There was a time when speaking to a salesperson was part of how you learned about a product. You wanted to know what it could do, how it worked and how it compared with something else, so you spoke to the company selling it.
Now, by the time that conversation happens, the buyer may already know quite a lot. They may have visited your website and your competitors’, read reviews, watched demos, compared prices and gone through discussions on Reddit or LinkedIn. Now they can also sit with AI and ask question after question until they understand a product or an industry they may have known very little about an hour earlier. They may even come into the first sales conversation with a shortlist already in their head.
I do this myself. If I am trying to understand something unfamiliar, I don’t necessarily start by speaking to someone who sells it. I research it first. AI has made that much easier. But knowing more can also make us very confident that we know what we need.
It reminds me a little of what happens when we visit a doctor. We search our symptoms, read about possible causes and perhaps ask AI what they might mean. Some patients probably arrive convinced they already know what is wrong with them. But having access to medical information doesn’t mean we know how to diagnose ourselves.
A doctor listens, asks questions, examines the patient and decides which tests are needed. Two people can describe similar symptoms and still have completely different problems.
I think sales is facing its own version of this.
A buyer might come to you saying, “We need a CRM,” “We need an AI solution,” or “We need to redesign our product.” They may have done a great deal of research and have a fairly clear idea of what they want. The easiest thing for a salesperson to do is start selling them exactly that. But what if the problem isn’t the CRM but how the existing one is being used? What if AI isn’t going to fix a process that doesn’t work in the first place? What if redesigning the product won’t solve the reason customers aren’t using it?
Good salespeople have always tried to understand a customer’s problem before selling them something. There is nothing particularly new about that. What AI changes is the amount of information and confidence the buyer can bring into the conversation. And those two things aren’t always the same as understanding.
If I have already spent hours researching your product and your competitors, and then I speak to you and hear the same information I found on your website, what have you added to my understanding? The salesperson who adds something to the conversation is the one who notices what I haven’t considered. They might ask a question that changes how I am looking at the problem, recognize something from another customer or industry, or tell me that the solution I came asking about isn’t actually the one they would recommend.
None of this makes a knowledgeable buyer a problem. If anything, it raises the standard for the salesperson. When the buyer no longer needs you to explain what they could have found themselves, you have to bring something else to the conversation. You need to understand their business, know your own market beyond your product and be able to ask questions that make the conversation useful. The responsibility on the salesperson hasn’t disappeared because the buyer knows more. It has increased.
AI adds another complication. What we get back depends partly on what we tell it and what we ask. If I begin with the assumption that my company needs more leads, I can spend an hour having a very useful conversation with AI about generating more leads without ever asking whether lead generation is actually my problem. The better that conversation is, the more confident I may become in the question I started with. And after spending hours researching something, I may not particularly want a salesperson questioning my conclusion. I may be looking for someone to sell me what I have decided I need.
Questioning the buyer doesn’t have to mean telling them they are wrong. It can start with asking how they arrived at the answer. Why do they think they need this particular solution? What have they already tried? What do they expect to change if they buy it? The answers may confirm that the buyer was right, or take the conversation somewhere neither side expected.
There is an obvious limit to the doctor comparison. A salesperson is being paid to sell something. They have targets and revenue expectations. If understanding the customer’s problem leads to the conclusion that their product isn’t the right answer, that isn’t exactly a convenient outcome. But selling someone something you don’t believe they need raises a different question about what the salesperson’s responsibility actually is.
Of course, questioning the buyer doesn’t mean assuming the salesperson knows better. Sometimes the buyer does know exactly what they need. By the time they finally speak, the buyer may have done their homework and already have an answer in mind.
The question is, if the buyer already knows what you sell, what are you bringing to the conversation that they couldn’t find for themselves?