Why Being a “People Person” Won’t Save Your Sales Job in 2026
There’s a quiet revolution happening in B2B software sales right now. It’s just starting really, and most folks aren’t ready for it.
I’m not talking about the usual “AI will change everything” hype. I’m talking about something very specific that’s going to hit in 2026: a massive shift in who actually closes deals, especially in tech.
Here’s what I’m seeing firsthand, and it’s going to surprise a lot of people.
The $4M Deal That Closed Without Sales
I just met with a Head of Sales Engineering at one of the leading AI-native dev tools companies. He told me a story that perfectly captures what’s happening.
He just closed a $4M+ annual deal himself. Enterprise customer, massive deployment, strategic win. And the CRO wasn’t even in the deal at all.
Here’s who did what:
The Sales Engineer: Ran the entire relationship. Worked with the customer to test the product. Designed and ran the pilot. Handled all the technical onboarding. Built the business case. Flew onsite to close the deal.
The Sales Team: Helped price the deal. That’s it. That’s all sales did.
And he asked me the question that’s going to define the next 24 months of B2B software: “Did we even need sales at all?”
I didn’t have a great answer for him. Because increasingly, the answer is no. Not for these types of deals.
This isn’t some $50K SMB deal. This is a $4M+ annual contract. The kind of deal that would traditionally have an AE owning the account, running the process, coordinating resources, negotiating terms, closing the business.
Instead? The person who actually understood the product and could solve the customer’s problem just… closed it.
Our Own Wake-Up Call At SaaStr
I’ll be honest with you: I didn’t fully believe this was real until I saw it in my own business.
At SaaStr, we deployed an AI BDR last quarter. Not to replace our whole team. Just to test it. See what happened.
In the last 90 days, that AI agent has created 25% of our new pipeline.
Twenty-five percent. From a single AI agent that we set up in a few weeks.
It’s doing prospecting. Writing personalized outreach. Following up. Booking meetings. Qualifying leads. And it’s doing it 24/7 without getting tired, without needing commission, without taking vacation.
Is it as good as our best human BDR? Not quite. But it’s better than our average BDR. And it costs a fraction of what a human costs.
Here’s the uncomfortable math: if one AI agent can create 25% of our pipeline, what happens when we deploy three or four of them? What happens when they get better, which they will every quarter?
We’re still going to have humans in sales. But we’re going to have fewer of them. And they’re going to focus on completely different things than they focus on today.
The Big Deals Are Closing With “Sales”. But More and More Will Happen Without Traditional Sales Execs
Let me be clear about what I mean here.
I’m not saying deals will close without humans. That’s not what’s happening at all. In fact, I’m seeing more humans involved than ever before at the AI-native companies in our portfolio and network.
But they’re different humans.
You’re seeing more Field Development Engineers (FDEs). More Sales Engineers. More Solutions Architects. More implementation experts. More people helping you set up your AI agent, train it, configure it, get it working in your environment.
The humans are moving to where the actual complexity lives.
And here’s the kicker: these deals are big. We’re not talking about $2,000 deals here. We’re talking about six-figure, sometimes seven-figure contracts closing without a traditional AE ever being deeply involved.
The pattern in that $4M deal? I’m seeing it everywhere. The SE or solutions architect becomes the trusted advisor. They prove the value. They solve the technical challenges. They build the relationship with the economic buyer because they’re the one actually delivering outcomes.
By the time you get to contracting and pricing, the deal is basically done. Sales is just paperwork at that point.
If It Can Close On A Text Message, AI Can Close It
Think about it this way: if a deal can fundamentally be closed via email or text message threads — and plenty of mid-market deals can — then an AI agent can handle that motion just as well. Maybe not perfectly today, but soon enough that it doesn’t matter.
The traditional sales choreography of discovery calls, demos, objection handling, follow-ups? That’s all text-based communication with some video calls sprinkled in. And AI agents are getting shockingly good at that.
I’m seeing this play out in real-time at several AI-first companies. The “sales team” looks completely different. The person who actually closes the deal? Often it’s the SE who solved the technical problem. Or the FDE who proved the ROI. Or the implementation specialist who made the customer feel confident they could actually deploy this thing.
The traditional quota-carrying AE role is getting squeezed from both sides: AI handling the transactional motion, and technical experts handling the complex deals.
Our AI BDR at SaaStr is proof of this. It’s handling the entire top-of-funnel motion that used to require multiple humans.
Sales Teams Are Already Different At AI Leaders
Walk into any of the leading AI-native software companies today and look at their org chart.
The “sales team” structure looks nothing like what you’d see at Salesforce or Workday. You’ve got way more technical people. Way more implementation folks. Way fewer traditional sales roles.
And their ARR per GTM employee? Often significantly higher.
Why? Because they’ve rebuilt the entire motion around where humans actually add value in 2025-2026:
- Deep technical expertise to help customers understand what’s possible
- Implementation support to get complex systems working
- Strategic guidance on how to actually change business processes
- Training and enablement for the AI agents themselves
The “selling” part? That’s increasingly the easy part once you’ve solved the above.
That $4M deal I mentioned earlier? The sales engineer didn’t “sell” anything. He solved problems. He proved value. He made the customer successful in their pilot. The close was inevitable at that point.
The Math That Challenges Traditional B2B Sales Leaders
Let’s do some simple math here.
Traditional SaaS Company:
- 10 BDRs at $80K each = $800K
- 5 AEs at $200K OTE = $1M
- Total: $1.8M in sales headcount for, let’s say, $5M in new ARR
- Cost of GTM: 36% of new ARR
AI-Native B2B Company:
- 3 AI BDR agents at $50K/year total = $150K
- 1 human BDR managing the agents = $80K
- 2 AEs at $200K OTE = $400K
- 3 Sales Engineers at $180K = $540K
- Total: $1.17M for $5M in new ARR
- Cost of GTM: 23% of new ARR
That’s a 35% cost reduction for the same output. But it gets worse (or better, depending on your perspective).
The AI-native company’s motion is more scalable. Adding another AI agent is trivial. Adding another human BDR takes months and doesn’t really work until month 4-5.
Within 12 months, that AI-native company is going to be doing $8M in new ARR with roughly the same team. Their cost of GTM drops to 15%.
The traditional company? They need to hire 4 more BDRs and 2 more AEs to get to $8M. Their cost of GTM stays at 36%.
The Tech Exception (Which Isn’t Really An Exception)
Now, there’s an important caveat here. The further removed your customers are from tech, the less true this will be. If you’re selling to construction companies or law firms or healthcare providers, traditional sales motions will persist longer.
But here’s the thing: tech is the #1 largest segment of our economy.
When I look at B2B software buyers, the overwhelming majority are tech-savvy companies. They’re comfortable buying software online. They’ve deployed AI internally. They understand APIs and integrations.
These buyers don’t want traditional sales processes. They want to talk to someone who can solve their actual problem, not someone who’s following a MEDDIC qualification framework.
And even in non-tech industries, the tech buyers within those companies (the CTO, the VP Engineering, the IT team) are the ones making SaaS purchase decisions. And they definitely don’t want traditional sales.
What This Means For Your Hiring Plans
If you’re building your GTM team for 2026 right now, here’s what I’d be thinking about:
- Hire fewer traditional AEs. Especially in the $50K-$250K ACV range. That motion is getting automated fast. And increasingly, even in the $1M+ range, you might not need them. That $4M deal closed with an SE, not an AE.
- Massively reduce your human BDR/SDR hiring. If our AI BDR can create 25% of pipeline in 90 days, and Vercel can run inbound with one human, you don’t need 20 BDRs. You need 2-3 humans managing AI agents. Train your best BDR to manage the AI agents and let the rest go (or redeploy them to where humans actually add value).
- Hire way more technical talent for customer-facing roles. Your best “closers” in 2026 will be people who can actually solve problems, not people who can handle objections. The Head of Sales Engineering who closed that $4M deal? He’s more valuable than most VP Sales hires.
- Invest heavily in pre-sales and implementation. The companies winning in AI are putting massive resources here. One AI company I know has a 1:1 ratio of SEs to AEs. Some have more SEs than AEs. The AI-native companies are going 2:1 or 3:1 SE to AE ratios.
- Rethink your comp structures. If your SE is closing the deal, shouldn’t they get closing credit? Many companies are already doing this. That $4M deal? The SE should get paid like an AE on that one. Full stop.
- Deploy your first AI sales agents immediately. Not next quarter. Now. Start with one AI BDR. See what happens. We went from zero to 25% of pipeline in 90 days. Your results will vary, but you need to start learning this motion yesterday.
The Uncomfortable Question
Here’s the question that’s keeping sales leaders up at night: if a Sales Engineer can close a $4M deal with minimal sales support, if an AI agent can create 25% of new pipeline, what exactly is the traditional sales team for?
Some companies have good answers to this:
- Sales does the prospecting and qualification (though AI is clearly getting better here)
- Sales handles the commercial negotiation (though in that $4M deal, the SE handled this fine)
- Sales manages executive relationships (though the SE often becomes the trusted advisor anyway)
But honestly? A lot of companies don’t have great answers.
The traditional sales role was designed for a world where product knowledge was easy and customer acquisition was hard. We’re rapidly moving to a world where customer acquisition is easy (inbound, PLG, AI agents) and product expertise is hard (complex AI systems, technical integration, change management).
In that world, the person with deep product expertise is infinitely more valuable than the person with sales process expertise.
Being A “People Person” Isn’t Enough Anymore
Here’s the part that’s going to be hardest for traditional sales folks to hear:
Being good with people isn’t enough anymore. Not even close.
For decades, sales has been about relationships. About being likable. About taking clients to dinner. About “connecting” with the economic buyer. About reading the room and knowing when to push and when to back off.
And look, those skills still matter. But they’re table stakes now, not differentiators.
What I’m seeing — and this is crystal clear in AI products — is that customers are increasingly bypassing salespeople who don’t help them actually deploy the product and solve their problems.
They don’t want another discovery call. They don’t want to hear about your company’s vision. They don’t want relationship building for the sake of relationship building.
They want someone who can get their AI agent working. Someone who understands their data pipeline. Someone who can troubleshoot why the integration isn’t working. Someone who can train their team on best practices.
Marc Benioff said something on our SaaStr podcast that perfectly captures where this is going:
“I wish every customer had a Field Development Engineer and could be fully onboarded and in production before they pay. That’s the vision.”
Read that again. Fully onboarded. In production. Before they pay.
That’s not a sales process. That’s an implementation process. That’s a technical enablement process. That’s a “prove the value first, collect money second” process.
And it requires a very, very different type of person than your traditional quota-carrying AE.
It requires someone who can actually do the work with the customer. Not just talk about the work. Not just coordinate resources. Not just “add value” by being friendly and persistent.
Someone who can sit down with the customer’s engineering team and debug why the API calls are failing. Someone who can review their prompts and suggest better approaches. Someone who can train their team on how to get the most out of the AI system.
The customers don’t care if you’re a people person if you can’t help them go live.
And increasingly, they’re just not engaging with salespeople who can’t provide that technical value. They’re going straight to the technical resources. They’re asking to work with the SE or the FDE. They’re bypassing the AE entirely.
That $4M deal I mentioned? The customer didn’t want to work with sales. They wanted to work with the person who could actually help them deploy the product. That happened to be the Sales Engineer.
The New Sales Skillset
So what does a successful salesperson look like in 2026?
They’re part engineer, part consultant, part implementation specialist. They can:
- Actually configure and deploy your product, not just demo it
- Debug technical issues in real-time
- Understand the customer’s architecture and how your product fits in
- Train the customer’s team on best practices
- Build custom integrations or workflows if needed
- Speak credibly about technical trade-offs and implementation approaches
Oh, and they can also handle commercial conversations, negotiate contracts, and manage stakeholder relationships.
Being a people person is the baseline. Technical competency is the differentiator.
The best “salespeople” I’m seeing at AI companies? Half of them have engineering backgrounds. Many of them can code. Almost all of them have deployed the product themselves dozens of times and can do it in their sleep.
They’re not traditional sales at all. They’re technical experts who happen to also be commercially minded.
And that’s who’s winning deals in 2025-2026.
2026 Is When It Will Really Hit Sales Teams
Here’s why I think 2026 is when this really hits:
AI agents are getting good enough, fast enough, that the “we’ll adopt it eventually” companies are going to get caught flat-footed. The AI-native companies are already restructuring their teams. They’re already seeing the results. They’re already closing eight-figure deals with SEs, not AEs. They’re already running outbound with one human and a bunch of agents.
And when your competitor is closing deals with 30% fewer GTM headcount and 40% better unit economics? That’s not a sustainable disadvantage.
Look at what we’re seeing in just Q4 2025:
- $4M deals closing without sales
- $8B companies with one human in outbound
- AI BDRs creating 25% of pipeline in a single quarter
- Customers demanding technical resources over traditional sales
What happens in Q2 2026 when those AI agents are twice as good? What happens when they can handle discovery calls, not just email outreach? What happens when they can negotiate contracts?
What happens when every buyer expects the Salesforce vision — fully deployed and in production before they pay?
The sales profession isn’t dying. It’s transforming. The best salespeople — the ones who actually solve problems, who understand technical nuances, who can guide complex implementations — they’re going to do better than ever.
But the traditional sales playbook from 2015? The “people person” who’s great at relationship building but can’t actually help you deploy? That’s what’s about to get disrupted.
The question isn’t whether this is coming. The question is whether you’re preparing for it now, or waiting until 2026 to figure it out.
And if you’re a Head of Sales hiring right now? Maybe you should be hiring more Sales Engineers instead of more AEs. Maybe you should be hiring one really good BDR to manage AI agents instead of ten mediocre BDRs doing manual outreach. Maybe you should be looking for technical talent that can sell, instead of sales talent that can’t deploy.
At least that’s what the $4M deal, the Vercel model, our own 25% pipeline number, and Marc Benioff’s vision are telling me.
The rude awakening is coming. The only question is whether you’ll be ready for it.
And whether being a “people person” will be enough to save your sales career when customers just want someone who can help them go live.
