AI is redefining early-career paths, but how?

Is AI good or bad for early-career sales? That isn’t for Revenue Brew to say. There are, however, some big questions we need to ask around how it will undoubtedly impact the freshman salesperson. Over the last couple months, we spoke with three revenue leaders working on the front lines of the technology and (spoiler), they all had differing opinions on how it will change sales.

Here’s why AI is a cause for hope, worry, and how it is fundamentally changing how humans do their jobs.

The AI guy: In June, we spoke to Jon Studham, head of sales at inbound-focused GTM AI platform Spara. A highly experienced sales leader with previous roles at Outreach, Cisco, and Microsoft, he said he alone was using AI tools to do the work that companies would traditionally hire multiple employees to do.

“I’m trained like your best [sales engineer], your best support person, and your best salesperson all-in-one…That gets rid of your receptionist, your low-level inbound SDRs that are 20 years old—that don’t know anything about the true technology or how to actually handle a sales call or an objection, talk about price, talk about a competitor,” Studham said.

He said when building a rev org he would be looking to hire individuals that either have an effective Rolodex, or that are skilled with clients. “I would hire an outbound BDR, because that is still broken. You can get trained on it. You can call my tier three accounts until I feel comfortable with you,” Studham said. Replacing some early-career sales roles might mean less sellers waiting in the wings to learn the skills that would have once been the building blocks of a sales career, stoking concern over a potential talent gap. Studham suggested taking action now to get ahead of a changing landscape.

“If colleges don't change the curriculum on how they’re taught right now, God bless the next five to six years of people in college. I don't know what they’re going to do,” Studham told Revenue Brew.

A tool not a replacement: Prabhav Jain, CEO at rev org AI firm 11x, said that despite his company’s mission to bring AI to go-to-market teams, he does not see it as a replacement for early-career sales employees.

“Anytime any big technology shift has happened, it’s never been about replacing jobs. It’s always been about, ‘How do you give leverage to the human so that they can do more of what they want to do and less of what they don’t want to do?” Jain told Revenue Brew.

Jain thinks his company’s technology can be effectively used to accelerate the sales learning curve, while outsourcing other tasks to AI. It seems that with AI picking up the busy work slack, early-career sales professionals might be getting in front of prospects faster.

“When I think about what the go-to-market rep of the future looks like, they spend their time with the customers and prospects,” Jain said.

Importance of the human touch: Alex Kean, senior director of revenue operations at AI platform Merge, supports this thesis, and gave the example of early-career sales employees delivering cookies to get an edge.

“The same CRO who might have gotten 40 cold calls about sales tools, the moment a kid shows up with a box of cookies, [they’re like,] ‘I’m impressed,” Kean said. “[One company] had pretty intense security, and the CRO was like, ‘Wait, how’d you get up here?’ ‘I went through the back door of the freight elevator and found my way up.’ And he was like, ‘Okay, I’ll give you a call’...There’s people rewarding some of the ambition.”

While AI is the newsmaker of the moment, Kean said that in the everyday trenches of the sales world, humans will always want to be dealing with humans when making a final decision.

“Humans want to buy anything from humans. I have a hard time believing that people are going to want to buy from a robot,” Kean said. “Maybe there won’t be as many [SDRs], but to go from one to zero feels tough.”