Is AI Coming For Sales?

Agents rationalising software development is now yesterday's news, however the new wave of automation is the rise of agents helping with sales and marketing. Traditionally we needed to scale sales teams to scale growth - the two were more or less directly correlated in a very 1-1 way. A lot of GTM needed a sales team to just physically ramp up the amount of outreach you could do, which was supposed to directly feed the bottom line and revenue generation. However, if GTM can instead scale with agents then this opens up, even further, the number of companies that can stay leaner longer and the amount of value that can be generated within smaller teams.

We can already reduce tech team sizes by using AI for much of the work that needed a separate front end developer, backend engineer, designer, dev ops and more. Now AI can do much of that work with some human checks and balances. Sales was always thought of as a fundamentally human skill. But what if you could train your AI to send personalised contextual outreach, follow up properly and do everything up to and including booking a call (and perhaps even taking the initial one?). What possibilities does that open up when one of the core constraints and bottlenecks to scaling-up was the size of your sales force and the speed at which you could ramp them up, train them and get a return on that hire and training period?

The possibility is exciting when most people just take it as a given that at least 30-40% of a batch of reps will churn or underperform, and accept that hiring sales teams is notoriously inefficient, costly and frustrating. If AI enables scaling sales, with all of its constraints and inefficiencies, not just for the initial funnel stages, outreach and lead generation, but the actual sales process, with much less friction, less training and time-lag to results, and perhaps most importably a repeatable, easily systemisable process, scaling becomes predictable rather than the wobbly and unstable ladder it has hereto been.

Sales is thought of sometimes as the last area where only humans can be effective, but consider this: it may actually be that in some cases people may actually prefer to buy from an AI, because they can ask questions frankly, don't feel manipulated or pressured and feel more comfortable saying yes or no. This may actually make for an even better and higher converting sales process, because sales isn't usually about convincing someone to buy, or deploying your skills of persuasion, a lot of times it's about answering questions and providing information.

This is all hypothetical and no one knows whether AI sales reps would perform better or worse than human sales reps. If anyone has done a study, it would make for interesting reading to see whether my instinct about humans maybe preferring to deal with an AI sales rep is true or not. However with AI being used now in first round interviews,  the logical leap to using them in first round sales calls doesn't seem that far and the next breakout company may be a company that nails AI driven sales.