Have we lost interest in investing in the human side of sales?
Not in hiring sales execs themselves, but in giving them more tools to be more “efficient”. It sort of seems like it.
AI has hardly rendered the sales professional obsolete. Not yet, at least. Salesforce itself is hiring 2,000 sales execs this year to … sell its AI platform, AgentForce.
At most B2B companies, 35%-40%+ of the headcount is in sales and it’s often the largest functional area. And in any sales-led motion, you are going to just need more sales reps year after year to scale. Even now. Even in a more efficient world. Even with AI, as it is today.
And yet, there’s one thing that’s clearly changed the past 18 months. For the most part, folks seem done investing in more productivity for their sales humans. Unless it leverages AI.
In 2021, everyone bought 100 new sales and revenue apps to keep the sales engine humming, along with large investments on the human side of RevOps, Customer Success, and more.
Today, SaaS and growth are back, but it’s a new SaaS:
- We want our sales team to just work with the tools and platforms they already have. Enough with the expensive add-ons.
- We’ve cut back customer success and rolled it into sales, instead of investing more there, in many cases.
- Our energy to invest in more sales efficiency and productivity is very narrowly AI and automation focused.
- The best are still running a classic (if updated) SaaS sales playbook, but those facing slowing growth have grown more cynical on the classic playbook working. A general malaise belief that outbound, events, ABM, etc. still “work”. Even though they all work at the best.
- ”Agents” may arguably be overhyped at the moment, but who wouldn’t want to invest in routine sales tasks being done by someone that actually wants to do them — an AI agent? Versus a tool that just makes it easier to do them. The appeal is so strong here.
2021 was peak Gong-Salesforce-Outreach-ZoomInfo-Calendly etc. At least, as those tools were then.
Great tools that let a human, at least in theory, do their job more efficiently with technology. You loaded up your AEs and SDRs with as many of these tools as possible. Often, more than they even could fully process.
2025 won’t be the death of the AE or even the SDR. But it may be all the investment goes into AI to supplement them, to turn them into “Mech AEs” — rather than adding tools to just make sales execs work better as humans.
We may be building Mech AEs.
Surrounded and powered by AI, making them much more powerful than before. With agents doing all the work they don’t want to do, don’t do, or don‘t do well. And as part of that, we’ve likely lost a lot of energy is just making plain old sales reps just …more efficient. We may have even sort of given up there, a bit.
Closers still closing. But the investment all around them in … AI. An automated suit of sales productivity armor that handles everything from inbound screening (BDR) to technical questions (SE) to onboarding via AI.
The leading platforms are adapting, this won’t kill them, and it will make them better. ZoomInfo already has $100m of revenue from its AI Copilot. But it sure makes it harder to break into the sales, marketing and revenue space as a SaaS vendor unless you are using AI to make that Mech AEs even more automated.
