Sales Teams Struggle with AI Adoption
Sales professionals are facing challenges in adopting and effectively utilizing AI tools. This includes difficulty reaching decision-makers, concerns about AI-generated content quality, and a lack of demonstrable value and trust in automated sales processes. Many are building solutions to address these gaps.
SOURCES (60)
“The strategy isn’t entirely wrong but the execution you’re describing is. The problem with replacing PM headcount with AI is that the work AI handles well is the mechanical layer. What it doesn’t replace is the judgment. Things like stakeholder navigation, ambiguous prioritization calls, managing…”
“Every AI SaaS tool demo looks great until someone asks where the prospect data goes. I keep seeing founders treat security review like a late-stage procurement chore. For anything touching sales calls, CRM notes, demo accounts, POCs, or customer screenshots, it is usually part of the product conversation. If the answer is "paste the transcript into our cloud and we'll generate the workflow," a lot of enterprise buyers are done. Not because they hate AI. Because now legal has to dec”
“How? Use that actual intelligence you have and ditch the AI for anything other than some back and forth and brainstorming.”
“Yes, without promoting, here is what they do (it's not perfect of course and very much depends on what stage you are at, I'm focusing on mid stage PMing). Product Analyst: identifying top requests/problems to solve and matching them with prospect and customer demand. Tied in with Linear so it's centralized. Product Operations: communicates with internal and external stakeholders when specific features hit specific milestones within the PDLC Product Marketing: creating v1 launch docum”
“Wait, so you didn't actually remove the calendar step - you just moved it later? First the AI demo, no booking needed, then a call once someone's actually interested. Feels like a smart move, honestly.”
“It's useful for stress-testing a decision you've already made. Not great at making it for you”
“AI agents are useful for Google Ads when they watch accounts continuously and surface problems you'd miss. But the agent is only as good as the account data and the rules you give it. Before you automate monitoring (or let anything suggest bid changes), run this manual pass once on any account you're onboarding: **1. Test one conversion** Submit a real lead or purchase on mobile and desktop. Confirm it shows in Google Ads within a few hours. Broken tracking is the silent budget killer. *”
“I think AI will play a huge role in post purchase processes. Checkout and product discovery are obvious areas where AI is helpful and they get a lot of attention at the moment, but there's huge potential for it to help with refunds and warranty claims. I think the real trust builder is AI that can resolve that back and forth instead of pointing people to a form.”
Well, depends how you see it, right? An agent can do everything.
“Solid breakdown. Slightly different angle: for real outreach from a single account, the "tool" I'd reach for now is just an AI harness with browser access, Claude Code / cowork, or ChatGPT with browser + MCP. It can visit a profile, send a personalized connection request, log the person in a Google Sheet or CRM, and send a follow-up email, all as a routine you set up, no dedicated platform needed. What most of these paid tools are really built for is scale, running 10, 15, 20 accou”
“Totally. And how much room for error does the org have a capacity to pay? It's an inevitable risk. These are all short term solutions to long term problems”
“I've yet to see AI do much more than basic admin work, and even then, it needs a lot of babysitting. Which means the org is paying both for the AI and the human in the loop.”
“He's one more leader hearing the siren song of AI. It calls to these leaders, singing great tales of love, beauty, and reduced staffing costs, while in actuality it is luring their ship directly into the rocks.”
“You package and sell a service. PM cost part of that package. PM isn’t generating the revenue because it’s the other parts that provide the service the client is looking for. Exceptionalism and can be made if your entire business model is selling a PM service but usually it’s not the primary product or service”
“The best product agents are the ones you build yourself, that use structured and isolated company context. All these tools such as ChatPRD for example are great in essence but building a workflows in Claude Cowork with different connectors, custom templates, and context guidance is much more valuable.”
“My point is that we commercialise that and sell it to our customer, our customer pays for the PM cost.”
“He's planning to make up for not enough PMs with AI agents, but he doesn't know what the agents are going to do, yet? That's not a disaster waiting to happen... Generative AI and agentic AI can be used to help improve productivity, but if most of your work is not easily automated - things like stakeholder alignment, decision-making, prioritization, managing complexity - it won't be as helpful as he hopes. Ask your AI of choice, "What are the best use cases for AI in project”
“Too many projects , and two or three new full enterprise projects come in every week. The CEO doesn’t really have a plan that we know of as to how AI is going to help , he has an internal task force determining how it will, but is already enacting his plan of not hiring any more PMs”
Using ai overtime will cost more than onboarding one or two PM's
“I’m working at a place where we aimed and successfully increased sales by millions (20+) a year. It was a top down strategy of adding more sales people, an additional layer of sales development executives under them, and implementing agents and bots assembled and trained by sales operations.”
“Just left a situation, what they are asking of you now, this will ask for double next year. Time you update your resume. What you described is not a strategy , it’s relying on a culture of firefighting.”
I want a aai agent for lead generation for my business
“I had a call with them but didn’t join as a client yet bc I'm still debating. But they shared a lot of tips and useful advice on AI tools and free credits, so didn’t feel like a sales trap at all. They seemed genuine unlike some other ecom calls I've had before.”
“Totally feel you on that. It's like you can lead a horse to water, but getting them to drink is another story. Maybe gamifying the process could help? Like, add some fun rewards for the reps who actually use the battlecards.”
“A couple of comments on my last post caught my attention. One person said their sales reps mostly work through Claude. Another mentioned most of the interaction happens somewhere other than the Salesforce UI. That would've sounded ridiculous a year or two ago. But now I'm wondering if we're slowly moving toward a world where Salesforce is just the backend, while people work from AI assistants, Slack, Teams, Outlook, or whatever tool they're already in. Not saying that's good”
“Spent about six weeks testing this because a few people on our team were convinced one tool was clearly better than the others. Same list, same offer, same send window, rotated across three different AI-personalization products that all promise the same thing: scrape a signal, generate a custom first line, make it feel researched. Reply rates landed within half a point of each other. 4.1%, 4.4%, 3.9%. Not a meaningful difference given the sample size. What actually moved the number wasn't th”
“Goodness me. Just had a 30 min discovery call with one of their reps (Taimur Anjum) who's based in Portugal. He let me know he had a hard-stop at 18 mins in (Without explaining why?) so we didn't get to have much of a conversation on the tech which I was looking forward to. Forewarning to anyone reviewing a new tool like Agent frank or similar - this chap was about the most salesy rep you could get so brace yourself for an uncomfortable experience and frankly, waste of time. Far below wh”
“Landed 3 clients doing automation builds so far. People still show up to calls, still seem interested, but closing has gotten a lot harder the last couple months. Not sure if that's on me. Maybe my funnel's leaking somewhere between the call and the close, maybe the messaging needs work, I don't know. But it also feels like every other post here is someone offering the same thing now. Chatbots, lead follow up, CRM syncing, all of it. Like I want to build advance automations for busin”
“I can only imagine what an echo chamber that conference will be this week. Vendor: "Hey! We can do order entry from your emails" Everyone else: "Same", "Same", "Same", "Same", "Same", "Same", "Same", "Same", "Same", "Same" Vendor: "Well...we can make track & track AI calls that drivers hate!" Everyone else: "Same", "Same", "Same", "Same&qu”
“Bit late to the party but what even is an ai agent Can you build one on the free versions of AI and is there a best platform for it? submitted by /u/Advanced_Smile_2193 [link] [comments]”
“Glad the failure matrix landed — that's usually the whole product once the demo voice is "good enough." What you described (slots only from live availability, re-check on mid-call time changes, exact-amount deposit consent, polite decline never fires payment) is exactly the write-boundary pattern that keeps med-spa receptionists from creating cleanup work. If you want a second pair of eyes on the remaining edges — noisy barge-in recovery, double-book under concurrent calls, or &quo”
“We found we got a much better response rate once we spent time explaining each question to the client in the instructions boxes. A bit of work up front, but it's paid off. We do all this inside Content Snare.”
“I've been on Gong for about 8 months now and the conversation intelligence is insane. Our close rate jumped by like 9 points just from coaching based on what Gong surfaces. The AI picks up on stuff I never would have caught - like how often reps interrupt prospects or when they lose deals after mentioning price too early. The trackers and deal insights are solid too. Love being able to search across all our calls for specific competitor mentions or objections. Helps our enablement team build”
“Brother, why reply using AI? This just makes me feel like your app is also AI which is only a problem because I suspect you don’t understand your target audience at all. It feels like you decided it’s for ADHD people because it was, 2-3 years ago, very trendy to build services/solutions for ADHD people or to have ADHD.”
“It’s awesome you’re having success with agents, but can you not make generic slop AI responses to threads on subreddits? At least run the response through one of the de-slopifiers so it’s less obvious and grating.”
“A first sale is valuable evidence that the problem and the demo can connect, but screen-driving agents have a different reliability profile from API automations. I would measure task success by application and workflow, log screenshots and actions for replay, and add a confirmation boundary before destructive clicks. The clearest value proposition will likely be one painful screen-based job with a measurable time saving, not the general ability to click anything. That focus should also make onbo”
“(Please no marketing ) I'm looking for a genuinely good AI that can do realistic sales roleplays—handling objections, acting like different customer personas, giving feedback, etc. Has anyone found one that's actually worth using? Or are most of them basically the same? Would love to hear from people who've actually used them. submitted by /u/Stunning_Job_3035 [link] [comments]”
“LOL, language barrier there, but AI translated it for me ;) The fact that your clients assume you're just trying to sell them something when you follow up is actually a solvable problem. It usually means the follow-up doesn't add value beyond "are you ready to buy?" One approach is to treat your follow-ups as research calls instead of sales calls. Start the conversation by telling them you'd like to know how your pieces are selling. Ask what their customers are saying. Any”
“I agree people will still use screens. My question is whether they'll spend less time navigating websites and more time approving what their agent already did for them.”
“Yeah, and the tell is specificity you couldn't fake from their website. 'Saw you run three lots and still book test drives by text' beats any pitch. The moment they feel seen, price stops being the objection.”
“Fair enough. What are you actually hoping to walk away with here, a clean number for the whole thing, or someone who takes it off your hands so you never think about it again? And do you have a sense of what it's worth to you? Because a tool at $0 with no live channel is a tricky thing to price, and how you answer that tells me whether you've thought about this as a real handoff or just a nice-to-have if someone bites.”
“During sales discovery calls - rehearsed responses by the prospect are going to kill your sales efforts. They are going to mislead you. They're going to lead on you onto the wrong track. And when you're on the wrong track, your presentation is will be on the wrong track and then your proposed solution is going to be on the wrong track. This will all end up with either with an email that begins with "unfortunately", a ghosting or an excuse by the prospect that "something el”
“From what I've seen, support metrics are much easier to trust than sales metrics. Faster responses and fewer repetitive tickets are obvious, but proving a chatbot directly increased conversions is a lot tougher. That's been my experience comparing a few different tools, including Flyweight AI.”
“I started out in sales in 2004. I started teaching social selling in 2014. Here's how I see the future of outreach.... Sales is getting more difficult. Part of that is our own making. When you have tools and technology that allows us to find and reach prospects more efficiently, more people will do it, so eventually, the problems become - people just ignore everything. The data and tools have lowered the barrier to entry. The bad actors or just naïve people using those tools has degraded the”
“For the experienced sales people starting a sales process from scratch in B2B remote sales. What’s your process for writing a script, understanding your prospects and then scaling? How do you know what works and what doesn’t when you have no frame of reference? Curious to hear those who have pioneered sales processes and scaled from scratch. Whats steps did you take. submitted by /u/ConfectionStock4566 [link] [comments]”
“Exactly. Even a simple rubric with 3-4 observable behaviors would make the score feel earned instead of mysterious.”
“Sales enablement/Product Marketing will become more important: building a ton of new features but no one is using them (in part because no one knows about them) Anyone can develop (with guardrails) - i think we will move towards almost anyone in the org being able to build within specific guardrails (this will take years and is an unpopular opinion i know) LOTS of toe stepping in the meantime - everyone can do 80% of everyone else's job so i'm seeing people step on everyone else's to”
“The data retention piece is the first thing to sort out before anything else. A lot of tools bury their training policies deep in the ToS. Some say they don't train on your data in marketing but have it as an opt-out in settings. 3 things I'd check before committing to anything: does audio get processed locally or in the cloud (huge for privilege), what happens to recordings after transcription is done, and can you export everything if you switch later?”
“I’ve been in sales for about 15 years, the past 5 have been in AI tech. The space is overly crowded, everyone is selling the same thing in a diff color. It feels like the new “race to zero” based on customer expectations but costs are actually increasing. I’ve been killing myself to deliver a mid performance. I’m safe bc leadership likes me, I have a good attitude and a “mid” performance at my company is pretty good comparatively speaking. I could comfortably take a few months off while I find a”
“I run a small business with a handful of outside sales reps, got tired of trying to coach people based on numbers stats and KPIs alone. We managers started using different tools because we wanted to hear what was happening during customer appointments without having to sit in the truck all day. It's been helpful but I'm still figuring out the best way to roll it out with the team. The toughest part wasn not the software it was getting the reps comfortable with recording conversations in”