How AI will replace A LOT of sales reps within the next few years

The future of sales execution isn’t Cadences (I guess some folks call them Sequences!?!?) 😆

Let’s look at a brief timeline that led us to this point before I spell out how everyone will sell ~3 years from now (Who knows? Maybe sooner.)

2010 - I’m in a transactional sales role taking souls in a boiler room above the Hooters in Vista, California. I have the bright idea to email all of my prospects a promo offer. One email with all of them CCd. I learn about the difference between CC and BCC 🫠 . It’s too late though. The “one to many” seed has been planted.

2013 - Out of the boiler room and selling SaaS in Austin, Texas. Still fairly transactional. A guy I work with shows me how to send mail merges with Word and Excel. Instead of sending just one blast I figure I might have better results if I send three blasts to the same people spaced out over 2 weeks to close out the month (“Finance has given me three coupon codes to be used by the end of the month. Would you be interested in saving a couple bucks?”). It works and I absolutely crush my number every month. 📈

2015 - Promoted to Channel Sales. I now have 1,200 VAR partners that I need to extract sales from. How in the hell am I going to reach out to all of these folks!?!?! I do some research, sign up for some trials, and then talk finance into buying me a MixMax license. I think it was $168 for the year. Now I’m using multi-email sequences AND automating most of the emails. I can track my reply rate. I can calculate a meeting rate manually. I know my meeting to Opp rate, Win Rate, and ASP. I now know exactly how many people to contact to hit my number. I absolutely crush my number. 🤑

2017 - I’m a founding AE at Evernote and get to help evaluate “sales automation” tools. ToutApp = 🗑 . Cirrus Insight = 🤮 . Salesloft = HOLY CRAP! 🤯 . I get to build a bunch of Cadences in Salesloft for different personas, verticals, and use cases. All of my pre-Opportunity workflows are now driven by Cadences. I close the largest deal in North American history and they create a Mid-Market AE role for me.

2018 - I go to work at Outreach, largely because I wanted to use Outreach. I’d seen a demo while I was at Evernote and my mind was blown. You can actually do LinkedIn connection requests and DMs IN THE PLATFORM!?!?!?! 🤤 . I’m not crushing it BUT, I am talking to VPs in Sales, Sales Enablement, Sales Ops, and Demand Gen EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. NON-STOP. I’m learning everything about them, what they do, how they do it, what’s broken, how they’re trying to fix it, what’s working, what’s not working. I acquire a sick amount of acumen and expertise.

2020 - It’s February. I fly out to Boston for a 2-week new hire bootcamp at HubSpot. My mom is freaking out about some MIT student who came back from Christmas break with some sort of weird flu variant. She’s always freaking out. I’m excited to get into our CRM and start scrubbing my accounts. Wait… WTF is all this!?!?! Is this right!?!?! It’s showing me every time this person has come to our website, received a newsletter from us, and read a piece of content… I CAN SEE WHAT THE CONTENT WAS!?!? I CAN WHERE THEY WERE ON OUR SITE!?!?! Everything is time stamped. I have 700+ accounts in my patch. I filter by ICP, marketing activity, sales activity, and I come up with an awesome target account list. I fly home excited. Tom Hanks gets sick. Basketball gets canceled. Things change. I watch Tiger king.

2022 - I’ve left sales and have been consulting. I’ve been helping all of those same types of people who I used to sell to at Outreach. I’m all up in ops, enablement, and strategy. Lots of helping folks with content, too. Frankly, they all stink at it. Business is getting slow so I start talking with Salesloft about partnership opportunities. They buy me a ticket to Saleslove. Michael Forbes is in a booth and he gives me a demo of the latest and greatest. He shows me a coaching dashboard where managers can see how many people their rep(s) Cadenced, what % of steps are completed on time, skipped, what types of steps those are, how often and how much the rep is personalizing and what results that’s getting vs. when they don’t, when they’re connecting most, sentiment of connections, how all this compares to last week/month/quarter, how it compares to other reps, to the team, to other teams, to reps on other teams. My heart finds a new syncopation. My mouth goes dry. My pupils dilate.

2023 - I’m working at Salesloft! Doing the same work before, with the same types of roles, but exclusively at Fortune 500s. On a recurring product training I get to see our new AI layer called Rhythm. Intent and behavior driven sales orchestration. It’s nice! It’s a logical next evolution. What’s that? We’re seeing a direct correlation between conversion rates and Rhythm task completion rate? Beep-boop-beep 💻 … Yup! At every single one of my accounts, the reps booking the most meetings with the least amount of work are the reps who are doing their tasks that were generated by AI. It’s telling them what to do, who to do it with, and how to do it.

2024 - AI is moving fast, expanding from task and messaging generation to layering over all parts of the platform. All sales roles and functions are starting to benefit from an all seeing AI copilot to help guide them. More to come on that…

That’s a lot!

If I were a rep right now, I’d do everything I could to learn about and understand AI and machine learning.

There’s loads of chatter about AI replacing sales reps.

It won’t… not entirely.

Strategic thinkers with a high degree of business acumen AND an expert level understanding about how AI is applied to, and working in, the tools that they’re using will be the new rockstars.

Everyone else will need to find another line of work.

Period.

There won't be anymore sales and marketing. Dan Tyre coined the term Smarketing long ago, and AI is driving us closer towards that vision of a single customer acquisition, growth, retention, and referral engine.

Firmographic, psychographic, technographic, marketing intent, product engagement, and sales engagement data will all feed and train an AI that will understand our customers 100000x better than we ever could because guess what??? No departmental silos. No egos. No biases. Just loads of data from across the buyers journey, and data don’t lie.

Cadences/Sequences will be obsolete. AI will use everything mentioned above to direct reps as to who to contact, how to contact them, when to do it, and what to say. It will dynamically create follow-up actions depending on the outcomes of the prior actions and historical data. It will be able to factor in historical conversion metrics to inform everything, and it will be able to validate all contact info, verify employment, and adjust outreach and follow-up accordingly. Reps won’t need to think, just do.

So what will reps actually do?

Much of what they’re currently doing, but to new and different degrees.

They’ll perform quality checks to make sure that the AI is learning properly and serving up the right actions with the right people. They’ll be the ones to audit content to ensure it’s personalized in a relevant way before it goes out.

This will create a lot of bandwidth for reps to begin to focus more on nurturing those prospects at whale accounts who are towards the wide end of the buyer's journey funnel, trusting that AI will serve as a reliable copilot coaching them through how to move the prospect from awareness, to interest, to action. This will be a big part of the role, and these types of prospects are usually DQd or at least deprioritized currently, in part because reps only have enough bandwidth to work with prospects once they’ve reached the action stage of their buyers journey.

Also, taking bigger priority will be quarterbacking deals and managing internal stakeholders. The trend of strategic sellers becoming project managers is going to continue even faster as AI becomes more sophisticated, freeing sellers up by handling the blocking and tackling of targeting, messaging, and outreach.

Transactional sales roles will all be lost to AI EXCEPT FOR high-enterprise and strategic BDRs. However, the role will change.

The best BDRs will be able to handle all of the quality control work mentioned previously and will need to have a high level of business acumen, as well as technical acumen specific to AI.

The main focus of their role will continue to be outreach, but with focus almost exclusively on calling, video prospecting, and interacting with their prospects content on Linkedin and Twitter (I will never call it X. Suck my butt, Elon).

In other words, their value will be in their ability to execute meaningful interactions that AI won’t be able to execute in a warm, personalized, and human manner.

I work with sooooo many teams that are basically just email farms that send emails, wait for replies, and try to convert email replies to meetings. There will be 0 use for them in the near future.

However, AI still won’t be as good as a human at working through objections, building rapport, and aligning solutions to problems in a deeply resonating way.

Here’s one big caveat to all of this… this mostly applies to SaaS sales. Older industries that are traditionally late to adopt new tech will still have a place for your email-crazy-order-taking-appointment setters. BUT, the pay will is less than what you’d get for the same type of role in SaaS.

I haven’t even touched forecasting yet! That could be (shoot, will be) a whole other article.

In summary, as Ferris Bueller famously said “Life moves pretty fast. You don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

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