Is the era of the cold call coming to an end in the world of sales? With the adoption of artificial intelligence, at least one expert thinks so.
“I think the use of these AI tools in a sales capacity, what it’s done is level-set a whole new pace of productivity,” said Morgan Donaldson, former vice-president of growth at Fullscript, during a panel about AI use in sales at Tech Tuesday this week.
“It frees them up to be much more creative with their customer and get creative with their outreach, too. I think it removes the mundane.”
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Fellow panellist Marcelo Bursztein, founder and CEO of NovaceneAI, said sales teams have dedicated significant time to integrating AI into their sales cycles. But it’s most popular at the top of the cycle, taking on simple tasks such as automating outreach like emails and calls to potential clients and providing data analytics to help move the process along.
If used correctly, Donaldson said AI can help reduce the amount of “soul-crushing” calls sales reps have to make to find potential buyers.
“I think, hopefully, the era of the cold call is coming to an end in the next few years,” said Donaldson. “We should at least be doing lukewarm calls. I think what AI does is helps you identify your target with much greater accuracy and greatly reduces the number of conversations you’re having and increases the quality of engagements.”
As AI finds its place in the world of sales, the panel of experts who discussed the issue at the Brookstreet Hotel in Kanata on Tuesday agreed that sales teams need to be cautious about falling for shiny new tools that can too easily become a distraction.
As the industry booms, Rose Cain, vice-president of embedded operations for software company Visier, said it can be difficult to know what will or won’t be effective in the sales process.
“We’re still trying to figure out how it helps us in sales,” she said. “I have a lot of pressure with businesses coming in saying, ‘We need to use AI (sales development representatives).’ But we’ve seen that that hasn’t had a great turnaround because selling is human-to-human.”
At Visier, Cain said governance has been an important part of the process. The company decided that AI tools that are readily available could be used, but it would not pay for additional ones. It also drew up guidelines to protect proprietary information and security.
“We’re an AI company so we’re embracing AI and what that meant was implementing (Google’s integrated AI) Gemini,” she said. “But imagine if I put my entire sales pipeline and put it into Gemini. It’s out there, just like that picture you put on Instagram 10 years ago and really regret.”
The continued uncertainty around AI and the rush of new products into the market also mean that, at this point, the technology can be hard to trust, said Cain.
“We’ve seen just playing around with ChatGPT how it can be really wrong. I’m not slamming ChatGPT, it just happens to come to mind, but we’re not ready for the trust,” she said. “(AI) is going to learn and morph and we’re just at the infancy of what it will look like. I don’t know what that inflection point is.”
She added, “But I think things are going to settle down a bit. Everyone’s rushing out right now and, eventually, there’s going to be folks who win and folks who don’t. Then we’ll start seeing the leaders who we can maybe put more trust in.”
The other reason to be wary about AI, according to Bursztein, is less about the technology itself and more about outsourcing.
“As developers, we have to be very careful how much we trust the platform,” he said. “What happens when you rely on external platforms? Anything you build relying on a third party you realize that, one day, that company can wake up and change the rules around your product. It can affect you in a way that just breaks your business model.”
As automation proliferates through sales, there’s also the risk of losing potential clients to the endless noise that’s taken over their inboxes.
“I think there’s basically overmarketing fatigue,” said Jon Chatburn, a sales leader with Growth Guide. “That’s one of the disadvantages of AI. Now we’re going, okay, let me hit you on LinkedIn, let me email you, let me autophone you. It’s a barrage.”
And for individuals trying to weather the influx of AI marketing? The answer might be AI of their own.
“I would even argue that there’s going to be a period – it’s happening now – where we have our own AIs that are protecting us from that barrage,” he said. “It’s like AI fighting AI to try to get your attention.”
