AI can support sales, but it can’t replace the person on the call. Danielle Foster argues that the tech is being misapplied by leaders too eager for snazzy shortcuts and that any other attitude towards emergent technology is simply the wrong one; business leaders should not be swayed so easily.
As the business world evolves, much ado has been made about artificial intelligence. The marketing buzz is hot. AI is the acronym on every business owner’s lips. The world will change, they say. Nothing will ever be the same, they say. Yet marketing and branding is all it is; for as much as things change, in my industry, sales, certain fundamental principles remain the same. Sales is a human-based business, and that part isn’t going to change anytime soon. There is too much buzz; and there is an entire cottage industry built on overhyping the efficacy of generative artificial intelligence tools.
Not so intelligent?
This isn’t some hot take. It’s an opinion formed from what I am seeing go down within the sales business sector. There will be novel uses of generative AI. However, it is not the catch-all business solution built in unending wonderment of technology that is constantly drumbeated throughout the halls of U.S. thought leadership.
I’ll just say it; when it comes to sales, artificial intelligence isn’t it. It is not better. There are many reasons for this, but the core one is that in the sales sector what is necessary is that a human talks to a human. Sales is the act of one person talking to another person, and entreating them, convincing them, tripping the light fantastic with verbal panaché, to put their money up for the product one is selling.
Support or think?
The technology isn’t there yet. While GenAI is interesting, what it is good at is not conversation. GenAI only passes the Turing Test for those with underdeveloped rhetorical skills. For those of us in the sales industry with years of experience under our belts, AI at the moment has very little utility because the conversation isn’t exactly Judi Dench telling stories on Graham Norton’s couch. You want to build an application? Great, use AI, it is fantastic and generates usable code at least to start from. Want to process a spreadsheet? Great, artificial intelligence is 100% your friend. But if you want to write an essay, the output will be equivalent to a college intern. The ‘bot can’t write, it can only copy what it has seen before. And AI definitely, definitely, cannot talk, entreat, convince, or converse in any meaningful fashion.
The pivots that real sales professionals can perform are not matched by the technology
Just in recent months, I have had two clients that have returned to us after around 30 days. Both of these clients left to replace their sales force with AI sales chatbots and automated calls. One didn’t even finish the whole 30 days because of the complete time waste it was to switch sales strategies. This client said to both myself and one of my contract managers, “One of the things that I like about you guys is that you can make changes in 5 seconds.” He said this because his experience with AI demonstrated to him that artificial intelligence’s adaptability actually struggles in real world circumstances. This business leader had to go through no less than eight different people to make changes that in all reality take twenty seconds to do. The pivots that real sales professionals can perform are not matched by the technology, and due to the depth and nuance of sales conversations, it’s going to be a while before it’s ever close to a human, much less a trained, savvy sales professional.
AI as a tool, not as a replacement
The marketing is overhyped; replacing real sales professionals with automated AI chatbots and cold solicitors will result in organisational brain drain, and as well lower the quality of the service. The only benefit currently is lower labour cost that may look good on a ledger sheet, in the short term. That number will be lower and will result in lower cost; however, businesses will end up paying for it in other, not directly ‘quantifiable on the budget Excel spreadsheet’ ways.
Because now a human that was in that job role is gone, replaced by a machine that only specifically does one, or a couple things, that it has been designed and programmed to accomplish. As soon as a situation is encountered outside the purview of the programming, now those businesses that made the choice for AI will have a huge problem. If you are a business leader, here is a simple binary decision: would you rather have a worker in a core process job role that can be trained and instructed on how to adjust their work for better success, or would you rather have a worker that will experience downtime in order to reprogram its instruction hierarchy to properly adjust to the situation it encountered that it couldn’t perform well under?
Thus, we come to the core issue. Artificial intelligence, if to be properly employed in the sales sector, is supplementary, not complimentary. It can enhance and make easier the work that trained sales professionals do, but it cannot replace it. AI is being employed incorrectly in this industry. How do I know this? Well, turns out I have had the quite absurd experience of being hired to sell AI, by a company that offers AI-driven sales forces. Yet this same company will not employ their own product to do their own sales. I think that just about tells you everything one needs to know about AI in sales.
They expect results
All that marketing that you see out there? You’ve seen this phrase probably a hundred thousand times since ChatGPT was first made available: “AI driven results”. That’s a nice buzz word, or at least it used to be until it became the homogenous marketing copy that it is now. Nice phrase, but it is completely non-applicable to the sales industry. I have something better: human-driven results. That’s the top-quality mark for the sales sector. This is how business leaders in this sector need to be thinking about their sales force.
The next generations of sales professionals definitely need to be familiar with artificial intelligence. It is a tool, albeit shiny and new, that can help with a lot of tasks around the office to increase productivity. However, as it stands now, the technology is not ready to replace humans when it comes to a sales call conducted with a human. Return on investment is greater in the sales sector when one bets on humans that have the skills to cultivate relationships, act with integrity, and possess the ability to pivot when needed.
What we should be doing is to make our sales agents and executives less bogged down by the mundane tasks. The right application of artificial intelligence in the sales industry would be to replace processes, such as notes, scheduling, and data tracking. But not to replace the human role on a sales call. That is a misapplication of the technology to a task that currently, AI is not good at.
Sales professionals trained in the proper use of emergent AI tools will lead the industry into the future. But it won’t be because they are replacing their humans with AI ‘bots. It will be because they allow AI to fill the gaps for the things that distract from the core task of a salesperson, which is sales calls, meetings, and correspondence. Humans aren’t going anywhere in this industry, because human driven results have more value than robot sales callers.
Danielle Foster is the Founder and President of D Foster Consulting
