The Next Frontier in Sales: Exploring the AI Advantage
- Internet and information give buyer unfair advantage: The buyer has spent more time researching what they want, and the salesperson is primarily trained on their company's products and is under a time constraint. This means the transaction is very asymmetric information-wise.
- The way sales is done is heavily on marketing through social media (networks of intelligence): The only thing sales engineers should be focusing on are warm leads or hot leads, cold calling sparingly.
- AI is coming, and our value chain of trust has changed dramatically.
- Depends on the kind of the sales as well. If it's low-ticket items, you don't need a sales rep (Avon or Mary Kay) but Network Marketing exists because it's effective group psychology-wise.
- Main challenges that AI can overcome : AI can know the state of the buyer and managing their state to remain in control of the sales experience. The companies that come to mind are are Paradox.AI and Crystal Knows (DISC).
The best sales experience I ever had comes to mind, where the guy acted more like a concierge than the driver of the sale. Type A people very much appreciate this. Either way, people who are highly specialized need to feel that there is some knowledge parity going on. Unless the salesperson is specialized in high-end items of a company and they know their products in a technical way that might close a sale, it's hard for most salespeople to reach this level. It usually means the company hired someone with previous industry experience where the time in the field is there advantage.
In high end sales this begets another question about their training level. Do most sales reps have negotiation skills on par to someone who is a lawyer or people who do the majority of high-end purchases? People in certain industries have advantages (tech, medical, finance).