Clari + Salesloft international SVP Steve Harding on how AI is creating a more human-centric approach to selling

Here’s a dream scenario: salespeople spend less time on data entry and more time honing the craft of selling. Sounds good, right? AI is the (not so) secret weapon to achieving this and a key beneficiary of the saved time should, in theory, be the human-centric side of sales. Revenue Brew sat down with Clari + Salesloft international SVP Steve Harding to discuss the role AI is playing in sales organizations, and how to strike the right balance between human and agent.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

What role does AI play in today’s revenue organization?

We spent the last 25 years asking sellers to serve software, and now for the first time, AI presents the opportunity for software to serve the sellers. The extent to which productivity gains can be derived from AI is just kind of off the charts.

The extent to which AI is offering potential to drive productivity, but also precision and personalization within sales, I think we’re seeing unprecedented capability there. The trick is to make sure that everybody can embrace this technology consistently.

What are some best practices for adopting AI into day-to-day functions?

It’s really important that as revenue leaders we think about using AI to remove friction from the sales approach. It has to start with the customer first. It has to really start with mapping how customers buy, how they engage with you, and how they turn up.

How has AI changed the processes that sales teams have become used to?

The current tools are so numerous in their application that they’re not really adding the productivity gains. What AI presents is the ability to be an orchestration engine for all of those disparate systems, so you can then start to really distill the various signals that are occurring within your business, make sense of them, really synthesize them, and turn them into workflows that are additive. The main opportunity is that you de-shackle your sellers from the burden of administrative selling and move them back to relationship selling.

What advice do you have for sellers on using AI tools?

Taking advantage of LLMs in order to drive productivity for things like account research, persona research, even desk-based research in order to make sure that when you turn up, you’ve shown [customers] that you know them. I think the evolved position is to try and have some of that capability actually infused into your systems, so the LLM doesn’t just take advantage of the information that you give it, but it actually takes advantage of all of your business context and then serves that up in real time, not just in a generative way, but in an agentic way. How do you get these systems of orchestration that are actually wired to all of the underlying systems that effectively listen to what you’re trying to do with your customers and then help you prioritize the work that’s actually going to move the needle to more deals, bigger deals, faster deals, more rigor, less risk perspective?

Can AI encourage a more human-centric approach to selling?

It has the potential to. A lot of commentators would suggest the opposite, that there’s a risk that AI potentially is going to make us all robotic in nature. But actually, if you think about it the other way, it presents the opportunity for us to go back to 1950s sellers. Of course, that’s a little bit tongue in cheek, but what I mean by that is that you can get AI to do all of that mundane work, which then actually frees you up to do the relationship work. One of the consequences over the last 25 years of this constant investment in tech and this constant thirst for data is that actually what we’ve done is we’ve overindexed on the science of selling, and we’ve underindexed on the art of selling.