This post exists because one of the most common questions I’m asked is, “How are you using AI in your B2B sales outreach?”. The answer is “not much”, and this post is going to have an “old man yells at cloud” vibe.
Context if you don’t know me: I’m CEO and Founder at Sales Schema, and we help agencies and B2B service companies scale through tasteful and targeted outreach. We support clients through hands-on training and ‘done-for-you’ programs.
Anyway, if you’re like me, you probably noticed that every software platform started asking you if you want to add some artificial intelligence to the mix. It reminds me of going to a restaurant and being asked if I want pepper on absolutely every dish, including dessert
First, what this post is NOT:
- An existential prediction about the future of AI in our lives
That’s beyond scope for now, and for me, the the jury’s out. I get annoyed with the usual binary of AI as either A. the harbinger of the singularity and/or robot apocalypse, or B. a passing, disco-like tech fad, a typical argument from anti-technology types. As usual, the truth is probably in the middle.
- An argument that AI has no value, or is otherwise overrated
Like most people, I used ChatGPT to edit this post and I’m sure there other great uses I haven’t uncovered yet. There is and will continue to be a generation of entrepreneurs who make their fortunes on AI or areas adjacent to it.
But if you’re with an agency or B2B service company, you probably want to build to build a business development process that is repeatable, and there are already too many shiny object and distractions without having AI shoved down your throat at every turn.
When it comes to B2B sales, AI might offer some marginal benefits, but here is why it’s mostly an overhyped distraction:
1. Mass skepticism to fake personalization
As of now, AI in sales is limited to looking at publicly available data and regurgitating it back at recipients. While I’m sure there are salespeople winning with this approach, it will become harder and harder to make work as more players enter the game and as we all grow more skeptical. Because an approach like, “Hey Bob, I saw that you run Blamco and have been there for five years, that’s awesome!” is so abundant, we fortify our defenses against it.
2. Reputation risks outweigh marginal efficiency gains
When it comes to relatively small total addressable markets, provenance and trust matter. While scaled outreach is highly effective when done right, the cost of over-automating it to a small audience can cause reputation and deliverability damage that outweighs the small upside of saving time.
3. Successful campaigns latch onto what customers are becoming, not what they are right now
Kinda like how the best quarterbacks throw the football to where the receiver will be, not where he is at the moment the ball is thrown.
AIs regurgitate ‘winning’ copy from an infinite who’s who of campaigns, where the variables all differ. This like putting a spoiler on your Chrysler and expecting it to drive as fast as a Lambo (or whatever fast car has a spoiler, sorry I’m not much a car guy). AI makes decisions based on inputs from one dimension – the past. This is a problem even if the data was sourced yesterday, much less 1-2 years ago, as is the case with ChatGPT.
In our experience, successful outreach campaigns, like almost all effective sales and marketing, come from pattern interrupts and harnessing emergent properties, combined with deep market understanding.
4. Bad incentives
As Eric Weinstein says, “We look forward our blindspots so we can do business there.”
In a debatably down economy, AI is one of the few areas enjoying funding and a hiring frenzy. Incentives alone are not enough to affirm or dismiss a trend, but they’re worth paying attention to.
Precious few people understand how AI works on a deep level, which makes it hard to dismiss claims as to what the technology is capable of. No one wants to be the laggard left in the dust – if you’re a Chief Innovation Officer in 2024, you’re leaning into AI or you’re losing your job.
5. The human salesperson bottleneck
Let’s say I’m wrong about all of the above and you launch an AI-driven outreach program that generates many qualified meetings. Sooner or later all of those prospects will have to talk to a human through multiple conversations over a long sales cycle.
Until the day that AI can close a multi-six-figure deal for your complex service, which I think is unlikely in my lifetime, that person will have to vouch for the things that the AI communicated on their behalf. This means the salesperson will have to see and approve everything the AI says, which destroys any efficiency that was gained, or they will have to be ok with whatever random stuff the machine spits out. This is a problem because if you’ve ever led a complex sales process, you know that subtle misunderstandings can lead to blowups and lost deals, sort of like how the micro turn of a freighter can put the vessel hundreds of miles off course. I suspect that, going beyond sales, this human bottleneck will limit AI’s overall progress.
Conclusion:
“Game changers” are relative, and skeptics like me, at least in the area of “AI for B2B sales in 2024”, can be loudly and definitively proven wrong – for example, let’s say five years from now Salesforce makes all of its account executives into AIs, it somehow works, and the entire B2B sales world follows along: I would have to eat a lot of crow, add an “I was wrong” disclaimer to this post, and lash myself with a belt. All of that creates a deterrent to being the old man who yells at the cloud.
On the other hand, over the next decade, anyone can claim AI is a “game changer” and be right in terms of marginal utility. The invention of Excel helped accountants a ton, but they are still working 80-hour weeks at tax time and more or less doing the same work they’ve always done. Compare that to the airplane, which not so long ago, for the first time in human history, allowed my grandfather to fly across the earth for a business meeting. That was a “game changer”, and perhaps AI still will eventually give us something that exciting , but it’s not there yet, and cheerleading alone won’t make the technology give you more value than it’s capable of.
You might be wondering, what’s the right way to sell in 2024 if AI isn’t the answer? In our experience, the answer is combining the old with the new – look to prospects who are already likely to trust and respect you as an authority in your space, and go where you have an unfair advantage. It’s not always shiny or sexy, but it’s effective and the bar is low.
