I grew up in the sales world. Over the better part of the last 4 decades, I've seen many sales trends come and go. I've seen new industries rise and old techniques fall. I've heard predictions about All The Things that will someday render human salespeople obsolete.
The latest & greatest agent of predicted obsolescence over the last 5 years has been artificial intelligence (AI). Too many articles have been written about how AI is going to render salespeople totally obsolete, just like autodialing and online marketing and e-commerce and millennial buying habits were going to render salespeople totally obsolete.
It's complete hogwash.
Here's why I think AI (and every new technology) has not and will never render human salespeople obsolete:
Human salespeople are the greatest asset your enterprise has to navigate the full cast of characters in your prospect organization, and then run the conversations that are necessary to convince your prospects to change their behavior from every other competitor (including inertia), to you.
Only a human can navigate that terrain and run those conversations.
AI can't do that. Robots can't do that. Even marketing and advertising can't do that.
Those things are great; they help get salespeople in the door. And they improve with technology every year.
But they cannot run the conversations that are necessary with the full cast of characters in a complex sale to convince the prospect to do business with you over everybody else (including nobody at all).
Only humans can.
We often say at Slattery that salespeople go the "Last Mile" where marketing and advertising (and any technology) can never go. Human salespeople run the conversations that bring a complex sale to closure in the "Last Mile". No technology can do that.
There are exciting strides being made in technology, AI, marketing, and advertising -- but they are all (and will remain) tools to open up the conversation, not tools to close it. A human is needed for that Last Mile, and will never be obsolete.
This means that as great new technologies shorten the ramp to new opportunities, your salespeople must be incredibly effective at the Last Mile to remain competitive. They can't focus on the things that 'bots can do (order-taking) or on the things that bleed time & resources (giving premature presentations to unqualified prospects).
Your salespeople must be able to focus relentlessly on running the conversations with the full cast of characters to get the sale through that "Last Mile" to closure.
So when the next flurry of tech innovation triggers a whole generation of pundits to declare a solution to all your human-salespeople problems (and there are many!), remember that there is nothing new under the sun. Yes, human salespeople may be difficult to hire and retain and manage, but they may very well be necessary if your sale has a "Last Mile" at all.
We may reach that "Last Mile" faster all the time with greater and greater technology, but we still need human salespeople to run it.
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