AI's Impact on Sales

There’s a lot of hysteria around Gen AI, ChatGPT, etc.

And for good reason.

Not here to fear monger, simply sharing my own concerns and excitement. To be clear, the excitement far outweighs the concern.

The reality is Gen AI and ChatGPT will have a chest-rattling impact on sales. Why?

Because most salespeople are 1) really expensive and 2) not that effective.

Which leaves sales leaders asking questions like:

Fair questions by the way.

My 5 Predictions:

1. Most companies will slice their sales teams in half in the coming years. Especially in SaaS, there’s a massive issue with rep productivity and quota attainment. To be fair, the rep is not solely to blame. Most sales leaders aren’t great coaches and most sales enablement functions aren’t truly enablement.

2. Due to smaller sales teams, other teams shrink. Rev/Sales Ops, Enablement, Sales Leadership, Marketing, even Accounting & Finance (AI will be huge here). Companies have always built orgs based on the size/expectations of their sales teams. When that changes, so does everything around it.

3. Marketing becomes the cash cow - bottom line is buying is never going to be less digital. Salespeople have always been paid most and I think that’s about to change. Buyers spend 87% of their time doing research, ingesting content, joining communities, etc. In other words, they spend most of their time engaging in marketing-related activities. That’s not going to change - marketing just became much more valuable.

4. Entrepreneurship sky rockets - we’re already seeing this and I doubt it slows down. You can run a fully functioning business for less than $2,000/year (if you want help getting started, let’s talk). Sales teams becoming smaller means people will lose jobs, which is terrible. On the other hand, salespeople tend to be entrepreneurial and with the barrier to starting your own business virtually vanishing, I predict we’ll see tons of salespeople start their own successful businesses. This is what I’m most excited about. Opportunities for everyone.

5. Companies will over-index on AI over the next 12-24 months. Most have a ton of financial pressure, there’s a seemingly pending recession, and the VC/funding landscape changed with the SVB incident. Leaders are finding ways to cut expenses and people are expensive. To save themselves, leaders will eliminate too many roles too early without fully understanding how to implement AI into their organization. The result: tons of confusion, frustration, and lack of productivity. Overtime, AI will make/save businesses millions of dollars. However, in the next few years, a lot of execs will disguise questionable cost-cutting measures as “taking a step towards innovation” — only to find out they don’t know how to use AI properly.

Your key takeaways:

• If you’re a skilled salesperson, you’re probably safe. Gen AI will just make your life better.

• If you’re a salesperson who struggles to hit their quota, dive head first into the world of AI/ChatGPT and internally brand yourself as an innovator - this goes a long way because most people don’t know where to start with AI, so they need someone else to take that dive. Do it, it can only help you.

• If you’ve been thinking about starting a side-hustle or a full blown business, your time is now. It’s incredibly affordable to do your own thing. However, with a low barrier comes a ton of competition. This means you’ll need to become a skilled marketer.

All-in-all, tools like ChatGPT will have a net positive impact on you as an individual, as long as you take the time to become a skilled prompter, marketer, and storyteller.

We have a lot to look forward to folks, have a great Tuesday!