is going to buy that right away and adopt it because of the skepticism element we talked about at the beginning of this video. And so these laggards are basically our job protection for the, the people that are not the elite. So that's one slice of good news, I think, even mediocre salespeople, hopefully none of you watching this video will have some amount of job security for quite some time. Because even if technology can replace us, you need all the companies to adopt that technology, which rarely happens now for the top performers, the highest earners are going to be the elite. At those early adopters, the companies that do embrace AI, they're probably going to employ fewer salespeople because they're going to understand how they can leverage AI to replace a lot of the monotonous work that sellers often have to do. But those smaller groups of AES at the early adopters that are at the forefront of AI and sales are going to absolutely crush it and make a lot more money than I think even top sellers make today. And so if you take anything from this video, it's sweat a little bit less about having your job replaced, worry a little bit more about how you can become an elite rep at an early adopter embracing AI. Because I firmly believe, again, opinion only, that those sellers are going to be the ones best positioned for massive career success. 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