It's the Emotion, Stupid
A chad for our times. We strip out the famous ’92 US Presidential election-winning mantra “economy” and replace it with the “emotion” of the relationship connection we have with our buyer.
You have also seen the tsunami of claims that we have arrived at the “agentic” phase of AI.
You expect it from the vendors. They are vying for a sole monopolistic survivor spot, a la Microsoft with Windows or Google with search.
So perhaps hardly surprising to see Elon Musk trumpet his AI 'Grokbot' as now best of the bunch. What was interesting about his recent pitch, was how it specifically aimed at Sales.
Snapshots can be misleading, but it is fair to say that soon after posting he was ratioed. The majority called the said “agent” practically useless.
A view I presently share. At this particular moment they appear a distraction, with limited actual improvement to our close rates and allied metrics.
Yes, we are in early days. We have all seen the chatbot output curve shoot upwards these past three years. So who really knows. Yet there are signposts we ought to follow.
Back in the mid-90s, cub-rep training wheels well and truly shaken off, I was at a conference in Chicago. I went to a glossy talk by the eponymous Siebel of perhaps the first mainstream sales-reporting-system fame. For a short while the market maker, before eclipse by the following Oracle spin-out of Salesforce.com.
After, I stood in line. He gave me his book. Shook my hand. And swiftly moved on.
I was struck by the second-hand car salesman of it. Even down to the tassel loafers. This affected me, as it diminished the key conclusion to his talk, which had something special.
Something now borne out. For he presented video clips of your Sales agent talking with Buyer sales agents. Which he proudly prophesised was The Future.
The audience weren’t really suitably wowed. They judged it as a piece of industry sci-fi infotainment. I spoke with a fair few alongside me. Granting access, personal checks, request rework, authority permission — there were quite the list of “yeah, buts.”
Yet the main workflow was buying a flight, and compared to what we had to face back then it was a welcome fever dream.
Three decades on, has Grok Bot cracked it?
There are some delighted early adopters in the comments. Whatever the veracity of the claims, here is one by way of sample;
“Solid for pipeline research too. Feed it target accounts + buying signals, it drafts personalized outreach in seconds. Biggest unlock: rep time shifts from prospecting to closing.”
Yet plenty of others question privacy and data-ownership concerns. My experience right now is that enterprise-grade sales teams are hyper-wary of allowing an AI to rifle through their data.
I even had one Sales leader recount the live tale of one of the supposed “super-seven maths problems” that OpenAI claimed to have solved, only to be exposed as using the workings of the actual mathematicians who were solving it.
The answer right now is that there are indeed a whole bunch of tasks where so-called agents can really help us.
If sandboxing is an option (although those IP-theft risks still loom large) you can split all Sales activity into just a pair: either lead gen or prospect/client conversations.
Today the former is ripe for acceleration. Think raw data scraping and reformulating as a first step. Claims that half of all B2B sales teams are using some form of agent for the “grunt” work that eats into selling time can be valid — although beware that when the output is supposedly client-ready, dismay is still often my reaction. But we have to start somewhere.
For today, treat the current agents as powerful but narrow co-pilots for the operational layer and not as replacements for our relationship layer. Use them where you are able to buy back time, then spend it instead on the judgment work that still sets us apart. After all, we mustn’t lose sight that every decision to buy remains 100% emotional.
That’s the practical filter I use when embedded with teams who want the efficiency gains without losing the human edge that still closes complex deals.