I believe we are at another inflection point in the evolution of professional selling.
The last decade, or so, has been the era of bringing science to sales, or certainly mathematics. The advent of more powerful computing and the increase in investment in sales technology has produced an ocean of data ready for those of us who love to crunch numbers. Good stuff in my opinion. Things that can measured, get changed, and hence improved. But the side effect of all this technology seems to have been a huge increase in the volume of spammy emails that salespeople have generated and aimed at buyer’s inboxes.
Now AI is upon us and how to use AI is a next big driver in the evolution of professional sales.
I don’t believe the next round of AI-enabled tech will be about more volume of cold emails. I believe it will be about making sales more human again, ironically going back to what some of the best salespeople did in the twentieth century: building and maintaining relationships.
Ironically, this next wave of tech-powered selling may seem to some like a step backwards. It will be about salespeople getting refocused on what really makes them salespeople—a focus on one-on-one relationships with other humans. If salespeople don’t build and maintain relationships, then they risk one day being replaced by AI that can send emails and even make phone calls at a much greater scale than any person can.
The next era of sales will be about making sales more human again, ironically going back to what some of the best salespeople did in the twentieth century: building and maintaining relationships.
So how do we get to this new era of AI-enabled personal selling? The articles below can start us off in the right direction. The first two give some practical advice on adopting a more buyer-centric mindset. The third article questions whether the current trend for splitting up sales development and sales executives makes sense, especially from a buyer’s perspective and the final article describes using relationships in a coordinated account plan to sell to the enterprise.
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Are you authentic?
Stacey Hall argues that we need to throw Alec Baldwin and his “Always Be Closing” under the bus (you know the classic scene in Glengarry Glen Ross) and focus instead on being aligned with our core values and our prospects’ needs and wants.
The (New) New ABCs of Selling — Alignment, Belief, and Consistency
Don’t sell
Linkedin interviews the head of Pacific Growth for Marsh and finds that his #1 sales tip is to not sell. He says, “We don’t sell, we have engagement strategies around building relationships and understanding people’s needs.”
How Johannes-Daniel Veldsman Sells: His Secret, Interestingly, is Not To
Account Execs should prospect
David Brock says, “for complex B2B, particularly outbound, the [current sales] model is set up for failure.” He argues that in more complex sales, AEs are better equipped to prospect than SDRs.
SDRs And AEs, Do We Have Things Backwards?
Enterprise selling requires a plan
Many companies want bigger clients but are they willing to do all the hard work needed to land an enterprise account? If you are willing, read this to come up with a plan to make it happen.
Do you need an Enterprise Selling Plan (ESP)?
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