The Great Debate: Will AI ENABLE Sales OR ELIMINATE Sales

Calling all #SalesDevelopment and #Sales people! Are you seeing this? This is the BIGGEST debate of the year (it's Jan 11th). Will AI ENABLE sales (#AIForSales) or will AI ELIMINATE sales (#AIAgainstSales). Here is how it went down:

1) Chad Burmeister called me saying AI will eliminate sales: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6487429632382550016 

2) I had no choice but to respond and say AI will enable sales not eliminate: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6488165676791009280 #AIForSales

3) This caused a flurry of activity with the following posts you might want to check out:

Tony J. Hughes - The Truth about AI for Sales: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/truth-ai-sales-tony-j-hughes/

Shari Levitin - Re-humanize the sales process: https://vengreso.com/blog/sales-process-shari-levitin?es_p=8341127

Ben Sardella - Automated SDR and Beyond: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/automated-sales-development-2019-beyond-ben-sardella/

Ilan Kasan - Everything that can be automated must be automated https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6488799196542443520

Since everybody else chimed in, I thought I'd give my quick two cents as to why AI won't eliminate sales here in this post.

Here are the reasons AI won’t replace you anytime soon.

AI can’t mimic the personal interaction of video

In our state of Sales Development Report, companies told us the hottest technology in 2019 will be video. Our friends at Vidyard, now built into our sales cadence tool called playbooks, report nearly 30% better click through rates and 8x better response rates with video. Sales is getting more personalized not less and video is due to play a big role.

AI will absolutely play a role in video. I see cadence tools, like InsideSales.com recommending to reps to use video, when to use video, and how to use video.

We asked sales leaders and they told us AI won’t replace sales reps

We did a survey (will be published next month) with 600+ companies on our annual State of Artificial Intelligence study. If you didn’t see the first one go and get it here. In our most recent survey we simply asked leaders if they believe that artificial intelligence will replace sales reps in the next five years and 80% of them said no. That’s a lot of people saying no.

Now this doesn’t mean that certain parts of sales reps’ jobs won’t be supported by AI. At InsideSales.com we provide AI to help reps know which accounts and contacts to target, we give reps information about those accounts to spare time on research, and even recommend communication methods to use.

A McKinsey study found not every aspect of every job can be automated

I know people think that the job of sales is easy but it’s not. I’ll be the first one to admit there are areas that AI can help out with. Hell, I published the study that said sales reps only spend 36% of their time selling. With that said, you can’t use AI to eliminate everything a sales rep does and a McKinsey study seemed to agree. Currently, less than 5% of occupations are entirely automated, and about 60% of occupations have at least 30% of tasks that can be automated. 

People want to interact with other humans

According to a study by NewVoice Media, the #1 reason people dislike calling companies: is because they cannot speak to a real person right away. Push bots at your customers all you want, when push comes to shove, at some point in the process, people want to interact with people.

Everything in Sales Will be Impacted by Sales but That Doesn't Mean Replacement

This was interesting. We ran a survey that asked nearly 700 companies what roles would be "significantly impacted" by AI and low and behold, almost every role in sales tallied high remarks. This is the trend we'll see. Expect to see major changes in sales but don't expect sales or sales development to disappear.

Sales Prospecting is More Than Email

In our recent State of Sales Development report we asked what communication methods sales development teams are using and we heard, phone, email, voicemail, social, chat, video, direct mailers, and text messages. Can AI do all of those? Certainly not right now and we have no indication it can do that in the near future.

Again, I see AI supporting all of these communication methods as sales people become amazing at each of these tools.

This is the conversation of the year. Are you with us or against us #AIForSales