This is the sixth in a series of interviews I am conducting with subject matter experts and practitioners in the sales profession. I am examining where we are today with AI in sales and where we are going.
This interview is with Dave Brock. Dave is CEO at Partners In Excellence, a consulting firm that helps its clients OutPerform and OutSell their competitors. Dave is also the author of the “Sales Manager Survival Guide.”
Here’s a summary of our conversation and below this summary is the full transcript of our interview.
1. More human selling
Dave thinks AI will drive salespeople to be more focused on improving their relationship skills. “I think it’s interesting that up to this point the way some companies sell has become increasingly more machine-like. We’ve set up sales processes so we manage our customers through a type of assembly line. But now these new AI tools have the potential to free us up to be more human, which is really what helps our customers the most.”
2. AI will change the buying process.
Dave suggests that asking “Where do you see AI impacting the sales profession most in the next two to three years?” is the wrong question. What we should be doing is asking ‘Where do we see AI impacting buying in the next two or three years?’ and then figuring out from there ‘How can we help our buyers have a better experience and what does it mean to what we do?’”
3. Low risk deals won’t need a salesperson.
“In the next three to five years, I see virtually a 100% of transactional selling being done bot to bot. A lot of SaaS selling, and those kinds of products, with transactional processes and very knowledgeable buyers and sellers can be fully automated.” Dave made an interesting distinction here between low price point deals and low risk deals. Price and risk are usually correlated but risk is what is going to drive the need for a human salesperson to be involved.
4. Better thinking with ChatGPT
This is the application of generative AI that seems to be bubbling to the surface with some smart people–using ChatGPT as an idea generation partner. “One area is using ChatGPT to test our thinking or to help us think differently. For instance, I might say, ‘I’m prospecting this customer and this industry and this individual, what are the top 10 issues they might be thinking about?’”
5. More selling time…if you want it.
Dave believes that AI tools present us with an opportunity to win back time to actually sell but points out that not every salesperson wants that! “We did a, a survey for a very large company about time available for selling, and we found that their salespeople only had 9% time available for selling! There are a whole bunch of reasons behind that, but we figured out how to free up more time, so their salespeople had about 35% of their time available for selling…And the reaction from some of the sellers was, ‘Oh my, now I can’t hide out anymore!’”
Interview Transcript
Nigel: Where do you see AI impacting the sales profession most in the next two to three years?
Dave: Well, I’ll suggest that we’re asking ourselves the wrong question when we ask that question. The question we should be asking is “Where do we see AI impacting buying in the next two or three years?”
Once we start understanding buyers and how they’re going to be leveraging AI, now we can start saying, “How can we help our buyers have a better experience and what does it mean to what we do?”
The ability for us to use AI to get deeper insights is not new. ChatGPT has created a lot of sizzle around AI, but we’ve had fantastic analytical tools for some time. I see adoption of these tools picking up and people actually using them.
Nigel: You wrote about how buying will change, and I had this impression from that that my AI would call your AI. What do you think buyers are going to do at their end?
Dave: In the next three to five years, I see virtually a 100% of transactional selling being done bot to bot. A lot of SaaS selling, and those kinds of products, with transactional processes and very knowledgeable buyers and sellers can be fully automated. It’s better for the buyers, it’s better for the companies selling and it helps us to focus on those complicated buying situations where the buyer really needs human help.
Nigel: Where would you draw the line? Do you have a place in mind where humans are actually going to be needed?
Dave: The line is when you get to complicated buying processes–not necessarily low-price situations. As an example, I work with a manufacturer in Shanghai, and they’re automating the buying and selling process with their suppliers. They are ordering millions of dollars of materials at a time but they know this process so well that they’re hoping to fully automate it in the next year or two.
I define more complicated buying processes as ones where multiple people are involved and there’s higher risk–both personal and organizational. As Gartner has found from their research there may be 11 to 13 buyers in a complicated buying process–it’s almost a process of herding customer cats! How do we, as sellers, get those 11-13 buyers aligned in what they’re trying to do and keep them aligned? How do we address things like buyer indecision and fear of messing up, as Matt Dixon and Ted McKenna discussed in their book, The Jolt Effect? Those are deeply human type things, and that’s where sellers will be able to create real value.
Nigel: I’m wondering, if there are things sellers can do with ChatGPT that perhaps most people have missed so far?
Dave: One area is using ChatGPT to test our thinking or to help us think differently. For instance, I might say, “I’m prospecting this customer and this industry and this individual, what are the top 10 issues they might be thinking about?” ChatGPT will come back to me and then I’ll ask it, “Let’s look at that one issue. What questions should I be thinking about in exploring that issue with this customer?” I keep drilling down and drilling down. Usually, eight out of the 10 ideas I get back from ChatGPT are things I’ve thought of before, but it’s useful to have them confirmed. Of the other two ideas, one is usually something I knew about, but is phrased in a different way. But the tenth item may be one I should have thought of but somehow missed.
Nigel: I’m wondering, with ChatGPT and that kind of approach to using it, can you almost do something like sales training?
Dave: Yes. I’m actually looking at developing a number of sales training programs using ChatGPT. I carried out an experiment with a large client recently. We’ve been training some their people on strategic account planning. As part of that training, we covered business analysis and how to look at the financial and market performance of their clients and prospects. Some of the people we were training were struggling to understand some of these concepts, but once we introduced ChatGPT into the training, all of a sudden, lightbulbs were going off. The people that were struggling were suddenly getting the concepts.
Nigel: Do you think AI is actually going to help salespeople spend more time selling?
Dave: The good news is AI will free up a huge amount of time for more selling. The bad news for some salespeople is that now they will have to do more selling! AI will take away some administrative tasks from salespeople like writing a proposal or generating a quote and free them up to spend more time on the stuff that really requires a human touch.
As I mentioned, in complex deals this will free up time to focus on critical elements like “what are the risks, what fears do our buyers have and how do we get the buying group aligned?” Those things are deeply personal, human to human, they’re dynamic, they change from individual to individual, they change over time. These are things where even the best AI tools can’t deal with the context, the situation, and the human emotions. So, if I free up my salespeople’s time from all the mundane stuff, they can focus on these truly human issues.
Nigel: Do you think salespeople will actually do these things or will we find a way to waste time instead?
That’s a funny thing. About 10 years ago we, we did a, a survey for a very large company about time available for selling, and we found that their salespeople only had 9% time available for selling! There are a whole bunch of reasons behind that, but we figured out how to free up more time, so their salespeople had about 35% of their time available for selling…And the reaction from some of the sellers was, “Oh my, now I can’t hide out anymore!”
As I’ve said, I think most transactional selling will be fully automated in the future. This will free up salespeople to work with customers on more complex deals. These changes in selling will change the talent profile of who is a good seller. And of course, a lot of our current sellers won’t fit that new profile.
I think it’s interesting that up to this point the way some companies sell has become increasingly more machine-like. We’ve set up sales processes so we manage our customers through a type of assembly line. But now these new AI tools have the potential to free us up to be more human, which is really what helps our customers the most.