AI vs. Human Sales: How to Stay Ahead When the Game is Changing

The emergence of generative AI applications held the promise of liberating us from the toil of work in many fields. It's been over a year since OpenAI rolled out ChatGPT to the public, and the market went completely insane. And no wonder: in the post-ZIRP world, revenue per employee became the north star metric, which meant waves of layoffs that were mitigated by the deployment of AI.

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This created an insane FOMO effect. While I was raising our seed round for Captiwate, the most common question I got from VCs was not about the market or the opportunity, but whether or not we are using Generative AI.

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I wasn't alone. Here's a chart of the S&P 500 companies mentioning AI in their earnings calls, courtesy of Goldman Sachs:

Although OpenAI recently released GPT-4o, despite it being faster and cheaper, it’s not all that different from Turbo or ChatGPT 4 as noted by AI researcher Gary Marcus.

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Now that the hype phase might be dying down, maybe we can have a frank conversation on the lasting changes that generative AI has enabled and are here to stay.

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We're no naysayers or luddites over here. A common criticism of AI tech is that it's a solution in search of a problem, but it does shine in fields that have a lot of busywork that was just out of reach of automation. Marketing and sales, or go to market motions in general stand out as prime candidates of jobs that can be made more efficient by augmenting humans in the centaur model by the use of Gen AI.

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So while the question in 2023 was "How do we adopt AI in our sales strategy", the question in 2024 is "How do we adapt to an environment where all of our competitors and everyone else who is selling to our prospects is using AI?"

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In other words, while the theme of 2023 was efficiency, the theme of 2024 will be differentiation.

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But if we want to arrive at a more precise answer, we have to start at the other end of the conversation: how do our customers react to all these AI agents that are selling to them?

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The research says that AI is annoying

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SurveyMonkey ran a sizable study last year focusing on customer experience with AI in regards to support functions. The study was conclusive in that AI is in no shape to replace customer service: 

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• 90% of people preferred human agents over chatbots, 
• while humans had an average of 72 points higher Net Promoter Scores (NPS) than the bots did.

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The reason why bots fail in customer service and hence risk failing in sales is that while the tech might be good at understanding what the user wants technically, what humans crave is to be understood emphatically. And this simple fact is echoed across the survey, as consumers say that human agents are less frustrating (52%) and more understanding of their needs (61%).

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At this point, I can hear some readers exclaim: "But that's customer support! Not sales!", hence it's like measuring apples or oranges.

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But not really.

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The Rising Importance of Human Sales

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1) The customer doesn't care about the specific job role that they are interacting with. From their point of view, they are interacting with your brand, and their perception of your brand will be impacted regardless of the channel. Trust is hard to earn but easy to lose.

2) If anything, sales is much more reliant on empathy than customer support is! 

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To quote Ken Corbit from the Texas Christian University's sales center:

"While AI can offer incredible data analytics capabilities, the human ability to build personal connections and provide tailored solutions remains paramount. Human salespeople can perceive subtleties in mood, understand complex needs through a simple conversation, and make customers feel valued and appreciated in a way that technology can't yet mimic, often due to non-verbal cues and engagement."

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Or as Shubham Singh from DemandSage puts it:

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"The use of AI-powered bots or automated emails has been a mixed bag for buyers. While some find the responsiveness and efficiency of AI interactions convenient and helpful, others perceive them as impersonal or even intrusive. A seamless, tailored AI experience that anticipates needs and offers valuable insights can enhance a company's credibility and positively influence purchasing decisions. Conversely, a poor AI experience may lead buyers to question a company's sophistication or commitment to customer service, potentially steering them towards competitors who offer more personalized and engaging interactions."

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AI in sales has come a long way even from a few years ago when it meant chatbots powered by simple NLP and decision trees. These days, AI in sales means having a proper copilot, who can help with almost every task in the day-to-day of a sales rep:

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• It can help research companies and give you context or points of reference for the person you're contacting,
• it can help you research who to contact and via which means,
• It can help you generate emails and messages, personalize them and send them automatically,
• and it can help with follow-ups as well!

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These are killer use cases. Apps like copy.ai started off as a generic writing assistants and are now fully committed to helping with the common tasks of GTM teams. The service Clay allows you to do all of the above, and they have been going viral on LinkedIn with their experts showing you how to craft all of these workflows and more.

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That's great! It means that all of this Gen AI technology really is magical, allowing us to scale our sales efforts without compromising quality...

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...until everybody is doing it, using the same tools and running the same playbooks.

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Or in the words of Tanner Bond at RoboCMO:

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"A few weeks ago, I wondered aloud on LinkedIn whether Clay enabling so much personalization of sales outreach might just erode the effectiveness of personalization altogether. If every sales email I get includes context from my website or LinkedIn profile, do any of them stand out? Do I, the recipient, care that they are AI-generated?

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[...]

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Cute little AI-edited videos that feature my name, my pain points, and how your product addresses them aren’t going to cut it. Sooner than later, I will open my inbox to recordings of customized product demos, ready to watch. No forms. No suffering through multiple “qualifying” sales calls to sniff the actual product. More “Your company is a great fit for our product. Here’s what it would look like if you bought it. I’m here to answer any questions when you’re ready to talk.”

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Up until now, it took time and effort for a sales rep to personalize their reach out, which ended up working out well because it signaled an effort to the buyer. And effort on one end translates to trust on the other.

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What happens when all that effort can be automated away at the click of a button, available to everyone, everywhere, who would rather opt for a scattershot approach over personalization?

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We know what happens because this has happened before.

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How Buyer Behavior is Changing Due to AI Assistants

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There were times in living memory when someone knowing your name, job title and workplace information wasn't all that trivial either. If someone did, you could be confident that they had done their research, and you weren't wasting your time in replying to them.

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In some short years, however, that was all automated away, and now our inboxes are filled with "personalized" outreach that is cookie-cutter at best and downright spammy at worst.

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With the proliferation of account based marketing motions and sales copilots, soon everyone will receive these kinds of messages as soon as they visit a vendor's website.

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If this is the case, you either adopt the same approach or risk getting beaten to the punch by your competitors.

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But what if we told you that there is another way?

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There was a mental model presented in the B2B Institute's B2B Trends 2030 - Contrarian ideas for the next decade that serves as a framework on how to approach this situation, called The Contratian Matrix:

As we move to the wide adoption of AI tools in sales, we can fill this model with what the consensus will look like.

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We are moving from a world of intent data + human outreach to one where intent data is coupled with automated outreach. But that also means that as more companies adopt this approach, the outreach channel itself becomes less effective - dubbed the Law of Shitty Clickthroughs by Andrew Chen. 

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In short, this law states that a channel works great for the first movers, but as soon as everybody starts investing in it, the gains to be made are competed away until consumers or buyers start ignoring it.

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The law has held up so far for every online sales and marketing channel, whether it's banner ads or SEO-based content, podcasts, webinars and newsletters. Like the law of gravity, it will pull down the efficiency of AI based outreach as well.

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Obviously, you would want to invest in this channel as long as your competition does as well. But if you are to be a contrarian, you would want to differentiate.

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In the AI powered outreach scenario, the part of the channel that will get crowded is the inbox of prospects when they visit a website. It will become a wall of noise which will be difficult to pierce, becoming another very competitive environment.

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Differentiating Yourself in the AI Crowd

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Our idea at Captiwate is to beat the crowd and the AI hype at the same time by opening a video call with an interested prospect while they are on the website.

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This helps you achieve two things:

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1) You beat out the competition in speed to lead. While automated strategies are faster than manual outreach, nothing beats contacting someone when they are being the most engaged. Research shows that deals are killed not after the first hour, but within the first 15 minutes of failing to contact a buyer!

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2) Remember that the biggest weakness of AI tech is their complete lack of empathy and the fact that robotic messages alienate potential customers. And while you can only go so far in trying to make your bot appear more human, it's more efficient to simply put an actual human sales rep in front of an interested prospect.

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If you're curious on how this system works, feel free to book a demo with us.

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Conclusion: Beat the Pack by Looking Forward

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It seems like we’ve passed the hype phase of generative AI and are now in the territory of mass adoption. AI copilots and assistants are here to stay, and they are changing how the game is played in many professions, including the world of sales.

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While it seems like the situation is a simple “Adapt or Die!” at the moment, forward looking leaders should anticipate how buyer behavior will change as a result of being bombarded with AI personalized outreach. 

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In our humble opinion, if you want to differentiate yourself and stand out from the crowd in such circumstances, you need to double down on adding a personal touch by putting a human as fast as possible in front of your prospects.

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