There was a post on a Reddit Sales community yesterday titled “Company lets go of 10 sales executives in favor of AI”. [More details towards the end 👇]Lately, I've been delving deep into AI models: experimenting with prompt engineering, incorporating it into my workflows, and building MagicSync at Luru. However, despite its usefulness, I’m convinced that AI language models, as they currently exist, cannot fully replace Salespeople.Here's why:
1. Lack of open-ended input adaptation:AI models are best suited for specific questions with defined parameters but struggle with open-ended inputs. But Sales conversations are not always structured that way. Customers often trail off, have incomplete thoughts, and jump from one idea to another in the middle of a sentence. ChatGPT struggles to handle this kind of open-ended input effectively.
2. Contextual sensitivity:Human beings excel at synthesizing multiple sensory inputs, like tone, touch, facial expressions, body language, and external factors, to make decisions and react accordingly. AI models lack this ability and struggle to keep track of inputs and manage conversations that feel “personal”.
3. Difficulty with multiple personas:We Salespeople often interact with multiple personas simultaneously, such as prospects, sales managers, account managers, and more. Humans can easily switch between different personas and respond accordingly, while AI models struggle with this code-switching ability.
4. Mystery of human cognition:The above limitations are rooted in the complexities of human cognition, which is still not fully understood. Writing a computer program to replicate these human cognitive abilities let alone selling abilities remains a challenge.While tools like ChatGPT are valuable for tasks like saving time and brainstorming ideas, they cannot fully replace Salespeople unless the role of a Salesperson is reduced to just being an order taker.
Addressing the Reddit post
That’s exactly what happened in the company that let go of the Sales team. They had a chat-first Sales process that was involved only in the order-taking for booking appointments for mental health counseling sessions.There’s no relationship building, no calls, no meetings, no demos, and no agreements. Their job was to chat with leads and confirm bookings. To be honest, like many in the discussion, I for one don’t consider them a full-length Sales team.So what’s possible today with AI + Sales?For starters, task automation and productivity. That’s something that’s already being achieved and how MagicSync 🪄 is born at Luru.With GPT-powered MagicSync, Sales leaders and RevOps need not bother Salespeople to manually update CRM again.Our funda is simple - Let Salespeople do the selling. Let AI do the CRM filling.
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