The classic sales plays do still work. Hard work, knowing the product cold, showing up.
But the classic 2021 playbook? It’s close to dead in the Age of AI. And here’s one example of why.
The other day I did something that should make every sales rep reach for the keyboard: I reached out directly to a sales rep with a product I wanted to buy.
Not “exploring.” Not “evaluating options.” Not “building a business case.”
I wanted to buy. Right now. $10k+ deal. I just had two questions, then I was ready to sign and go.
I was busy at SaaStr AI LDN and didn’t have time for the dance. I just needed two quick answers, and they had my money.
Here’s what happened instead.
I heard back from someone else on his team—someone I’d never heard of—four actual days later. Maybe 2.5 business days if you want to be generous, but honestly, what do I care about your business days when I’m trying to give you money?
And this new rep? He said he “wanted to get on the phone first” before answering my questions.
Goodbye. Goodnight.
They lost the deal. Not because of price. Not because of a competitor. Not because of budget constraints or a change in priorities.
They lost it because they couldn’t answer two questions in less than four days.
This Is The 2021 Sales Process, And It’s Dying
Here’s what happened in that interaction, and it’s a pattern I see constantly:
The original rep was probably “too senior” for a $10k deal. So it got handed off to someone else. Someone who doesn’t know me, doesn’t know the context, doesn’t know I’m ready to buy.
The new rep followed “the process.” The process says: qualify first, get on a call, understand the use case, loop in a solutions engineer, schedule a demo, send a proposal, negotiate, close. That’s 6-8 touches minimum. 3-4 weeks if you’re lucky.
Nobody stopped to ask: what does this specific buyer actually need right now?
The answer was: two questions answered. That’s it. That was the entire sales cycle.
But the 2021 sales process can’t handle that. It’s not designed for a buyer who’s already done the research, already sold themselves, and just needs to transact. It’s designed for a world where the vendor controls the information, where buyers need to be “educated,” where you earn the right to propose by jumping through qualification hoops.
That world is gone.
The Buyer Has Changed. Sales Hasn’t.
Let me tell you what happened before I ever reached out to that rep.
I’d already:
- Read their documentation
- Watched two YouTube videos of the product in action
- Checked G2 reviews
- Asked two founders I trust if they’d used it
- Compared pricing to three alternatives
- Decided it was the right solution for our use case
I did 90% of the buying process before I ever made contact. The only thing I needed from a human was two specific questions about implementation that weren’t covered in their docs.
This is how B2B buying works now. McKinsey says buyers are 70% through the purchase decision before they engage with sales. For technical buyers and operators, it’s often higher.
But most sales orgs are still structured as if it’s 2015—as if the first call is about “discovery” and “qualification” rather than recognizing that the buyer has already discovered and qualified themselves.
AI Will Eat These AEs For Lunch
Here’s the thing that should terrify every sales leader clinging to the old playbook:
A well-trained AI would have answered my questions in real-time. It would have closed the deal.
Not theoretically. Not “in five years when the technology matures.”
Today. Right now.
An AI agent trained on:
- The product documentation
- Common implementation questions
- Pricing and packaging
- Integration requirements
- Security and compliance FAQs
…would have responded to my message in seconds. It would have answered my two questions. It would have sent me a contract. I would have signed.
$10k+ in revenue. Zero human touch required for a buyer who didn’t want human touch.
Instead, the “AI humans”—the flesh-and-blood AEs still running the 2021 playbook—lost that deal without caring and, honestly, without even knowing it. They probably marked it as “unresponsive prospect” and moved on. They have no idea what happened.
What The New Sales Process Looks Like
Let me be clear: I’m not saying human salespeople are dead. I’m saying the 2021 version of the sales process is dead.
Here’s what replaces it:
1. AI handles the first response—always, instantly.
When a prospect reaches out, something should respond in seconds. Not hours, not days. Seconds. If you’re not doing this by the end of 2025, you’re leaving money on the table.
That AI should be able to:
- Answer 80%+ of product questions accurately
- Qualify the opportunity
- Schedule meetings when human touch is actually needed
- Send proposals and contracts for straightforward deals
- Escalate complex situations to the right human
2. Humans handle complexity, relationships, and high-stakes negotiations.
Your senior AEs shouldn’t be answering basic questions about integrations or pricing tiers. They should be doing the work that actually requires human judgment:
- Multi-stakeholder enterprise deals
- Complex procurement processes
- Strategic partnerships
- Customers who genuinely need consultative help designing a solution
3. The handoff logic gets smart.
This is where most companies will fail. The AI needs to know when to stay in the loop and when to bring in a human. That logic needs to be based on:
- Deal size and complexity
- Buyer signals and sentiment
- Question types that indicate confusion vs. readiness
- Historical patterns about what predicts closed-won
Get this wrong and you’ll either have AI fumbling enterprise deals or humans wasting time on transactions that should be self-serve.
4. Speed becomes a competitive advantage.
Here’s a stat that should keep you up at night: the first vendor to respond to an inbound lead is 50% more likely to win the deal. That’s from HBR research on response times, and it’s been true for years.
Now imagine a world where some vendors respond in 10 seconds and others respond in 2.5 business days.
The gap in win rates is going to be massive. The companies that figure this out first are going to vacuum up market share while their competitors are still “wanting to get on a call first.”
The Real Problem Is Cultural
The hardest part of this transition isn’t the technology. The technology is ready. You can build a competent AI sales agent today with off-the-shelf tools.
The hard part is cultural.
It’s the VP of Sales who believes “nothing replaces a human conversation” and requires calls for every deal over $5k.
It’s the AE who thinks responding to emails is beneath them and wants to “control the process” by forcing everything to a call.
It’s the rev ops team that’s optimized for pipeline stages and forecast accuracy rather than speed-to-close and buyer satisfaction.
It’s the CEO who’s nervous about AI “saying something wrong” and would rather lose deals through slowness than risk a suboptimal AI interaction.
All of these mindsets made sense in 2021. They’re liabilities in 2025.
What I’d Do If I Ran A Sales Team Today
Here’s the concrete playbook:
This quarter: Deploy AI to handle after-hours inquiries and basic questions. Measure response times religiously. Set a goal: no inbound lead waits more than 5 minutes for a response, ever.
Next quarter: Train AI on your top 100 customer questions. Give it the ability to send pricing and proposals for your most straightforward product tier. Measure conversion rates vs. human-only flows.
This half: Implement smart handoff logic. AI qualifies and handles what it can; humans get seamlessly looped in with full context when needed. No more “let me transfer you to someone else who will ask you the same questions.”
This year: Restructure your sales team around this new reality. Fewer AEs, but better ones, focused on complex deals. AI handling the rest. Compensation models that reward outcomes rather than activities.
The Deals You’re Losing Right Now
Here’s what haunts me about that interaction last week:
I’ll never hear from them again. They don’t know they lost the deal. Their CRM probably shows I “went dark.” Their win/loss analysis will blame “timing” or “budget” or “competition.”
But the truth is simpler: they were too slow and too rigid in a world where I needed fast and flexible.
How many of these deals is your team losing every week?
You don’t know. That’s the problem. The buyer who was ready to purchase but got frustrated and went elsewhere doesn’t fill out a survey explaining what happened. They just disappear.
The only way to find out is to fix the process and watch your conversion rates climb.
2021 Sales Was Often Crappy for the Customer. We Just Had No Other Choices.
The 2021 sales process—with its mandatory discovery calls, its multi-day response times, its rigid stages, and its assumption that the seller controls the information—is a dead man walking.
AI isn’t going to replace great salespeople. But it’s absolutely going to replace the slow, bureaucratic, process-obsessed sales motion that treats every buyer the same regardless of where they are in their journey.
The companies that figure this out will close deals in hours that used to take weeks. They’ll convert buyers who were ready to purchase instead of frustrating them into a competitor’s arms. They’ll free up their best salespeople to focus on deals that actually need a human touch.
The companies that don’t? They’ll keep “wanting to get on a call first” while their competitors collect the revenue.
The choice is yours. But I’d make it fast.
The buyers certainly aren’t waiting.
