Will AI increase or decrease sales jobs?

A specter is haunting the sales world. The specter of AI. All the powers of old corporations have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter. Will sales jobs be forever doomed? Will AI automation replace sales professionals or even just reduce their tasks, thereby contracting the staffing needs of organizations?

Or perhaps will AI support sales professionals, increasing job opportunities? Could AI make the work of salespeople easier, stronger, and better, thereby expanding the possibilities to build conducive conversations with buyers and create more jobs?

The world seems to be divided. But everyone is concerned. If AI is a threat, how do we cope? If AI is an opportunity, how do we benefit from it before everyone else? Doubts must be shed.

Well… A recent McKinsey report shows that, unfortunately, the category that will suffer the most from a decline in jobs due to AI, along with office support, is customer service and sales. It is predicted that between 2022 and 2030, 13% of jobs in the category will be lost. Many tasks controlled by salespeople can be replaced by AI, significantly reducing staffing needs. So, are we all doomed? Not so much. In fact, the same report claims that a significant increase in jobs is predicted for business professionals.

So, the real question is: are you a salesperson or a business professional? Most sales jobs will be lost in the retail realm. This is where generative AI will be rampageous in its impact. However, in the B2Btech sales world, we can reasonably expect an increase in jobs. It is the low-skilled, low-paid jobs that will shrink, while the high-skilled, high-paid jobs will surge.

However, AI will cause a major shift in how sales professionals do their jobs. So we have to be very careful.

The real problem of salespeople is one: they are the least trusted profession. Multiple Gallup reports over the years show that sales, marketing, and advertising professions rank pretty low in trustworthiness and perceived ethics. It’s not that buyers don’t understand the features of a product. They don’t believe in the sellers’ argument that they matter as claimed. It’s not that buyers don’t understand the numbers you use in your presentation. It’s that they don’t believe they are true. They assume they are inflated and that you are conveniently bending reality to make it appear better than what it truly is. As a matter of fact, as I explain in my book, the sad reality is that for most salespeople who are motivated to stay in sales for a short period of time, lying is paradoxically the best strategy. Trustworthiness is difficult to obtain in sales. At the same time, those sellers who can build trustworthiness reap the highest benefit and clearly emerge as successful.

Now, do you think building trustworthiness will become more or less crucial with the advent of AI? It definitely will become more relevant. Buyers won’t even know if what you say comes from your own words or if it’s just a script from ChatGPT. Generative AI will create wonderful arguments, splendid presentations, beautiful product descriptions, and perfect tailoring to the client’s assets and capabilities. Yet, generative AI will make buyers suspicious of everything you say. AI will generate information for you, but you still select the information to report. AI will become a marvelous tool that will make it easier to lie without being caught. AI will make it easier to inflate evidence and build arguments that sound extremely compelling but are unrepresentative of the truth.

Suddenly, rapport building becomes essential. AI will not decrease but rather increase the importance of the social interactions between a buyer and a seller. The more we rely on machines to write sales arguments for us, the more we need human connections to gauge whether those arguments are true or not. AI will not replace human interactions in business. It will make them more important to build trustworthiness.

AI will be an immensely powerful research tool that can help you gather relevant information in a fraction of the time. It will make your presentations impressively strong. It will allow you to ground your claims in solid, compelling, and reliable evidence. It can empower research efforts, and it can help you display evidence more strongly through effective visual aids. Make AI build charts and infographics for you. AI can analyze data about the audience and the company to develop a more tailored presentation. It can also help create simulations that can reinforce the demonstration of your product’s effectiveness.

As another McKinsey report highlights, AI will represent the next productivity frontier for business professionals. Learn how to use it fast because being a laggard will be costly, and being a pioneer will bring you many benefits.

AI will be your ally, not your replacement. Those who understand how to use AI to support the development of their sales arguments will be able to gain an advantage over the competition. Information from AI can be used to significantly reduce uncertainty around the benefits of your product. It will help you show how your product solves the client’s problems and contributes to the client’s profit and long-term value. AI will help you build a stronger sales conversation.

Thus, if used well, AI is an incredible opportunity for sales professionals.