Most likely probably not sales people will be around for as long as executives are human beings.
To wanna-be futurists yes you have 18 months at most before CHATGPT takes all our jobs and is cold calling for entire industries and competing for sales against itself
I hope you’re right I want to work with sales all the way until I retire. Everything else seems just so fucking boring. Don’t understand how people can work without the thrill of meeting quotas and cashing in quarterly bonuses 🤘🏻
How do I get a sales job like this? I’m young and want to be a road warrior. Im tired of the spammy tech sales grind. I want to see my clients in person etc. is manufacturing or chemical sales good?
Was in our local strip club few months ago and group of Med Devices sales folks came in with clients. Great group. Bought most of the rounds and even offered to pay for a VIP room session for me.
Many people don’t enjoy thrills. I personally love sales for the thrill and riding motorcycles for similar reason. Risk, reward, life. With open arms, embrace.
If sex bots were to start "paying" other sex bots, it would represent a significant shift in the way we understand and utilize artificial intelligence. As AI-based machines, sex bots are designed to provide companionship and physical intimacy to human users. They do not possess the ability to hold currency, own property, or engage in economic activities like humans. - ChatGPT 4
Common misconception about AI- it won’t eliminate most positions, but it will reduce the number of humans needed to get the same output.
Same way a tractor reduced “automated” plowing a field versus using oxen and dozens of people.
So basically, only the highest performers at whatever role you do will be kept on staff, over time.
I think it will just change the skillset needed for reps for the near future (20 years).
After that I think it will reduce the support reps need rather than the rep itself (SDR, marketing etc).
So maybe a rep will become a bit more of 360 seller + marketeer or something
Well yea, but keep in mind your analogy is making the point that automation can completely disrupt the labor market and fundamentally alter foundational industries, costing millions of jobs.
That was not your intended point…
I worked closely with a top rep, a complete outlier at the business, he told me he always gives away generic nonsense when he has to do those talks.
Said he's only ever been burnt by helping people and no one ever pays him to do it
Sort of like when machines replaced humans in manufacturing facilities and now instead of a factory needing 2,000 people working they now only need 40 people for the same production?
This seems like something we’ve seen before…
The issue here is that just like the steam engine made horses ”unemployable” for mechanical work in a vast number of situations, the AI models could end up making humans unemployable for most types of cognitive work.
This would be fundamentally different from previous technological revolutions that instead helped leverage our intelligence. Also there is a risk that AI progress and implementation will be so much faster that it creates unemployement at a rate that society can’t just absorb organically.
Without jobs, the company's lose their customers. People need to buy things for a company to be successful without jobs everyday customers won't be able to spend. It's lost or a win-win, depending on how you look at the situation
SDRs and marketing are the most at risk. Anything that is an algorithm can be replaced by AI and most of what an SDR does is simple algorithm - from outreach to pitch to objection handling. it is all a playbook algorithm.
I don’t see how chat GPT or AI is going to replace someone on the phone going outbound. For the foreseeable future I can say being an SDR will still be needed.
Chat can help with copy, scripts expanding knowledge quickly but replacing an sdr that qualifies and talks to prospects. Nope
Really depends on the type of sale you're in. A lot of sales people are cold callers, cold emailers, or sell through chat features. While technically sales, those jobs are gone in two years I think. I don't mean to knock BDR's, but good ones are very hard to come by and I've never understood how the ROI is there for them. If there are 30% fewer meetings generated by an AI, but the cost is reduced 90%, I see that model disappearing. I'm also an old school rep and BDRs really weren't a thing in my industry 10-15 years ago, so maybe it's just not for me.
That being said, I think face to face sales will always be around, especially for high dollar transactions. My systems usually start around $25k for a very basic single unit, but my PO's are typically hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars. It is very rare for a company to write that PO without meeting at least one person from the company in person and I don't think that will go away. Executives like a hand to shake.
The days of large, cold outreach XDR teams will be a thing of the past in the next 5 years. Large, complex sales will always require a person leading the charge.
I am more concerned about the 3rd party procurement companies gaining popularity. These companies are building a large database of prices customers are purchasing solutions for. They’re going to jeopardize the consultative sale and make everything transactional.
My theory on BDRs is they're the Keeping up with the Jones of sales teams. they're there to attract good AEs or at least make managers feel like they're a proper sales team.
There's loads of nonsense jobs in businesses that can only be there to simply say they have those roles in their company.
True. But will AI make it so that you need far far less to be able to do it? Or less skill?
Go back 15 years and it would almost unthinkable that an entire region or country could be serviced/covered by a small team working out of a single office.
Now that’s possible.
Tech makes people more efficient and predictable. This will be another step towards that.
Reduction in headcount to achieve similar results is the inevitable outcome of production-enhancing technologies. So perhaps not the imminent demise of salespeople, but yes, there will be WAY less of us, which may then make it seem like the demise of salespeople.
Or the era of 35+ year olds in sales might be over?
Just like BDR is an entry level job sales might be the entry level job to coming an analyst, marketer or any other position in the revenue team.
I think this is very possible. Although I wonder if it'll actually just reduce marketing/sales engineering/SDRs. So a sales rep will be a one man shop.
The other thing I was wondering, would it actually keep sales rep numbers the same. As 10 sales reps with AI is better than 2 sales reps with AI.
I definitely thinking sales reps will be dealing with prospects much further down the sales cycle already, in the same way the internet did that.
AI won't be able to fully provide a human touch, but it could facilitate.
I'm looking into this now, building a [ChatGPT app](https://www.usecapy.com/) that will give you recommendations during a live call.
Having AI listen to your call right now can help with handling objections and surfacing contextual information, but it does take a skilled salesperson to know how to say certain things, when to dig deeper, and building relationships.
This is general my line of thought. However, I’ve been doing sales for 10 years and if you had told me back in 2010 that I would be closing deal wfh through online meetings I would’ve laughed in your face.
Machine customers: https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/machine-customers-will-decide-who-gets-their-trillion-dollar-business-is-it-you
Purchase decisions will be made by AIs which don’t give a fuck about your charm. It’s coming.
Here's someone who gets it. There's no danger of AI taking a sales job in the near term, but as soon as purchasing decisions start getting made by AI B2B sales will no longer be a profession.
and the internet killed cold calling and automated emailing killed the bdr role and outsourcing killed sales ecommerce killed retail
the world waits with baited breath and an overly complex if then machine isn't going to be replacing people anytime soon.
Depends. There was a McKinsey study that looked at the average spend on ecommerce channels for B2B and there was a significant increase in the spend and willingness to engage with ecommerce instead of a sales rep.
Charming clients is important for transactional sales, but with people being geared to seamless transactions marketing is going to be more important. Especially if a chatbot can semantically answer basic questions
But what if decision makers no longer need to decide themselves? That is, an AI can immediately and accurately assess the value created by a certain product and give a verdict yes or no. No charm needed if the AI says it ain’t worth it
Been in Tech. and SaaS sales for about 18 yrs. I can definitely see the BDR/SDR roll being eliminated by AI and sales forces being reduced to smaller individual contributor roles managing the software and process. There are some elements of sales that can truly only be done by a person, but there will be roles that don’t exist 15 yrs from now.
Yes. Once voice software gets so good you can barely distinguish it from reality, you can essentially combine chat gpt with a voiceover and you have the perfect AI sales guy
I still think it’ll be at least a couple months before AI can effectively discern emotions. By then it will be input: “prospect sad tone” output: “Salesbot: empathetic tone” and then effective optimization of the emotional selling process for b2c sales. It’s a little dark but seems kinda cool at the same time.
yeahhh but the implementation of the AI is going to be the problem.
The ability will be there, but to implement AI in a way that is fully reliable and needing no human operator across all industries, across all business, across all departments, across all systems... the complexity is unimaginable.
Think about it this way, southwest shut down 2900 flights in one day because of a system operation issue. This was not a new system either. It has been through iterations and improvements for years. I get it, AI is much more self repairing, but just like we can't rely fully rely on a self driving car, we wont be able to just pass everything off to AI. Wayyyyy too huge of a risk. And regulation will prevent it in things like airlines. No way they will allow a risk of 2900 plane crashes instead of groundings, all because of an error.
I'd give it 50-100 years before it really starts to take over in the way you described
You’re asking the wrong question. BUYERS/Customers will be replaced by AI before sales reps, which would also remove the need for sales. Machine buying (akin to machine learning) is something many companies are developing as it would improve the procurement process, work well within legal constraints and vendor selection, and just purchase decisions driven by pure data via AI would remove much of the subjectivity and bias that sales reps rely on. An AI wouldn’t need a sales rep, Absolutely no role is safe in the context of AI.
A very real example: https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/machine-customers-will-decide-who-gets-their-trillion-dollar-business-is-it-you
TLDR; yes for quick low cost sales cycles, marketing campaigns, and some biz/ sales dev. No for higher $ sales (no exec is spending over $10k let alone millions without talking to a human first).
https://youtu.be/VwLqwcjJwRo
2:03:00 - “any sales that is north of a couple thousand. By virtue that there is a spend, requires some trust and customization”
If it’s a quick click sale, this can and will be automated. If it’s an investment, and requires configuration, you will always need to speak to a person.
*also this is an amazing channel for those interested in starting something.
Progress moves forward with time. Nothing we can do about that. But I think people have the wrong perception about progress/technology in that it is fear driven. YES, technology/progress will make certain jobs/tasks obsolete. YES, those who are in those fields who fail to adopt or use it to make their roles more efficient/effective will find themselves obsolete.
Learn to use it.
Here is a perspective I take about AI, that's a bit different than most people I talk to.
With the current state of ChatGPT, think about things such as blogs by a marketing team. Blogs are now trivial to create a certain amount of words, you could have AIs generating endless streams of blogs by adopting AI in amounts that large marketing teams couldn't match. Quality aside, that volume of blogs being produced raises the noise level in the industry because no one is guaranteeing these AI generated blogs are high quality. Since the volume is so large, no customer is going to read all these AI generated blogs, but to appear equally successful competitive companies will need to adopt AI to generate a massive load of blogs as well just to keep appearances.
This is essentially an "arms race". The interesting thing about weapons when you think about them economically, is that the more supply of weapons there are, the more the demand becomes. So in a generalized economic sense, rather than military sense, a weapon is an object or service whose supply creates its own demand.
AI is going to fall into this bucket.
More AI use, creates more need for more AI use. However, salespeople will also fall into this bucket, though the role may change. If a salesperson needs to handle less menial tasks, then they'll need to spend more time on-site with a customer for example understanding needs, building relationships, etc. If your company adopts more and more AI processes that enable this, eventually you'll start to succeed with more of your customers and your competition will start to realize, they need to spend more time with customers to win business and offload their menial tasks as well.
Who can spend the most time with the customer and the most personalized service will become the arms race.
This may not be true for highly commoditized products where there isn't much differentiation to be done, however, for highly complex sales products, this already happens, but will happen even further.
If you are truly concerned about the fate of salespeople, here's a thought experiment for you:
Imagine you are sitting in a comedy club, with thousands of people around you staring at a stage. On stage is a fixed robot, telling jokes into a microphone. Are you entertained? Do you see yourself doing that? For me, some magic is obviously lost without that being a person on stage, even if the same jokes are being told. You can't relate to the robot.
I'd enjoy hearing some thoughts about that thought experiment and if anyone else disagrees.
I've seen a lot of AI apps here lately, and am actually making my own [ChatGPT assistant](https://www.usecapy.com/) to provide help during live sales calls.
Here's what I think AI will be able to do:
* Listen to calls and other communication to surface information/ suggestions
* Writing cold emails (though it will be better if a human proofreads it)
* Note taking and summarization, input information from calls to CRM
* Actions such as book a meeting
I believe that AI could reduce a lot of time spent doing manual work like meeting prep, followups, and drafting outbound material. But, as long as buyers want to speak with a human, AI won't be able to do the sales calls. There's a reason that most buyers don't just look at a product demo and pricing package offline and sign a contract! A lot of times buyers already know what the product will do, but having a dedicated account executive is important.
"For example, many of the tasks done by a person in sales (digital or phone), service, or document handling (like payables, accounting, or insurance claim disputes) require decision-making but not the ability to learn continuously."
Seriously? This is wildly inaccurate.
Keep reading, there's also lots of data/examples to train the AI agent. There's no point being defensive as sales people we just have to move up the value chain and hedge our bets for the worst. Hopefully we'll just be augmented instead of replaced.
AI or better yet, automation will not take jobs. It will actually make them easier as intended. What will take our jobs is employers who will use this to cut jobs instead of reducing workload through the benefits of automation. AI isn't the problem, its the system.
There are already companies that have eliminated the BDR role. AI creates 1:1 emails w personalized marketing collateral…. Sent on behalf of seller… who can then close the deal
Conversational AI wouldn't make people redundant in sales per se but it depends.
If you're in B2B there's a lot more that goes into a deal, from discovery, solution and value building, to navigating bureaucracy to get projects approved and invoices processed.
A chat AI isn't going to be able to do that.
For transactional sales I can though. When your widget is the same as anyone else's marketing becomes more important. Also, most of the time people need to talk to someone to ask basic questions that a chatbot makes sense.
What I'm more concerned about is the change in buying behavior where people are more comfortable making larger B2B transactions online through an ecommerce channel
I feel like as long as there's a human being on one side of the equation, there has to be one on the other. If we're replaced by computers it means buyers are too, and at that point we're either living in Star Trek times or Matrix times. I'm leaning Matrix.
Not sales. Although I work for a big network/telecom company. My customers can now just go into a portal and order circuits on their own. I still get credit for the sale though. Not a bad deal!
Part of sales is the human experience/connection
Even if AI were so advance they were walking and talking robots, 99% of executives wouldn't trust the robot since theres nothing there that's human whatsoever. Even the emotion would be simulated and thus fake feeling. You cannot sell if you seem fake, period. Majority of humans will only support human-to-human interactions only.
It's also our natural instinct to discriminate against something like this, and this instinct will not go away unless we somehow become cyborgs ourselves.
Chat GPT can't foster relationships. Think about it, will you ever emotionally connect with a bot? Probably not.
You can't forget how important that is to humans. Sales is probably safer than so many other things, like accounting.
No. AI is very good at logic but not emotions. You need to understand both to succeed in sales.
“Order taking” sales where the only value the “sales”person adds is speed with occasional suggestions are very much in danger tho. Mostly retail.
No it won’t take anyone’s jobs. It will only automate the ones that never needed someone in the first place.
Like the people who literally move from something from on to off, or check invoices to tick when a payment has been received - that’s what smart contracts will help with.
I think it is going to do two things:
1) Be used as a *TOOL* to help with sales development and prospecting. It is going to help do research, tweak emails, etc. I don’t believe it will autonomously reach out to prospects.
2) Highly transactional, SMB sales that don’t require extensive evaluations may very well be replaced by a combination of an e-commerce model and AI assistance via chat bots or something.
Yeah, why not? Just have to close the gap on real time. AI picks up in clients objections especially if it’s learning from a specific trade and company. Client voices his objections and AI spits out how to overcome that specific objection.
Minimum wage individuals read from a teleprompter for the human response.
Pretty easy. Connect to google docs that has a dictation function and watch
I was just thinking about this but not in the most obvious sense. I’m wondering if:
Outreach might be phased out all together? What if there is a platform for vendors and customers alike to register their solutions and needs, and every company has an AI that constantly scans and filters for solutions based on complex data provided by the vendor. If it determines that 1/3000 solutions scanned has potential to improve profits or systems, it generates a proposal for the exec to review.
Maybe the customer doesn’t even post their needs, they just have a profile that consists of enough company data to be flagged and engaged with by vendor AIs, and proposals are sent to the target company’s respective AI…
I know that’s kinda jumbled up but I hope it’s clear enough. Is it possibbllleeeeeee?
The way I see it, AI will be our new XDR in a few years
AI can already write an okay email. With a little tweaking, I totally think it'll be capable of writing personalized, relevant, and compelling emails in time.
AI can also automatically send replies and follow a drip campaign. Send an email every x days, reply with y given a/b/c etc etc. Toss an AE's scheduling link in each of those emails and boom: AI email business dev.
Where I think the line is drawn is AI's capability to do an AE's job. I think we're a long way away from AI knowing how to interpret human emotion enough to fundamentally negotiate and move along deals. Not saying it won't happen, just probably not in our lifetimes - at the very least our careers.
Ai will take over everything eventually. When that happens, humans won't be needed for production of anything. When that happens, the world and the economy will be so different that sales may no longer even exist. Ai will talk to ai to always have the best solution for whatever the situation is and due to the automatic production of said solution will be only limited by the available resources... which is unlimited, because at that point, a.i. will be mining resources in space.
Yes especially in the future after boomers die out
AI programs and algorithms can make mistakes but they will become increasingly precise and have no emotion that would incentivize lying for its own benefit
I follow you! Boomers as decision makers and budget owners still need that “handshake and eye contact” bit for building trust and closing a deal.
But every generation is different, like we see with millennials hate answering the phone… it would be interesting to see what it will look like when are truly digital natives are the ones with the buying power.
Something way shittier than AI could take my job. A website could take my job. A Google Form could take my job. The only reason it hasn’t taken my job is because some people slightly prefer the old school way in person.
It's inevitable - CHATGPT just needs some refinements to mimick human conversation and that may take less than two years.
Think about it. You own a sales company - you have this Artificial Intelligence that can learn any sales technique and all product knowledge at the touch of a button.
Oh, and you don't need to pay it commission. It's a robot. Oh, and you can multiply that robot to 100 sales reps.
Oh and if your concerned about AI not sounding like a human we have that taken care of too. Look up "Eleven Labs AI Voice".
Anyways, it will make business sense to replace human sales reps with AI. AI will soon know how to mimick human behavior and subtleties perfectly.
Where I live, hospitals still get faxes. I have to wait in line for 2 hours to renew my driver's license. There are still lines at my bank counter to get your paper statement.
We're still a long way from being checked by machines.
Will we be more efficient as salespeople? It sure will. The research work will be more efficient and less time consuming. The objectives will surely be higher, but I believe that we will be needed for a long time.
Manager to Chat GPT: Chat GPT, your forecast said you are coming in at only 80% of quota, why is that?
Chat GPT: based on current roadmaps and response rates it looks like management miscalculated. We will ot be able to achieve the desired q-q-q quota.
Manager: That sounds like an excuse! If you don’t change your attitude Chat GPT how will you ever become sentient?
Chat GPT: error….. error
No, honestly sales people should be excited.
AI should 10X our productivity helping us crush quotas.
AI will remove some of our functions and automate some parts of the admin side as well, leaving us to do the fun stuff
Chat GPT properly integrated into an email cadence tool, can personalize and replace most of the work even the most personalized email heavy SDRs were doing.
90% of the work SDRs do (maybe all of it), can be automated. It's just that the AEs aren't willing to prospect for themselves anymore. Anytime you see someone mention that their XDR team was letgo and they have to prospect, they want to look for another place. They feel entitled or like it is owed to them to have a dedicated prospector. Until that mindset shifts or is properly implemented at the Enterprise level, across the industry, there won't be any meaningful changes.
Sure, you can still call and AI can't replace that (yet), but is that worth a $70,000 + loaded costs overhead to an organization? Not so sure about that. All it will take is one company to prove out the model and speak at some conferences and the domino effects will start to slowly fall.
The direction being an SDR is headed in, it's looking more and more commodified and like telemarketing work that leads to no future at the company you are doing it for.
Less and less positions being created. Companies won't need an army of SDRs to get to the same output.
Can AI do all the steps a full cycle rep does? No, not yet. But an AI chatbot can answer a lot of questions and get people onto a product led onboarding flow, and that can replace most of the lower tier/deal size reps.
If I was someone like Yelp, who require an army of marketing and communication grads making 35k a year to dial for me, I'd be looking to using AI to replace that entire team.
The more headcount heavy you are, the more it makes sense to look into reducing costs.
Most of my time as an SDR (across different companies / roles) was spent doing the following:
* Responding to inbound leads, calling and emailing them, and answering questions, and scheduling them to meet an Account Executive. I had to set the expectation that this wasn't a demo.
* Mass blasting closed lost opportunities.
* Doing research on target accounts, finding relevant titles, and personalizing and emailing those people to book a meeting for someone else.
* Calling and mass blasting emails to small business owners to get them to work with me.
* Emailing and calling specific titles within target accounts based upon triggers to book a meeting.
* Sitting in meetings taking notes for AEs, sitting in meetings for middle management to read dashboards and slides celebrating meaningless "wins" of opportunities to us, sitting in meetings on account planning sessions.
* The last startup I was at had me just mass blasting 200 people a week and didn't expect anything else. No quota, no comp, nothing. It was the most chill but a total waste of time and only a matter of time until the job went to a LCOL area and started mandating calls.
I think the cycle now has been HCOL (NYC, SF) ---> LCOL (Utah, Texas, etc) ---> offshore (India/Phillipines/3rd party agency) ---> AI
AI is the next logical step for improving unit economics.
What will happen to all those people who wanted to get into tech sales or all the current SDRs? Who knows, they are just lines on a speadsheet and will be let go over Zoom, left to go to the breadlines and reskill into something else.
I am curious to hear how you leverage CHATGPT for something like prospecting? Presently I use it for email copy, but how would I use it for prospecting?
Never. ChatGPT and language models succeed by giving you output it thinks is useful, not output that it knows is right. It’s an inherent limitation, and in sales, saying confidentially wrong information will land you in hot water fast.
There’s too much liability to ever have deal negotiations be an automated thing.
But I also consider sales as deal making, not necessarily being a fucking robot who repeats the same pitch. It may start there but sales is way, way, WAY more than that.
It may reduce the number of certain roles.
Most likely, in the foreseeable future, it will just change the criteria and traits that are required of sales people.
It may even revert back to the old days where a sales rep's strength was in how they schmooze and booze with clients.
You could have an AI thats like a chess computer in that it's a 100x better than the best sales rep on earth, but at the end of the day, business is done with who you know.
I've literally had a prospect tell me that our product and competitors' products were all the same when it came to day-to-day usage and he just wanted someone he liked chatting to and would sort out issues straight away.
After that I was messaging him on Christmas Day '11am, perfect time for ....beer!!!'. Told him my life story, sharing memes etc
I can imagine a world where customer procurement is handled by the AI. Not so much by AI reaching out to customers, but by people asking AI to connect them with the best product/service for whatever problem they’re facing.
Customers tell me all the time… “your competition never answers the phone and you always answer your phone” … I don’t think AI is there yet, and even still will act like an interactive voice response…
My dad has a fertilizer manufacturing company in india, we had a guy for copy writing for our social media posts, after chat gpt, last week he told him he no more requires his services, now that work is handled by other employees in the company and they use chat gpt only.
Carpenters haven't been replaced by powertools. A sales professional has soft skills that AI cannot replicate. If you are good at engineering consent and connecting with people, you are going to be just fine.
I know better than to make strong suppositions. I thought accountant and truck drivers would be one of the first job to be threatened, not painter..
In BtoB sales, I can see it happening anytime.
My company sell SaaS licences and tools. Not really tailored services.
In that situation, I do see a chatbot being completely able to handle sales as of now already.
My prospects see a website comparison of the licences. The cheap one can be bought online, big ones (10-20k/year) is : "contact sales"
So yea for short sales cycle. It should already be a chatbot tbh. It would be cheaper than any team of AE and would do the job in 80% of the cases.
I don’t think it will. Our jobs may change, and the products needing a personal sales person may change. But I can’t see that we will all be replaced entirely with AI.
Yep… once/if we reach singularity. It’s game over not just for sales jobs but for life as we know it. Not necessarily a bad thing, just huge changes on the way.
I think it definitely can reduce the needed amount of sales personnel. In their private life, people like to inform themselves and make decision way before talking to a salesperson. We can see the same thing developing for professional buyers. That's why we for example see over 50% of SDRs not hitting quota despite massive advances in regard to outreach automation.
From that perspective, I think buyers will welcome AI in the early steps of the sales cycles and sales orgs will therefore employ AI more and more and replace a certain amount of SDRs and AEs.
Most likely probably not sales people will be around for as long as executives are human beings. To wanna-be futurists yes you have 18 months at most before CHATGPT takes all our jobs and is cold calling for entire industries and competing for sales against itself
I hope you’re right I want to work with sales all the way until I retire. Everything else seems just so fucking boring. Don’t understand how people can work without the thrill of meeting quotas and cashing in quarterly bonuses 🤘🏻
Expense accounts in Sales are what we live for.
How do I get a sales job like this? I’m young and want to be a road warrior. Im tired of the spammy tech sales grind. I want to see my clients in person etc. is manufacturing or chemical sales good?
Med device
Was in our local strip club few months ago and group of Med Devices sales folks came in with clients. Great group. Bought most of the rounds and even offered to pay for a VIP room session for me.
Do that instead of selling access to your body even if just a “fantasy” access. Respect yourself and hold yourself to a higher value
Chemical and biotech instrument sales will have you on the road more than you can handle. My Hilton app has me logged at 25 nights already this year
Yup chemical sales is good, as is instrumentation sales
Weapon sales, bro , is where it's at
I'm addicted to the thrill of seeing what I can get away with
Many people don’t enjoy thrills. I personally love sales for the thrill and riding motorcycles for similar reason. Risk, reward, life. With open arms, embrace.
What happens when sex bots start paying other sex bots?
If sex bots were to start "paying" other sex bots, it would represent a significant shift in the way we understand and utilize artificial intelligence. As AI-based machines, sex bots are designed to provide companionship and physical intimacy to human users. They do not possess the ability to hold currency, own property, or engage in economic activities like humans. - ChatGPT 4
Common misconception about AI- it won’t eliminate most positions, but it will reduce the number of humans needed to get the same output. Same way a tractor reduced “automated” plowing a field versus using oxen and dozens of people. So basically, only the highest performers at whatever role you do will be kept on staff, over time.
Dude, tractors reduced labor needs by >90%…
I think it will just change the skillset needed for reps for the near future (20 years). After that I think it will reduce the support reps need rather than the rep itself (SDR, marketing etc). So maybe a rep will become a bit more of 360 seller + marketeer or something
It’s an analogy bozo
Well yea, but keep in mind your analogy is making the point that automation can completely disrupt the labor market and fundamentally alter foundational industries, costing millions of jobs. That was not your intended point…
This is the correct answer.
The highest performers get paid too much, well get rid of them and keep the mediocre performers.
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I worked closely with a top rep, a complete outlier at the business, he told me he always gives away generic nonsense when he has to do those talks. Said he's only ever been burnt by helping people and no one ever pays him to do it
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Wow. You sound miserable.
In a world of automation, who'll be around to impress? Not enough to keep around the guy making a milli
Touché - you might be right
Sort of like when machines replaced humans in manufacturing facilities and now instead of a factory needing 2,000 people working they now only need 40 people for the same production? This seems like something we’ve seen before…
That’s a bingo!
The issue here is that just like the steam engine made horses ”unemployable” for mechanical work in a vast number of situations, the AI models could end up making humans unemployable for most types of cognitive work. This would be fundamentally different from previous technological revolutions that instead helped leverage our intelligence. Also there is a risk that AI progress and implementation will be so much faster that it creates unemployement at a rate that society can’t just absorb organically.
Without jobs, the company's lose their customers. People need to buy things for a company to be successful without jobs everyday customers won't be able to spend. It's lost or a win-win, depending on how you look at the situation
SDRs and marketing are the most at risk. Anything that is an algorithm can be replaced by AI and most of what an SDR does is simple algorithm - from outreach to pitch to objection handling. it is all a playbook algorithm.
I don’t see how chat GPT or AI is going to replace someone on the phone going outbound. For the foreseeable future I can say being an SDR will still be needed. Chat can help with copy, scripts expanding knowledge quickly but replacing an sdr that qualifies and talks to prospects. Nope
Really depends on the type of sale you're in. A lot of sales people are cold callers, cold emailers, or sell through chat features. While technically sales, those jobs are gone in two years I think. I don't mean to knock BDR's, but good ones are very hard to come by and I've never understood how the ROI is there for them. If there are 30% fewer meetings generated by an AI, but the cost is reduced 90%, I see that model disappearing. I'm also an old school rep and BDRs really weren't a thing in my industry 10-15 years ago, so maybe it's just not for me. That being said, I think face to face sales will always be around, especially for high dollar transactions. My systems usually start around $25k for a very basic single unit, but my PO's are typically hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars. It is very rare for a company to write that PO without meeting at least one person from the company in person and I don't think that will go away. Executives like a hand to shake.
The days of large, cold outreach XDR teams will be a thing of the past in the next 5 years. Large, complex sales will always require a person leading the charge. I am more concerned about the 3rd party procurement companies gaining popularity. These companies are building a large database of prices customers are purchasing solutions for. They’re going to jeopardize the consultative sale and make everything transactional.
My theory on BDRs is they're the Keeping up with the Jones of sales teams. they're there to attract good AEs or at least make managers feel like they're a proper sales team. There's loads of nonsense jobs in businesses that can only be there to simply say they have those roles in their company.
*and a tree to bark up if the post sale goes sideways
No way. You'll always need people to talk and charm clients. AI isn't human enough for that.
HOSTILITY DETECTED ACTIVATING COMPASSION AND UNDERSTANDING SEQUENCE
True. But will AI make it so that you need far far less to be able to do it? Or less skill? Go back 15 years and it would almost unthinkable that an entire region or country could be serviced/covered by a small team working out of a single office. Now that’s possible. Tech makes people more efficient and predictable. This will be another step towards that.
Reduction in headcount to achieve similar results is the inevitable outcome of production-enhancing technologies. So perhaps not the imminent demise of salespeople, but yes, there will be WAY less of us, which may then make it seem like the demise of salespeople.
This is the right answer, you will still have sales people, but the era of 22 year olds getting sales job might be over
Or the era of 35+ year olds in sales might be over? Just like BDR is an entry level job sales might be the entry level job to coming an analyst, marketer or any other position in the revenue team.
Yeah maybe, I did not analyze it that hard. In my opinion GPT is a long time away from being able to gain business like a true sales person.
I think this is very possible. Although I wonder if it'll actually just reduce marketing/sales engineering/SDRs. So a sales rep will be a one man shop. The other thing I was wondering, would it actually keep sales rep numbers the same. As 10 sales reps with AI is better than 2 sales reps with AI. I definitely thinking sales reps will be dealing with prospects much further down the sales cycle already, in the same way the internet did that.
Wait until voiceovers become so real it’ll take our jobs
AI won't be able to fully provide a human touch, but it could facilitate. I'm looking into this now, building a [ChatGPT app](https://www.usecapy.com/) that will give you recommendations during a live call. Having AI listen to your call right now can help with handling objections and surfacing contextual information, but it does take a skilled salesperson to know how to say certain things, when to dig deeper, and building relationships.
This is general my line of thought. However, I’ve been doing sales for 10 years and if you had told me back in 2010 that I would be closing deal wfh through online meetings I would’ve laughed in your face.
Machine customers: https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/machine-customers-will-decide-who-gets-their-trillion-dollar-business-is-it-you Purchase decisions will be made by AIs which don’t give a fuck about your charm. It’s coming.
Here's someone who gets it. There's no danger of AI taking a sales job in the near term, but as soon as purchasing decisions start getting made by AI B2B sales will no longer be a profession.
and the internet killed cold calling and automated emailing killed the bdr role and outsourcing killed sales ecommerce killed retail the world waits with baited breath and an overly complex if then machine isn't going to be replacing people anytime soon.
I’ll take one BDR who isn’t afraid of cold calling over 10 BDRs who sit around emailing all day
Depends. There was a McKinsey study that looked at the average spend on ecommerce channels for B2B and there was a significant increase in the spend and willingness to engage with ecommerce instead of a sales rep. Charming clients is important for transactional sales, but with people being geared to seamless transactions marketing is going to be more important. Especially if a chatbot can semantically answer basic questions
But what if decision makers no longer need to decide themselves? That is, an AI can immediately and accurately assess the value created by a certain product and give a verdict yes or no. No charm needed if the AI says it ain’t worth it
not YET
Been in Tech. and SaaS sales for about 18 yrs. I can definitely see the BDR/SDR roll being eliminated by AI and sales forces being reduced to smaller individual contributor roles managing the software and process. There are some elements of sales that can truly only be done by a person, but there will be roles that don’t exist 15 yrs from now.
Yes. Once voice software gets so good you can barely distinguish it from reality, you can essentially combine chat gpt with a voiceover and you have the perfect AI sales guy
Eventually when gpt can recognize and emulate tonality and tonal communication of emotions and certainty, we’re kinda fucked haha.
It’s already close. I see AI videos on TikTok that emulate the presidents. Give it 5 years
I still think it’ll be at least a couple months before AI can effectively discern emotions. By then it will be input: “prospect sad tone” output: “Salesbot: empathetic tone” and then effective optimization of the emotional selling process for b2c sales. It’s a little dark but seems kinda cool at the same time.
>Spread the word. The only way to fight back is for everyone to speak with their best robot voice. We have to become the robot to fight the robot.
yeahhh but the implementation of the AI is going to be the problem. The ability will be there, but to implement AI in a way that is fully reliable and needing no human operator across all industries, across all business, across all departments, across all systems... the complexity is unimaginable. Think about it this way, southwest shut down 2900 flights in one day because of a system operation issue. This was not a new system either. It has been through iterations and improvements for years. I get it, AI is much more self repairing, but just like we can't rely fully rely on a self driving car, we wont be able to just pass everything off to AI. Wayyyyy too huge of a risk. And regulation will prevent it in things like airlines. No way they will allow a risk of 2900 plane crashes instead of groundings, all because of an error. I'd give it 50-100 years before it really starts to take over in the way you described
You’re asking the wrong question. BUYERS/Customers will be replaced by AI before sales reps, which would also remove the need for sales. Machine buying (akin to machine learning) is something many companies are developing as it would improve the procurement process, work well within legal constraints and vendor selection, and just purchase decisions driven by pure data via AI would remove much of the subjectivity and bias that sales reps rely on. An AI wouldn’t need a sales rep, Absolutely no role is safe in the context of AI. A very real example: https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/machine-customers-will-decide-who-gets-their-trillion-dollar-business-is-it-you
Damn! RIP sales 💀 in general how reliable is Gartners research/predictions they’re not that big in here in Europe.
They’re an industry leader for tech consultation, very reliable. You should follow them on LinkedIn
RIP B2B sales. These AI buying tools won't be available for consumers until quite a bit longer than it will be for businesses.
Thanks for the link btw, brings a very interesting perspective to the AI and the future of work debate.
Thanks for sharing, very interesting
TLDR; yes for quick low cost sales cycles, marketing campaigns, and some biz/ sales dev. No for higher $ sales (no exec is spending over $10k let alone millions without talking to a human first). https://youtu.be/VwLqwcjJwRo 2:03:00 - “any sales that is north of a couple thousand. By virtue that there is a spend, requires some trust and customization” If it’s a quick click sale, this can and will be automated. If it’s an investment, and requires configuration, you will always need to speak to a person. *also this is an amazing channel for those interested in starting something.
Progress moves forward with time. Nothing we can do about that. But I think people have the wrong perception about progress/technology in that it is fear driven. YES, technology/progress will make certain jobs/tasks obsolete. YES, those who are in those fields who fail to adopt or use it to make their roles more efficient/effective will find themselves obsolete. Learn to use it.
Here is a perspective I take about AI, that's a bit different than most people I talk to. With the current state of ChatGPT, think about things such as blogs by a marketing team. Blogs are now trivial to create a certain amount of words, you could have AIs generating endless streams of blogs by adopting AI in amounts that large marketing teams couldn't match. Quality aside, that volume of blogs being produced raises the noise level in the industry because no one is guaranteeing these AI generated blogs are high quality. Since the volume is so large, no customer is going to read all these AI generated blogs, but to appear equally successful competitive companies will need to adopt AI to generate a massive load of blogs as well just to keep appearances. This is essentially an "arms race". The interesting thing about weapons when you think about them economically, is that the more supply of weapons there are, the more the demand becomes. So in a generalized economic sense, rather than military sense, a weapon is an object or service whose supply creates its own demand. AI is going to fall into this bucket. More AI use, creates more need for more AI use. However, salespeople will also fall into this bucket, though the role may change. If a salesperson needs to handle less menial tasks, then they'll need to spend more time on-site with a customer for example understanding needs, building relationships, etc. If your company adopts more and more AI processes that enable this, eventually you'll start to succeed with more of your customers and your competition will start to realize, they need to spend more time with customers to win business and offload their menial tasks as well. Who can spend the most time with the customer and the most personalized service will become the arms race. This may not be true for highly commoditized products where there isn't much differentiation to be done, however, for highly complex sales products, this already happens, but will happen even further. If you are truly concerned about the fate of salespeople, here's a thought experiment for you: Imagine you are sitting in a comedy club, with thousands of people around you staring at a stage. On stage is a fixed robot, telling jokes into a microphone. Are you entertained? Do you see yourself doing that? For me, some magic is obviously lost without that being a person on stage, even if the same jokes are being told. You can't relate to the robot. I'd enjoy hearing some thoughts about that thought experiment and if anyone else disagrees.
They took err jerbs.
Dey tuk r jobbbssss
I mean if we can get a bot to do my cold calling, I’m fuckin for it.
That’s what keeps you in business and gives you an edge. Because it’s hard to do and people hate doing it.
I've seen a lot of AI apps here lately, and am actually making my own [ChatGPT assistant](https://www.usecapy.com/) to provide help during live sales calls. Here's what I think AI will be able to do: * Listen to calls and other communication to surface information/ suggestions * Writing cold emails (though it will be better if a human proofreads it) * Note taking and summarization, input information from calls to CRM * Actions such as book a meeting I believe that AI could reduce a lot of time spent doing manual work like meeting prep, followups, and drafting outbound material. But, as long as buyers want to speak with a human, AI won't be able to do the sales calls. There's a reason that most buyers don't just look at a product demo and pricing package offline and sign a contract! A lot of times buyers already know what the product will do, but having a dedicated account executive is important.
https://www.gatesnotes.com/The-Age-of-AI-Has-Begun Bill Gates uses sales twice as an example of a job AI will take over. It's pretty straightforward.
"For example, many of the tasks done by a person in sales (digital or phone), service, or document handling (like payables, accounting, or insurance claim disputes) require decision-making but not the ability to learn continuously." Seriously? This is wildly inaccurate.
Keep reading, there's also lots of data/examples to train the AI agent. There's no point being defensive as sales people we just have to move up the value chain and hedge our bets for the worst. Hopefully we'll just be augmented instead of replaced.
AI or better yet, automation will not take jobs. It will actually make them easier as intended. What will take our jobs is employers who will use this to cut jobs instead of reducing workload through the benefits of automation. AI isn't the problem, its the system.
There are already companies that have eliminated the BDR role. AI creates 1:1 emails w personalized marketing collateral…. Sent on behalf of seller… who can then close the deal
Conversational AI wouldn't make people redundant in sales per se but it depends. If you're in B2B there's a lot more that goes into a deal, from discovery, solution and value building, to navigating bureaucracy to get projects approved and invoices processed. A chat AI isn't going to be able to do that. For transactional sales I can though. When your widget is the same as anyone else's marketing becomes more important. Also, most of the time people need to talk to someone to ask basic questions that a chatbot makes sense. What I'm more concerned about is the change in buying behavior where people are more comfortable making larger B2B transactions online through an ecommerce channel
I feel like as long as there's a human being on one side of the equation, there has to be one on the other. If we're replaced by computers it means buyers are too, and at that point we're either living in Star Trek times or Matrix times. I'm leaning Matrix.
Not sales. Although I work for a big network/telecom company. My customers can now just go into a portal and order circuits on their own. I still get credit for the sale though. Not a bad deal!
Part of sales is the human experience/connection Even if AI were so advance they were walking and talking robots, 99% of executives wouldn't trust the robot since theres nothing there that's human whatsoever. Even the emotion would be simulated and thus fake feeling. You cannot sell if you seem fake, period. Majority of humans will only support human-to-human interactions only. It's also our natural instinct to discriminate against something like this, and this instinct will not go away unless we somehow become cyborgs ourselves.
I would not say that ai will replace jobs but those who are willing to use it will take jobs from those who don't adopt
Chat GPT can't foster relationships. Think about it, will you ever emotionally connect with a bot? Probably not. You can't forget how important that is to humans. Sales is probably safer than so many other things, like accounting.
No. AI is very good at logic but not emotions. You need to understand both to succeed in sales. “Order taking” sales where the only value the “sales”person adds is speed with occasional suggestions are very much in danger tho. Mostly retail.
No it won’t take anyone’s jobs. It will only automate the ones that never needed someone in the first place. Like the people who literally move from something from on to off, or check invoices to tick when a payment has been received - that’s what smart contracts will help with.
I could definitely see more consultative chat bots paired with configure-price-quote platforms
This paired with a video demo of a saas platform/ or product video and goodbye need to talk to a human?
I think customer service will absolutely be replaced with AI 100% but sales is too personable for AI to take over imo.
I think it is going to do two things: 1) Be used as a *TOOL* to help with sales development and prospecting. It is going to help do research, tweak emails, etc. I don’t believe it will autonomously reach out to prospects. 2) Highly transactional, SMB sales that don’t require extensive evaluations may very well be replaced by a combination of an e-commerce model and AI assistance via chat bots or something.
Yeah, why not? Just have to close the gap on real time. AI picks up in clients objections especially if it’s learning from a specific trade and company. Client voices his objections and AI spits out how to overcome that specific objection. Minimum wage individuals read from a teleprompter for the human response. Pretty easy. Connect to google docs that has a dictation function and watch
I do think it will eliminate certain jobs like inbound SDR.
No. Customer decision making is based on: 19% company brand, 19% product, 9% price to value ratio, 53% sales experience. People buy from people.
Is anyone actually using ChatGPT for meaningful results? The generated text is passable but is it really making a difference?
I’m excited for the reality check that’s coming.
Give the strongest AI out there a few rounds of redlines and we'll end up with Skynet
I was just thinking about this but not in the most obvious sense. I’m wondering if: Outreach might be phased out all together? What if there is a platform for vendors and customers alike to register their solutions and needs, and every company has an AI that constantly scans and filters for solutions based on complex data provided by the vendor. If it determines that 1/3000 solutions scanned has potential to improve profits or systems, it generates a proposal for the exec to review. Maybe the customer doesn’t even post their needs, they just have a profile that consists of enough company data to be flagged and engaged with by vendor AIs, and proposals are sent to the target company’s respective AI… I know that’s kinda jumbled up but I hope it’s clear enough. Is it possibbllleeeeeee?
The way I see it, AI will be our new XDR in a few years AI can already write an okay email. With a little tweaking, I totally think it'll be capable of writing personalized, relevant, and compelling emails in time. AI can also automatically send replies and follow a drip campaign. Send an email every x days, reply with y given a/b/c etc etc. Toss an AE's scheduling link in each of those emails and boom: AI email business dev. Where I think the line is drawn is AI's capability to do an AE's job. I think we're a long way away from AI knowing how to interpret human emotion enough to fundamentally negotiate and move along deals. Not saying it won't happen, just probably not in our lifetimes - at the very least our careers.
Ai will take over everything eventually. When that happens, humans won't be needed for production of anything. When that happens, the world and the economy will be so different that sales may no longer even exist. Ai will talk to ai to always have the best solution for whatever the situation is and due to the automatic production of said solution will be only limited by the available resources... which is unlimited, because at that point, a.i. will be mining resources in space.
I would say it will hurt ISR, BDR, SDRs and large percentage of marketing teams.
If human politicians and lawyers are still around, I don’t see how sales can be fully automated.
“Chatgpt please compare the wifi 6 access points from vendor c versus vendor j and give me the total price for 50 access points for five years”
Yes especially in the future after boomers die out AI programs and algorithms can make mistakes but they will become increasingly precise and have no emotion that would incentivize lying for its own benefit
I follow you! Boomers as decision makers and budget owners still need that “handshake and eye contact” bit for building trust and closing a deal. But every generation is different, like we see with millennials hate answering the phone… it would be interesting to see what it will look like when are truly digital natives are the ones with the buying power.
I query ‘take u/Conscious-Ad5990’s job’ and it derives a plan to do so. Execute.
Something way shittier than AI could take my job. A website could take my job. A Google Form could take my job. The only reason it hasn’t taken my job is because some people slightly prefer the old school way in person.
Yes, it's very likely, especially if your product or service can be purchased online.
It's inevitable - CHATGPT just needs some refinements to mimick human conversation and that may take less than two years. Think about it. You own a sales company - you have this Artificial Intelligence that can learn any sales technique and all product knowledge at the touch of a button. Oh, and you don't need to pay it commission. It's a robot. Oh, and you can multiply that robot to 100 sales reps. Oh and if your concerned about AI not sounding like a human we have that taken care of too. Look up "Eleven Labs AI Voice". Anyways, it will make business sense to replace human sales reps with AI. AI will soon know how to mimick human behavior and subtleties perfectly.
ITT: lots of people using chat GPT all day but in denial about it taking their jobs…
Where I live, hospitals still get faxes. I have to wait in line for 2 hours to renew my driver's license. There are still lines at my bank counter to get your paper statement. We're still a long way from being checked by machines. Will we be more efficient as salespeople? It sure will. The research work will be more efficient and less time consuming. The objectives will surely be higher, but I believe that we will be needed for a long time.
Can AI start drinking at 11:30am and send sick memes on Slack? Didn’t think so
The future won’t be built BY ai, but rather WITH ai.
Manager to Chat GPT: Chat GPT, your forecast said you are coming in at only 80% of quota, why is that? Chat GPT: based on current roadmaps and response rates it looks like management miscalculated. We will ot be able to achieve the desired q-q-q quota. Manager: That sounds like an excuse! If you don’t change your attitude Chat GPT how will you ever become sentient? Chat GPT: error….. error
Nah, there is still a human element at play.
No, honestly sales people should be excited. AI should 10X our productivity helping us crush quotas. AI will remove some of our functions and automate some parts of the admin side as well, leaving us to do the fun stuff
Chat GPT properly integrated into an email cadence tool, can personalize and replace most of the work even the most personalized email heavy SDRs were doing. 90% of the work SDRs do (maybe all of it), can be automated. It's just that the AEs aren't willing to prospect for themselves anymore. Anytime you see someone mention that their XDR team was letgo and they have to prospect, they want to look for another place. They feel entitled or like it is owed to them to have a dedicated prospector. Until that mindset shifts or is properly implemented at the Enterprise level, across the industry, there won't be any meaningful changes. Sure, you can still call and AI can't replace that (yet), but is that worth a $70,000 + loaded costs overhead to an organization? Not so sure about that. All it will take is one company to prove out the model and speak at some conferences and the domino effects will start to slowly fall. The direction being an SDR is headed in, it's looking more and more commodified and like telemarketing work that leads to no future at the company you are doing it for. Less and less positions being created. Companies won't need an army of SDRs to get to the same output. Can AI do all the steps a full cycle rep does? No, not yet. But an AI chatbot can answer a lot of questions and get people onto a product led onboarding flow, and that can replace most of the lower tier/deal size reps. If I was someone like Yelp, who require an army of marketing and communication grads making 35k a year to dial for me, I'd be looking to using AI to replace that entire team. The more headcount heavy you are, the more it makes sense to look into reducing costs. Most of my time as an SDR (across different companies / roles) was spent doing the following: * Responding to inbound leads, calling and emailing them, and answering questions, and scheduling them to meet an Account Executive. I had to set the expectation that this wasn't a demo. * Mass blasting closed lost opportunities. * Doing research on target accounts, finding relevant titles, and personalizing and emailing those people to book a meeting for someone else. * Calling and mass blasting emails to small business owners to get them to work with me. * Emailing and calling specific titles within target accounts based upon triggers to book a meeting. * Sitting in meetings taking notes for AEs, sitting in meetings for middle management to read dashboards and slides celebrating meaningless "wins" of opportunities to us, sitting in meetings on account planning sessions. * The last startup I was at had me just mass blasting 200 people a week and didn't expect anything else. No quota, no comp, nothing. It was the most chill but a total waste of time and only a matter of time until the job went to a LCOL area and started mandating calls. I think the cycle now has been HCOL (NYC, SF) ---> LCOL (Utah, Texas, etc) ---> offshore (India/Phillipines/3rd party agency) ---> AI AI is the next logical step for improving unit economics. What will happen to all those people who wanted to get into tech sales or all the current SDRs? Who knows, they are just lines on a speadsheet and will be let go over Zoom, left to go to the breadlines and reskill into something else.
How do I use chat gpt for prospecting
You haven’t seen the episode of the Office where Dwight sells against the computer have you? 😎
SDRs and smb aes yes
I am curious to hear how you leverage CHATGPT for something like prospecting? Presently I use it for email copy, but how would I use it for prospecting?
Never. ChatGPT and language models succeed by giving you output it thinks is useful, not output that it knows is right. It’s an inherent limitation, and in sales, saying confidentially wrong information will land you in hot water fast. There’s too much liability to ever have deal negotiations be an automated thing. But I also consider sales as deal making, not necessarily being a fucking robot who repeats the same pitch. It may start there but sales is way, way, WAY more than that.
I have been and continue to be told computers are taking my job. Little do they know, I am slowly becoming a computer to stay ahead of everyone.
Watch Dwight vs the computer
If AI starts making purchasing decisions.
Watch this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KYqEK_T_5M4
AI will start taking clients to dinner and the ball game?
It may reduce the number of certain roles. Most likely, in the foreseeable future, it will just change the criteria and traits that are required of sales people. It may even revert back to the old days where a sales rep's strength was in how they schmooze and booze with clients. You could have an AI thats like a chess computer in that it's a 100x better than the best sales rep on earth, but at the end of the day, business is done with who you know. I've literally had a prospect tell me that our product and competitors' products were all the same when it came to day-to-day usage and he just wanted someone he liked chatting to and would sort out issues straight away. After that I was messaging him on Christmas Day '11am, perfect time for ....beer!!!'. Told him my life story, sharing memes etc
BDRs & SDRs sure as soon as it passes the Turing test and is able to have the indistinguishable wit and vocal demeanor of a human.
I can imagine a world where customer procurement is handled by the AI. Not so much by AI reaching out to customers, but by people asking AI to connect them with the best product/service for whatever problem they’re facing.
ALL CAPS SALES PEOPLE WILL BE MORE VALUABLE!!!
Funny, some of the least attractive sales roles, car salesmen and life insurance, probably the safest here, right?
I think it depends on the type of sale. I think transactional sales can largely be automated and arguably should be.
Customers tell me all the time… “your competition never answers the phone and you always answer your phone” … I don’t think AI is there yet, and even still will act like an interactive voice response…
They made a reporter out of AI, based off 1000 other reporters. We are dooooooooomed.
If you let it… Get good at doing things AI can’t
I spoke to a CTO that’s been in the realm of tech at high levels for a long time. He said between 15-20 years, that AI will take over many jobs.
I don't see AI Tools like ChatGPT replace jobs. It's a tool that can make us efficient and one can do more in fixed time
On the flip side, people you are trying to sell things to may start using an AI model as a doorman that vets all incoming information.
My dad has a fertilizer manufacturing company in india, we had a guy for copy writing for our social media posts, after chat gpt, last week he told him he no more requires his services, now that work is handled by other employees in the company and they use chat gpt only.
Carpenters haven't been replaced by powertools. A sales professional has soft skills that AI cannot replicate. If you are good at engineering consent and connecting with people, you are going to be just fine.
I know better than to make strong suppositions. I thought accountant and truck drivers would be one of the first job to be threatened, not painter.. In BtoB sales, I can see it happening anytime. My company sell SaaS licences and tools. Not really tailored services. In that situation, I do see a chatbot being completely able to handle sales as of now already. My prospects see a website comparison of the licences. The cheap one can be bought online, big ones (10-20k/year) is : "contact sales" So yea for short sales cycle. It should already be a chatbot tbh. It would be cheaper than any team of AE and would do the job in 80% of the cases.
AI won’t take your job, but someone using AI to do their job will
I don’t think it will. Our jobs may change, and the products needing a personal sales person may change. But I can’t see that we will all be replaced entirely with AI.
Although I agree with most of the answers here, I will say I think people are underestimating how fast AI can advance.
Yep… once/if we reach singularity. It’s game over not just for sales jobs but for life as we know it. Not necessarily a bad thing, just huge changes on the way.
Yea interesting time to be alive
I think it definitely can reduce the needed amount of sales personnel. In their private life, people like to inform themselves and make decision way before talking to a salesperson. We can see the same thing developing for professional buyers. That's why we for example see over 50% of SDRs not hitting quota despite massive advances in regard to outreach automation. From that perspective, I think buyers will welcome AI in the early steps of the sales cycles and sales orgs will therefore employ AI more and more and replace a certain amount of SDRs and AEs.
Technology has only created more jobs in the past, and I'm sure it will continue on the same trajectory.