Focus Your Sellers on the Critical Art of Being Human

• AI is poised to become an integrated member of the sales team, handling core activities.
• This can free salespeople to focus on driving high-quality deals by solving for the emotional component of the sale.

Big Picture

AI can help scale sales impact — if you let it

Technology powered by artificial intelligence promises to assume many core sales activities, freeing up sellers to concentrate on delivering value-affirming interactions with customers. To deliver sales impact at scale, sales leaders need to focus sellers on the unique human behaviors that drive high-quality deals — and treat technology as a full-fledged team member. Here’s how.

Treat technology as a member of the sales team

• Sellers must relinquish some control over customer interactions and give AI-powered technology — generative AI, emotion AI and digital humans — more responsibility to execute core selling activities. For example, synthetic sales development reps (SDRs) can automatically identify leads and generate outreaches, reducing prospecting time to just an hour a week and giving salespeople more time to focus on other tasks.
• Don’t use AI as just a sales tool; instead, define and scope tech’s role as a full-time employee, held responsible and accountable like any contributor. This is a paradigm shift that will require changes to how sellers interact with technology.

Nurture key human skills in sellers: Listening, hearing, empathizing

• Let salespeople focus on where they excel: engaging buyers on a human level to understand their needs, motivations and objections, and ultimately validate that a purchase is right for them. This is known as “value affirmation” and is a key factor in driving more expansive, high-margin deals.
• Critical sales skills involve “mentalizing”: active listening (being fully present as the buyer speaks), putting yourself in the buyer’s position to understand their perspective and experience, empathizing as they consider a purchase, and using the information you gather to predict how the buyer will likely behave.

Experiment to get the most out of AI

• Treating AI as a partner starts with your sellers’ willingness to engage with, trust and be influenced by AI. Without this seller-tech collaboration, technology cannot be a true teammate. From there, it’s all about experimentation: choosing the right AI application and refining inputs to get the best results, ultimately making the AI better. 
• The most critical skill for seller-tech collaboration is creativity. The power of AI is only unlocked when salespeople ask it to combine information in new and novel ways — bringing their AI partners to life to win a deal, craft an email or tap into a different audience.

3 things to tell your peers

1- New AI technology has the potential to significantly reduce seller responsibilities, but only if you are prepared to treat it as a full-fledged member of the team — not just a tool.

2- With this added team member, get your sellers to be more effective, valuable and impactful by asking them to do less.

3- Use AI tools to take on some of the responsibilities historically owned by sellers, and have sellers focus on their uniquely human edge — mentalizing: the ability to listen, empathize and understand buyers in a way that nurtures high-quality deals.

We specialize in High-performance Human Behavior training

Working on the humans that grow your business | Human Behavior Expert, I teach corporations & employees how to hack into humans using Behavior & Persuasion. I work with Pharma | Finances| Banking |Insurance| Sales| AI – Language & Behavior Prompt Engineering