Grumpy Old Salesman....

I’ve been in sales since I was 20, back when ‘SDR’ was just called telemarketing and your ‘tech stack’ was a phone, a pen, and a call sheet. I’ve done it all, from smiling and dialling to running sales teams. What keeps me interested isn’t the LinkedIn-influencer nonsense about ‘crushing it’ - it’s the psychology of selling: building real relationships, earning trust and helping the next generation of sellers cut through the noise. Don’t believe everything you read on LinkedIn. Most of those so-called gurus wouldn’t last a week on the phones.

I’ve been in sales long enough to remember when the height of technology was a Nokia brick phone and a Filofax. Fast-forward 30 years, and now everyone’s telling me AI is going to replace salespeople altogether. Spoiler: it won’t.

Here’s the thing, AI is a fantastic tool, but like any tool, it depends on the person holding it. Give a monkey a chainsaw and you’ve got chaos. Give a good carpenter a chainsaw, and you’ve got a fine piece of furniture. Sales is no different.

Where AI Actually Helps

• Research: AI can do in 30 seconds what used to take me an afternoon of digging - pulling together company news, sector challenges and even hints about a prospect’s buying signals.
• Prep: Drafting email skeletons, call outlines, and LinkedIn messages. Notice I said skeletons. AI gives you a framework; you still need to inject your own tone, insight and humanity.
• Admin: If AI can take notes, update CRM and write call summaries so you don’t spend Sunday night catching up, that’s a win.

Where AI Is Useless (and Dangerous)

• Cold Outreach: Those soulless, copy-paste AI emails flooding inboxes? They scream “I don’t care enough to write to you properly.” You might get replies - but usually from people telling you where to stick your pitch.
• Building Trust: You don’t win a six-figure deal because a robot wrote a nice email. You win it because you listened, you understood and you built confidence. No shortcut exists.
• Negotiation: When the CFO is squeezing you on margin, you can’t exactly say, “Hang on, let me ask ChatGPT what I should do.”

The Bottom Line

AI is like a rookie SDR: eager, fast, but doesn’t understand nuance. Left unchecked, it’ll embarrass you. But managed well, it can take grunt work off your plate and give you back the time to do what actually closes deals - conversations, relationships, trust.

So, next time someone tells you AI is the future of sales, smile politely and remember: the future of sales is still you. AI just makes sure you’ve got more hours in the day to do the stuff that matters.

💡 Practical Tip of the Week: Next time you’re writing a prospecting email, try letting AI draft the first pass. Then, rewrite the opening line as if you were sending it to your best mate. You’ll be amazed at how much more human it sounds.