I had a call with a potential new vendor the other day that reminded me why so many B2B sales orgs are going to get disrupted in the next 1-24 months.
They made me sit through a brutal 30-minute qualification meeting. Really longer. And it helped me not one bit.
Let me be clear about what happened: I’m the CEO of an eight-figure business and manage $200m+ of capital at SaaStr Fund. I reached out to them. I wanted to buy their product. And they made me jump through hoops like it was 2015.
I asked to talk to the person who would actually deploy us. They didn’t have anyone available.
Then—and this is where it gets truly absurd—they sent me an intake form in .xls to fill out after the call.
🚶♀️ We walked.
The Old Playbook is Broken
This vendor probably thinks they’re doing “best practices” sales. They’ve got their MEDDPICC framework. Their qualification checklist. Their multi-stage process designed to “filter out bad fits” and “maximize AE efficiency.”
But here’s what they’re actually doing: they’re optimizing for their process instead of my outcome.
And in the Age of AI, that’s a death sentence. It’s just too easy to do a good job here with AI before you waste a prospect’s time.
What AI Already Does Better Than Your BDRs
Let’s talk about what should have happened on that call—or better yet, what should have happened before that call even got scheduled.
Pre-Call AI Qualification (5 minutes of compute time):
- Scrape my LinkedIn, our company website, and public funding data
- Analyze our company size, growth trajectory, and likely budget
- Pull our tech stack
- Check if we match their ICP across 47 different dimensions
- Generate a custom one-pager on why their product fits our specific use case
- Flag the 3 most likely objections I’ll have based on our current setup
Or even just … ask Claude, Google AI or ChatGPT to analyze if we were a good fit, and why
During-Call AI Assistance (real-time):
- Live transcription with automatic technical question flagging
- Instant answers to product questions from their knowledge base
- Real-time identification when I’m asking to talk to technical resources
- Automatic scheduling of technical deep-dive if requested
- CRM updates happening in the background
Post-Call AI Follow-Up (30 seconds):
- Custom proposal generated based on our specific needs discussed
- Technical resources automatically scheduled if requested
- No intake form needed—everything captured from conversation
- Next steps clarified and in my inbox before I leave my desk
You know what this costs them? Probably $47/month in API fees per AE.
You know what it would have saved? A six-figure customer.
The “But We Need to Qualify” Objection
I can already hear the sales leaders: “Jason, we can’t just let anyone into a demo or talk to our team. We need to qualify budget, authority, need, and timeline.”
Baloney.
You need to help me solve my problem. If you do that well, BANT takes care of itself.
Here’s the thing most sales orgs miss: qualification isn’t about your efficiency. It’s about my confidence that you can actually help me.
When you make me sit through a 30-minute call where you’re clearly just checking boxes on your internal form, you’re not qualifying me. You’re disqualifying yourself.
What Good Looks Like in The Age of AI
I’ll give you a real example. Last month, we evaluated a new AI coding tool for our team.
Here’s what happened:
- I filled out a 60-second form with our basic info
- Their AI agent sent me a Loom video (generated, not recorded) walking through how their product would work specifically for our tech stack
- I replied with three technical questions
- Within 2 minutes, I had detailed answers with documentation links
- I asked to talk to someone technical
- Within 15 minutes, I had a calendar link with their solutions engineer—with a pre-meeting brief on what I wanted to discuss
- That call happened 48 hours later, lasted 20 minutes, and was 100% technical deep-dive
- We signed a contract 3 days after that
Total time from first touchpoint to signed deal: 6 days. Total time I spent on “qualification”: 0 minutes.
The Economics Say You Gotta Do It
Let’s do the math on what that vendor cost themselves yesterday.
Their AE probably costs them $180K fully loaded. Let’s say they do 8 qualification calls per week. That’s ~400 calls per year.
400 calls × 30 minutes = 200 hours of AE time per year 200 hours = 5 weeks of productive selling time
But here’s the real cost: how many buyers like me just walk because we’re not going to jump through hoops?
If they lose even 10% of inbound interest due to friction, and their average deal size is $50K, and they get 200 inbound leads per year…
They’re leaving $1M on the table. Every year.
To save what? The $5,000/year it would cost to implement an AI qualification system?
The Transition Path
Look, I get it. You can’t just blow up your entire sales process overnight.
But here’s what you can do in the next 90 days:
Week 1-2: Deploy AI Pre-Call Research
- Use Claude or ChatGPT to automatically research every inbound lead
- Generate custom one-pagers before first call
- Cost: ~$200/month in API fees
Week 3-4: Implement AI Call Assistant
- Use Gong, Chorus, or even just a custom GPT wrapper
- Get real-time answers to technical questions
- Auto-capture qualification info
- Cost: $50-100/user/month
Week 5-8: Build AI Follow-Up System
- Auto-generate custom proposals from call transcripts
- Eliminate intake forms
- Auto-schedule technical resources when requested
- Cost: $500/month in development + APIs
Week 9-12: Optimize and Scale
- Track conversion rates before/after
- Measure time-to-close improvements
- Calculate ROI (it’ll be massive)
Total investment: Maybe $10K in setup, $300/month per AE ongoing.
Perplexity already does a lot of this at scale. More on how their CBO does it here:
Stop Protecting the Mediocre
Here’s what nobody wants to say out loud: most qualification processes exist to protect mediocre salespeople from wasting time on deals they can’t close anyway.
But if you need a 30-minute call to figure out if someone is a good fit, your ICP is too broad, your positioning is too vague, or your product doesn’t solve a clear enough problem.
AI doesn’t fix bad product-market fit. But it does expose it.
Because when AI can qualify a lead in 90 seconds, and you still need 30 minutes, the problem isn’t the lead. It’s you.
What Happens Next
Over the next 24 months, we’re going to see a massive bifurcation in B2B sales:
The Winners:
- Companies that use AI to eliminate friction
- Teams that optimize for buyer outcomes, not internal process
- Organizations that respect customer time as much as their own
The Losers:
- Companies still running 2015 sales playbooks
- Teams that make buyers jump through hoops
- Organizations that prioritize “qualification” over “helping”
The vendor I walked away from yesterday? They’re going to keep losing deals like mine. They’ll blame “bad fit” or “not enough budget” or “timing wasn’t right.”
But the real reason is simpler: they made me waste 30 minutes of my life, and I’ll never get it back.
In the Age of AI, that’s unforgivable.
The Bottom Line
If you’re running a B2B sales org in 2025 and you’re still doing 30-minute qualification calls before you provide any real value, you’re not being thorough.
You’re being arrogant.
And your customers are walking. They’re just not telling you why.
AI has made it possible to provide more value, faster, with less friction than ever before. The tools exist. The technology works. The economics are obvious.
There’s no excuse anymore.
Either you respect your buyers’ time, or they’ll find someone who does.
It’s that simple.
