Selling Meets AI - Sales Part 1

AI is about to fundamentally change sales — and most sellers are not prepared for what’s coming.

In this episode, Jeff Wells explores why traditional sales motions are being rapidly commoditized, why buyers no longer need sellers for information, and why “closing techniques” are becoming less valuable by the day.

But this isn’t a doom-and-gloom conversation. It’s a blueprint for the future.

Jeff breaks down the shift from persuasion-based selling to what he calls “sales as a service” — where the real value of a seller is helping buyers move from information to clarity, confident decisions, and meaningful outcomes.

This episode explores:
• Why AI is replacing transactional sellers
• Why buyers are more informed than ever
• The future of trusted advisors
• Why most sales training is outdated
• The human skills AI cannot replace

The deal-maker is becoming obsolete.
The trusted partner is becoming invaluable.

What got your revenue here won’t get it where it needs to go next. On the Shoulders of Giants is the podcast from High Achiever
 for founders, executives, revenue leaders, and operators responsible for accelerating growth in complex organizations.

Hosted by Jeff Wells, each episode explores the leadership principles, operating systems, and decision-making frameworks behind scalable, sustainable performance.

We go beyond tactics to help organizations align strategy, execution, and resource allocation through a Revenue Operating System designed for clarity, accountability, and measurable growth.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Do you recognize that the ancient craft of selling is in the process of changing so radically that the entire process is being rewritten? And the big question in the room is what actually survives the rewrite? There might be a little dust on the bottle, but don't be fooled because what's inside is wisdom. I'm Jeff Wells, and this is on the shoulders of giants. Listen, there's an elephant in the room of every sales organization that I walk into. And while everybody is thinking it, very few are talking about it in a way meaningful enough to get ahead of the coming chip. Elephant is the quiet question that every seller is privately asking. And that question is, am I about to be replaced? And they should be asking it. And if you're one of them, honest answer might be yes. Not because you aren't talented, it's because the motion that you've been trained to run is the motion that's being commoditized first. The good news is this necessity is the mother of invention. And what I mean by that is selling as most people practice it is built on an assumption. And the assumption is that the seller has information the buyer doesn't. And the job is to transfer that information in a controlled, persuasive way, and in doing so, close a deal. But quote unquote closing the deal implies that the persuasive nature of the process is where the value lives. And it's been that way for a long time. But in today's economy, persuasion is not the value driver of sales. The old saying, she could sell ice cubes to Eskimos is not a compliment. It's an indictment. And the market is going to deliver the appropriate consequence by quietly eliminating sellers whose core competency is high pressure and high pace in the pursuit of closing a deal at any cost. The good news is this is what the market will continue to reward and reward more handsomely than ever is something different. It's something that we think of as sales as a service. You see, the job is less about persuasion and leverage and more about service. It's to help the buyer get clearer about their own situation, connect information to a real problem, and move with confidence towards a solution with a high probability of delivering an outcome that's genuinely in the customer's best interest. And here's the rub: if you can't honestly deliver that, then exit the conversation sooner rather than later. This posture is not optional. Quite honestly, it's the only durable form of selling left. You see, the reality of the old assumption that the seller has information the buyer doesn't has been gradually eranic for a long time. As online access to information has improved, the buyer's journey has migrated away from the seller and into the buyer's hands. By 2020, research suggested that buyers were already completing roughly 57% of the buying journey before ever speaking to a sales rep. In many cases, the level of context the buyer brings to the early conversations shows that they often have a far better understanding of the product than the seller is. By 2025, that 57% had climbed to around 70%. And Gardner is now reporting that B2B buyers spent only 17% of their total buying time in direct contact with vendors. And that time is split across every vendor they're considering. The seller is no longer the source or the primary source of information. They're just a late stop on a journey that the buyer has shaped, or information that has shaped most of the buyer's thinking. There's no reason to expect that this trend will slow. AI will actually further accelerate it. What used to be a buyer pulling fragmented information from 10 different tabs is now a buyer asking a single question and receiving a synthesized, comprehensive view of your category, your competitors, your pricing patterns, and your likely objections in about 90 seconds. 94% of buyers today are now using LLMs in their buying process. The information isn't just more accessible. It's pre-digested, organized, and arriving in the buyer's mind as a formed perception before your first call is ever booked. And the numbers underneath these changes are even more sobering. 95% of the time, the vendor who ultimately wins the deal was already on the buyer's short list on day one before any seller had ever spoken to them. About 80% of the time, the vendor the buyer chooses to contact first is the vendor who wins. 75% of B2B buyers now say they prefer, check this out, a rep-free sales experience entirely. Let me pause for a second and just ask you what is the market signaling to you as a seller? You see, these numbers in themselves should challenge us to consider how we address things like discovery as part of our first call. A good sign might be that if we are the first company they're talking to, not the last, that might be a good sign that we should pay attention to, maybe even question. Because we need to know that. You see, what cannot be commodity, what cannot be commoditized is the act of sitting across from a human being, asking the right question at the right moment, hearing what they didn't quite say, and helping them get clear about their own situation and how that situation mics back to a solution first, and then your specific solution, if appropriate. Master the art of this, and you're on your way to differentiating yourself from most of the sellers in the market today. Now, the tension inherent within this idea of sales as a service is that it feels a little upside down from how most sellers are trained today. The essence of it is the ability to subordinate your perceived needs, your perceived need, to prioritize the needs of the customer first. It's to walk away quickly if you can't help, because that is in the best interest of the customer. And here's the hard part: you have to develop the ability to do this, even though the management system that surrounds you is probably not yet figured out how to support you in doing it. You see, if the pressure of tomorrow's forecast meeting, where the looming quarter-in deadline, where the deal has to get done or else shifts your behavior back toward a willingness to sell people things they don't need and create false deadlines like discounts that end by the end of the quarter, then get ready to find another profession. You see, sales as a service is rooted in maturity, posture, judgment, and presence. If your desire is to make or continue to make selling your profession, it's time to invest in learning and practicing the craft of sales as a service before it's too late. Listen, a lot of this is predicated on a belief that we talk about often in some of our coaching practices, and that is that access to information does not necessarily equate to transformation. You see, if it did, we'd have no personal development problems left on the planet. Because we have more access to more information on every subject in the universe with a click of a mouse. The information is free, abundant, and well organized. And yet, most people don't transform. We are currently in the most disconnected workforce in the history of work. If more information were the ticket, all of our problems would be solved. We consume more information than ever, and yet the majority of people stay stuck. Well, this idea of information and transformation actually applies to the buyer jury. It applies to every B2B buying process. Why? Because the buyer has more information than ever. AI has summarized the category, ranked the vendors and anticipated the objections, and laid the whole landscape out in front of them in a way no individual seller, quite honestly, could probably match. And yet, even though the buyer has a preconceived idea of what they want to buy, the process of actually buying is more complex than ever. Buying committees are bigger, cycles are messier, unused tools are rampant, and churn rates are high. Failed implementations are an expressed concern in most conversations. Each of these feeds a high level of buyer skepticism. So even though buyers have the information, they don't necessarily, number one, believe it's true. And even when they do, they can't figure out how to buy it. And the data reflects exactly this. A Harvard Business Review study of two and a half million sales conversations found that 40 to 60% of B2B deals, deals where the buyer had already expressed interest and intent, ended in notice session, not lost to a competitor, lost to an action. 89% of B2B buyers report at least one purchase that stalled in the past year. The average B2B win rate is now hovering around 20%, meaning four out of five qualified opportunities. Qualified opportunities. How hard is top-up funnel today? Really hard. Yet four out of five qualified opportunities never convert. And here's the part that matters most. Research shows that 56% of the buyers feel ventors, watch, have a poor understanding of their business. And when buyer and seller actually agree on the problem, win rates jump by 38%. Now pause just for a minute. Okay? The perception is for the buyer that you have a poor understanding of their business. Yet when the buyer and seller actually agree on the problem, when rates jump by 38%. What does that tell you? Given everything that we talked about, what does that tell you about the human element where a seller adds value in a sales cycle? You see, the information isn't the problem. The problem is this the translation from information to clarity to competent action is the problem. The buyer couldn't sequence it, internalize it, and connect it to a real problem we're solving, and the seller didn't help them do that. This is the gap. And it's also the gateway to success for the seller who can make the shift and master the art of closing that gap. You see, great information is only as valuable as the human capacity to sequence it, internalize it, contextually apply it to a real problem, and then take meaningful action against that problem to produce a measured outcome. That entire chain from information to decision to action to outcome is where AI quietly hands the ball back to humans. The problem is that when humans don't catch it, what we get is indecision. Even a decision to not proceed is a better decision than no decision. Now, there's also a second issue here that's highly prevalent in complex sales cycles. And that's this it's rare to find a champion who has successfully completed a complex purchase before. And if they're honest about it, they're often not even sure how to buy within their own companies. Now, this is more often the case than not. And so helping the customer navigate this must be part of how you serve. It is a critical parallel sales process, what most sellers are ignoring. And that's ironic because it's one of the key value differentiators within sales as a service that AI can absolutely not replace. The relational complexity here makes it a profoundly human discipline that is of amazing value when understood and executed against. But rest assured it needs to be understood, which is where a great seller shines. The reality is that AI can deliver the facts. It cannot tell the buyer when they're lying to themselves about their inability to clarify the problem, navigate the timelines, and understand the complexity of the internal bureaucracy and frame the cost-benefit calculations of the solution. It cannot read the rule or push back on a flawed assumption. It can't proactively work across the buying team to uncover the perceived obstacles that sit under the surface of the conversation that go unaddressed in an open forum. A great buying decision is rooted not in the assimilation of facts, but in the ability to connect those facts to a clearly defined problem with a high potential to be solved. That is a profoundly human act. And the seller who can sit in the room and help that happen, who can walk a buyer through the chain from raw information to real clarity to confident action, is the seller who will get exceptionally wealthy doing so over the next 10 years. While their current counterparts go to work for the local HVAC company. But the point is this if you're gonna stay in sales, there's one of two paths. Either change and learn to add massive value or get out of the business. Because if you don't learn to add massive value, the business will get rid of you. The harsh reality is that the market is moving away from a deal maker model and toward a service model where the seller's value isn't a one-time persuasion event, but an ongoing relationship of trust and facilitation. The term quote unquote trusted advisor, which has become cliche, must become a consistent reality with all your customers. You see, there will come a day when sales as a service is delivered by a product agnostic consultant whose primary function is solely to help companies effectively buy. If we all have access to the same information, then defining which product to buy is the easy part. Buying it is where the complexity lives. That is where companies will need you to add value. The deal maker is a transaction, sales as a service is a partnership. AI is going to eat the deal maker, but it can't touch the partner. Now let me say this. The idea of bringing this human element into the equation. Just to be clear, the human element isn't just being human, it's more about practicing your humanity. The easy version of this argument would be to say, quote unquote, be more human. AI can't be human. The scary fact is that in some cases, AI is more relational than a lot of humans. So we're not just talking about being nice or being a friend. I mean something much more specific. You see, most sellers are already human, biologically, anyway. The problem is that most Most of the conversation they're running today could be done by software and increasingly well-be. You see, they're physically present, but emotionally absent. They're delivering a script, oftentimes they didn't write. They're asking questions they don't even fully understand, and hoping the buyer will hand them a check at the end of the conversation. And then when that doesn't happen, they're surprised and confused. That isn't humanity. That is a human being doing the work of an algorithm. The differentiator isn't being human. It's practicing your humanity in the service of another human being. It's using the capacities AI doesn't have: real judgment, real presence, real curiosity, the ability to read what someone isn't saying, and the willingness to tell a hard truth instead of an easy one. All of it in the service of another person's situation, so that they can move from information to transformation, from data to decision, from decision to action, from action to outcome. That is the moat. And the good news for you is that almost no one is defending it. When I work with salespeople today, the person who has the appropriate mindset and service orientation and who is working to master the craft is the absolute exception, not the rule. That's why the opportunity is tremendous. Think about this. What are the failure rates in sales actually telling us? And I'll be honest, this is the part of the profession that bothers me most. The unsettling truth is that this isn't only a problem for junior reps, the stuff we're talking. I've watched the old motion show up in strategic sellers with seven-figure quotas and 20 years of experience, which makes you wonder whether the failure rates we've quietly accepted as normal in this profession. Majority of reps missing quota, short tenures, constant churn, are less about talent and more about the fact that almost no one has been taught to do this job the way the market requires. That includes sales leaders whose faltering management practices are too often making it worse, not better. That is the state of our business. Wake up. We've been training sellers for a game that the buyers stop playing. Now, here's the interesting thing. When things are easy, there's far less opportunity in the marketplace to differentiate. Differentiation is the primary value driver of your career. There's a direct correlation between your ability to add value and your ability to rapidly accelerate your career. It's opportunity mixed with difficulty, which is the most fertile ground on the planet to differentiate with it. That is what the landscape of AI is creating. There's never been a better time on the planet to be a seller if you're paying attention. Let me share a parable of sales as a service. Here it is. Two people get invited to the same dinner party. The first one shows up at the door, the host greets her warmly, and the moment she crosses the threshold, she starts talking. Talks about her job, her kids, her renovation, and the trip she just took. She doesn't ask the host about anything. Worse than that, she's so busy talking, she doesn't pick up on the fact that the host is distracted because their kid is sick upstairs. She just keeps talking because she was invited, and she assumes being invited is the same as being interesting. The second person comes across the same threshold. They greet the host and pause. She notices that the look on the host's face and asks how the day has actually been. And then she listens. When the host mentions the sick kid upstairs, she offers to help carry something to the kitchen so the host can take a minute. Then she moves into the room, sees the person standing below by the window, and goes over. She doesn't tell them what she does. She asks what drew them to the host and listens to the answer. She's not leading with technique. She's genuinely curious. Over the course of the evening, she learns things about every person in the room that nobody else picks up. Because nobody else is paying attention. She barely talks about herself at all. And by the end of the night, everyone there has the same quiet thought. I want to sit next to her again. You see, the first guest will get invited back out of obligation. The second will be invited back out of desire. The difference between them is that one understands the entire reason she was there in the first place was the chance to actually see the people in the room, to care for them more than about them, and add something to the evening instead of just filling space. The second guest will be invited to everything. Not because she performed, but because she was willing to subordinate her own desires for the sake of others, which is not only highly attractive, but more importantly, in doing so, she finds that her desires have never been more fulfilled. The way up is actually down. What it means to be a good guest at the party and how that translates practically to sales as a service is the subject of the next podcast. I hope you enjoyed this one. But until the next one, be well, keep selling, and we'll see you soon.