Opinion: The future of sales in a world of AI and ChatGPT

This article was written by Nick Powell, Vice President of Bolt Business.

Now that ChatGPT and AI are growing, people ask me what this means for traditional sales teams. My answer is that we’re about to see massive changes. The possibilities of ChatGPT are vast, and it will disrupt everything in sales and account management.

But ‘traditional’ selling, done by real people, is here to stay.

Bringing in the leads

AI can produce content at an alarming rate.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) relies on quality content, and sales teams depend on good SEO to drive inbound traffic. Inevitably, we’ll see vast quantities of SEO-optimised content flooding the internet. This will create a headache for search engines like Google, who must identify and rank the best search outcomes from a sea of content designed to rank well.

I suspect Google and others will have to dig deeper into the user behaviours of content sources to discern what came from a human and what was machine-made. This will be tough, but Google would have seen this coming. While it’ll be rocky for a while, I suspect much AI content will eventually be bypassed.

That’s not to say that some AI content isn’t good, though. Plug in your target industry and segment your company data. Then AI can reel off some great intelligence (and content) to meet your target audience’s pain points and curate quality materials for use in outreach.

This is valuable, and I see it being a key area where ChatGPT and others will fit nicely into the outreach tooling sales uses.

Sales

Many jobs will go — and I expect to see intelligent AI solutions that can make successful cold outreach calls. Achieving a high volume of calls at a low cost is where AI will impact human sales roles.

The Turin test will be passed soon; when it does, you won’t be able to tell if that cold-calling salesperson is a person or an AI bot. Many telesales roles will go when that happens. Sad, but inevitable.

Outreach is interesting, as sales outreach has never been more challenging. Daily, I get around 50 LinkedIn messages and about 50–100 emails trying to get me to take time out of my day. Most outreaches are terrible, and it’s become noise.

I’ve given up on email, and LinkedIn is now a sea of in-mails that I mostly ignore. Want to call me? Forget it. I’m English, and we don’t like speaking to anyone, let alone a cold call, so that’s out, too — I consider myself pretty hard to reach!

I love that I have several African countries in my business. In Ghana, for example, my best salesperson turns up at target businesses’ doors. More incredibly, it works!

Doing business face-to-face is more cultural there — which is bad news for AI. Across Africa, getting much traction in sales via digital channels is challenging. Real-life meetings are still the preferred method. Phone sales are still prominent, and AI will chip away here, but face-to-face is still vital for anything of high value.

Returning to the outreach topic, this is an area often cited where AI can take over by pumping out incredible volumes of outreach messages — all curated for the recipient. In theory, this will add to the ‘noise’ issue, and people will start to ignore the traffic, devaluing platforms like LinkedIn that will likely have to take action.

Again, another battle between bot and platform will have to play out, with recipients in the firing line. However, it may not be all bad. Perhaps AI will help to curate outreach messages that are highly targeted and can make it past Linkedin’s inevitable filtering.

This one is hard to predict, but given that I believe LinkedIn and email are already struggling to keep up, things might improve — we’ll see.

So, will AI be the end of salespeople?

Absolutely not.

There’ll be pain for high-intensity, basic sales roles but the opposite for more complex ones. Anything with notable conversion times and reasonably high-value sales will be the human’s space. Why? Simply put, I won’t sign a €1M deal with a robot. I wouldn’t even sign off on €10k with one.

Make no mistake: it will be a battleground! AI chatbots will start taking simple sales roles, and buyers will clue up and start insisting on ‘seeing’ people on calls. Add deep fake ‘virtual sales people’ over Zoom into the mix and watch this get messy. 

So how will buyers navigate this? They’ll revert to good old face-to-face meetings.

I believe we’ll go full circle back to the ‘old school’ style of sales, with real people meeting in person. If you want my business, visit my office, or take me for coffee. Zoom sales will drop as soon as deep fakes make you question if you’re speaking to a real person, which is excellent news for salespeople.

You’ll be fine if you’re a good relationship builder, personable, and can sell face-to-face. That said, this is going to get brutal for a while. The battle lines are still being drawn, so it will take time for this to play out. Whilst I think sales will see a split, simple sales will be AI-dominated, whilst anything of value will, as mentioned, go full circle, i.e. face-to-face.

But establishing the status quo is a long way off.

I believe we’ll go full circle back to the ‘old school’ style of sales, with real people meeting in person.

Wins and losses for account management

AI can handle simple account management tasks, functional issue handling, and receptive customer service-type requests. Decent chatbots are already picking up these tasks, and I suspect we’ll see technology create virtual ‘Account Managers’ that work on low-complex tasks.

The difficulty for AI virtual account management will be customers with complex requirements and expectations. If I spend a bunch of money with your company, I want a human. I want someone I can call, who’ll help me with any issues, knows my business and needs, and can have lunch with, form a real relationship with, and get value from. AI can’t offer much here. 

Suppose all you can offer your customers is an algorithm for managing that relationship. In that case, large companies, who often spend millions on services, products, and software, aren’t going to give their business to you.

One of the value propositions for our Bolt Business customers is our account management — if something happens and you need to speak to someone, you can.

Our competitors, generally (unless you spend millions a year), will instead push you to ‘submit a ticket’ and wait. Or, at best, a chatbot is all you’re getting until you can prove your issue is worthy of a human. It’s a strong value differentiator Bolt Business is happy to invest in.

While AI can handle uncomplicated customer service-based items, ‘real’ account management will be galvanised as a value proposition that businesses demand.

What about sales management?

One of my senior team members said, “I’ll be replaced by AI soon.”

That’s one of the most intelligent, capable people I know who genuinely thinks AI will replace them! Madness.

High-quality sales management isn’t going anywhere. Managing people is hard, and managing salespeople in a high-pressure environment is even more so. Do that in a complex, dynamic environment like a scalp or start-up, and it’s extremely tough.

It doesn’t matter how good AI becomes; give me a team of salespeople, and I’ll get more out of them than any bot can. Why? Because I’ll use the bot, and I’ll add to it.

AI can crunch data and do the leg work to help me with strategic insights, opportunity identification, performance analysis, and reporting. But I’ll take that and use it to make me better, not replace myself!

Motivation, long-term thinking, and real-world relationship-making are the domain of the sales leader. AI will give incredible insight, saving so much time that you can double your time investment in the team.

All those things you want to do now but struggle for time with (driving, coaching, motivating, ideating, working on deals, and going to meetings) will all become possible.

It’ll then be possible for me to be productive while having more real-time information, data, and strategic insights — making me better at my job and increasing the value I bring to the business.

Sales leaders in businesses that have any reasonable complexity or some kind of face-to-face sales aren’t going to lose their jobs. They’ll have more time and data to do their jobs better.

People will come out of this period stronger

In general, it’s going to get messy. Some roles will go, and that’s inevitable. But ‘real’ (face-to-face) account management and ‘real’ sales will emerge stronger.

The negative impact of covid on face-to-face meetings will reverse, and authentic relationship building will be the focus. If you’re doing that now, I see it staying the same long-term.

The key for sales and account management teams is to adapt and embrace AI to reduce the workload on low ROI tasks and augment and improve your key focuses’ impact.

Get this right, and it’s a powerful ally waiting to be unleashed.

Read more from Nick Powell in Solving the biggest shift in work culture for 100 years.