What's Faster? A Cheetah Chasing a Gazelle or Salespeople's Growing Skepticism Toward AI?"

Cheetahs are the fastest land animals, capable of reaching speeds up to 70 mph in short bursts covering distances of up to 1,640 feet. They can accelerate from 0 to 60 mph in about 3 seconds. As we explore the rapid rise of AI in sales, one cannot ignore the equally swift surge in skepticism and indifference, both happening at "cheetah speed." As fast as AI has appeared so have feelings that it might be more buzz than substance.

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The buzz around Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Generative AI (Gen AI) has reached a fever pitch. It’s nearly impossible to go a day without encountering discussions about how AI is transforming industries, making processes more efficient, or even revolutionizing the future of work. But amidst all this noise (and the hype) a significant challenge remains: many professionals, especially in fields like sales, remain unconvinced. They are struggling to discern whether AI is truly valuable or just another shiny object.

In the world of sales, where execution is everything, it's not enough for AI to merely be "cool." For AI sales readiness tools to break through the haze of indifference and confusion, they need to offer tangible, practical benefits that solve real-world problems for both sellers and their leadership. Recent survey feedback from sales professionals’ sheds light on what they actually need from AI sales readiness tools to add value and not just novelty. Sellers are busy enough and get pulled in many different directions. Foisting (not) another sales tool on them (A.I. or not) could end up in tears!

Understanding the AI Disconnect in Sales

There’s a disconnect in how sales professionals view AI. While the allure of AI’s potential is widely recognized, many salespeople and leaders are left wondering how to apply it in their day-to-day activities to improve outcomes. The skepticism is understandable; sales is an industry that thrives on personal connections, strategic thinking, and situational nuance. Adding a tool that simply automates tasks or generates surface-level insights isn’t going to cut it. For AI to be embraced, it needs to go beyond the flashy features and demonstrate that it can make a salesperson more effective, save time, help leaders become better coaches, and ultimately drive revenue growth.

What Sales Sellers Want from AI Sales Readiness Tools

The voice of sellers is clear: they want tools that make their jobs easier and their efforts more impactful. Here’s what they identified as essential for a valuable AI sales readiness tool:

1. Enhanced Account Understanding: Sellers are expected to engage clients in meaningful conversations about their business challenges and opportunities. AI tools can add real value by providing a deeper understanding of an account’s business environment, offering insights that go beyond generic data points. Buyers expect more from sellers. They are disinclined to explain the basics of their business and (rightly) think sellers should come into conversations demonstrating enough research and opinion. When a tool helps sellers feel more prepared to discuss specific industry trends, competitive landscapes, or business pains, it transforms AI from a "nice-to-have" to a "must-have." When sellers feel ready, they project confidence…and that’s infectious. 

2. Proactive Coaching: Sellers want an AI tool to act as a coach, not just an assistant. It's not enough to get general suggestions or automated reminders; sellers want the tool to spot potential “red flags” in opportunities they might have overlooked. Maybe even challenge them in certain areas. By proactively coaching sellers in areas that need attention, AI can help sales professionals avoid mistakes. It’s like trying to avoid the situation where “we don’t know what we don’t know!”

3. Meeting Preparation Assistance: Sales calls and meetings with key stakeholders are critical to moving deals forward (or qualifying out). An AI sales readiness tool should go beyond merely scheduling or sending reminders. It should help sellers by suggesting relevant content, offering insights about the accounts they’ll be meeting, and proposing a structured agenda to guide the conversation towards desired outcomes. Buyers are devoting less and less time to sellers these days, which means every meeting needs to be on song. When AI can help a seller show up prepared and confident, it becomes a valuable tool for winning business.

4. Credibility Building through Thought Leadership: In today’s sales environment, simply delivering a pitch is not enough. Sellers need to establish themselves as thought leaders who bring value to the table. AI tools can help create persuasive approaches and presentations that are not just product-centric but also address industry challenges and future trends. This not only positions the seller as an expert but demonstrates their willingness to have invested time and effort into the research necessary to formulate such opinions. This helps with competitive differentiation and adds significant value to their interactions.

5. Simplifying Account Planning: Account planning is a time-consuming process, yet it’s crucial for long-term success. AI tools should shorten and simplify this process by incorporating and analyzing data from various parts of the client’s business, identifying white space opportunities, spotting organizational synergies that sellers can surface and suggesting strategies to engage. This kind of support can turn a daunting task into a streamlined activity.

What Sales Leaders Want from AI Sales Readiness Tools

While sellers are looking for tools that make them more efficient and effective, sales leaders have a slightly different set of priorities. They need tools that help them lead more strategically while empowering their teams. Here’s what sales leaders highlighted as must-have features:

1. A Strategic Business Partner: Leaders want AI to be more than just a tool; they want it to function like a business partner that offers coaching, not just for individual deals but in developing the overall skill set of their team. The tool should be able to provide strategic insights, help prioritize efforts and offer guidance on how to approach different clients.

2. Ease of Use: As with any technology, adoption hinges on ease of use. If an AI tool is cumbersome or overly complex, it becomes a burden rather than a benefit. For AI to be embraced by sales leaders, it must be intuitive and easy to navigate, allowing them to quickly access insights and manage their team’s activities effectively.

3. Force Multiplication: Leaders are often stretched thin, juggling numerous responsibilities. An AI sales readiness tool should act as a force multiplier by taking on the tactical coaching and development aspects, allowing leaders to focus on strategic growth initiatives. This “divide and conquer” approach enables leaders to address individual seller development while also pursuing broader team goals.

4. Empowering Sellers to be More Strategic: By automating tactical tasks and providing deeper client insights, AI tools can help sellers not just follow a sales process but truly understand their clients and anticipate their needs. This raises the bar from transactional selling to a more consultative, strategic approach that aligns with the client’s business objectives, and helps leaders raise the performance of all the team, saving on the constant thrashing around of firing and hiring.

Moving from Hype to Real-World Application

The key to overcoming this fast-emerging indifference and confusion around AI in sales lies in demonstrating real, tangible value. Salespeople are not technologists; they don’t adopt tools because they’re innovative or exciting. They adopt tools because they work, because they solve real problems, and because they help drive results. Our findings illustrate a common theme: sales professionals are not against AI—they are against wasting time on tools that don’t add value.

The potential for AI to transform sales is enormous, but success hinges on shifting the narrative from “AI is cool” to “AI is useful.” Sales readiness tools that cater to the specific needs of sellers and leaders (those that provide coaching, insights, strategic guidance, and save time) will be the ones that succeed. For the AI conversation to move beyond novelty, it must become clear to sales professionals that these tools can genuinely impact their day-to-day work and help them achieve better results.

Concluding Thoughts: From Skepticism to Advocacy

As the conversation around AI in sales continues to evolve, companies that embrace AI sales readiness tools must prioritize demonstrating value through easy, practical, user-centric features. The time has come to turn skeptics into advocates by showing how AI can enhance—not replace—the skills of sales professionals. The craft of sales is far from over, but with the right AI tools, it can certainly become less confusing and time intensive and more clear, straight forward and inspiring.

Whether you’re a seller struggling to find time for account planning or a sales leader juggling team development and strategic planning, AI can be a game-changer—if it's done right. And with the insights gathered from real sales professionals, we’re one step closer to realizing AI’s full potential in sales.

The Fraud of the B2B Numbers Game

Why Lead Gen isn’t About Playing the Numbers Game, It’s about Playing the Human Game.

Hans Rosling was a medical doctor, professor of international health and well-known public educator. In his 2018 book “Factfulness” he debunks a lot of the generally held beliefs about the “state of the world” and despite his reliance on numbers, data and quantitative analysis he readily admits that “while the world cannot be understood without numbers, the world cannot be understood by the use of numbers alone.”

In the last 25 years it seems like we have tried to understand everything using numbers. We’ve reduced everything to an engineering problem. This has been especially true in business. We’ve seen the rise of the bean counters, the numbers driven MBA’s and the financialization of the western economy. No practice has been more affected than B2B sales and marketing. Despite all the application of numbers an older saying still holds true – “marketing leaders always knew they wasted half of their budgets…they just never knew which half.” The application of engineered thinking and numbers was supposed to answer this question. So, has it? Well…it has not. This is another example of our preference for extreme thinking where we’ve adopted engineering processes and overrated management science ideas while ignoring the realities of human behavior that make forecasting and predictions a fool’s play.

No worries, it isn’t over yet. We can use some number models and some probabilistic thinking to help overcome the challenge but first we can accept that this is not just a numbers game. For too long, the B2B community has been sold a lie: the idea that lead generation, for example, is just an engineering problem, that you can apply a mathematical formula to human behavior and expect reliable, predictable results. This mindset has led companies to waste vast amounts of time and resources on pouring “leads” into the top of the funnel, with the belief that the sheer volume will eventually yield deals. But here’s the truth: B2B lead gen isn’t—and never was—just a numbers game. Lead generation is about influencing human beings—who are illogical, unpredictable, and driven by emotions. The only way to truly improve results is by focusing on qualitative factors, particularly improving early-stage conversion rates through compelling, differentiated human interactions.

The Fraud of the B2B Numbers Game: Why Lead Gen is About More Than Just Math

We’ve heard it all for years - “if you pour enough leads into the top of the funnel, deals will magically fall out the bottom." This belief has shaped entire marketing strategies, pushed sales teams to the brink, and consumed countless resources. But here’s the truth: it’s a lie—a fraud that’s been perpetrated on the B2B community for far too long.

The reality is, B2B lead generation doesn’t fit neatly into an engineering problem. Human behavior, especially in a complex B2B buying process, is far too illogical and unpredictable to be governed solely by math. The numbers first approach fails because it ignores the most crucial element in sales: people. And if you don’t understand what makes people decide, no amount of lead volume will save you. 

The Numbers Game NEVER Worked

The engineering mindset has been drilled into the DNA of B2B sales and marketing. It’s a simple formula—get 1,000 leads in at the top, watch them filter down through your sales funnel, and close a few deals at the bottom. At every stage, conversion rates chip away at your lead pool until you have just a tiny fraction left.

But let’s look at what those numbers really mean, using “generally accepted” percentages from the perpetrators of these myths - what used to be “Sirius Decisions” (now Forrester), Gartner, Aberdeen and the rest of the “brains trust.”

For each closed deal I need ~4 opptys. To get to 4 opptys I need ~ 12 SQL’s, maybe 10, maybe 14? To get there I need something like 3 x to 6x MQLs so let’s say 4.5x which means say 57 MQLs? And to get there I need say 380 MLs (that’s a ~15% conversion from ML to MQL which is generous.) So if a “first call” fits into the MQL category that means we need to conduct 57 “first calls” for every closed deal. We can argue and tinker with this math until doomsday, but the conclusion remains sobering—your sales process is based on inefficiency, where failure is the rule, not the exception and the numbers at the top are just too big

Doubling Down on Early-Stage Conversion Rates

Rather than focusing on lead volume, the key to unlocking real revenue growth lies in improving your early-stage conversion rates. Specifically, the most pivotal point in the entire sales funnel is the first conversion—the jump from the first conversation to the second. This is where human emotion and decision-making first meet your product or service. It’s where you must start to create preference. It’s NOT just a “get to know you” call.

By re-framing your thinking here, you could either half the number of MQLs or first calls you need, OR double the number of closes. By improving just one conversion metric, you can double—or even triple—your closed-won revenue without any increase in lead generation costs. It’s about getting more out of the leads you already have, rather than chasing an endless supply of new ones.

Being Compelling and Differentiated: The Key to Doubling Your Conversion Rate

So how do you improve that all-important first conversion rate? The answer lies in delivering value right from the start. To do that, you need to be both compelling and differentiated. You’re not just selling a product; you’re selling urgency and uniqueness. You must answer two critical questions in the mind of your prospect:

1. Why Now? (Compelling Reason to Act)

   Human beings are driven by urgency. You need to show your prospects why they should act now rather than later. Maybe it’s a market shift, a looming competitive threat, or a time-sensitive opportunity. Whatever it is, it needs to resonate emotionally as well as logically. If there’s no urgency, the status quo remains. BUT, to do this right requires research, preparation, time and some daring.

   
   

2. Why Us? (Differentiation)

   This is where most B2B companies fail. They sound like everyone else. But differentiation is critical. You need to demonstrate why your solution is unique, why it’s the best fit for their problem, and why you’re the best choice. Whether it’s through unique features, a proven track record, or an innovative approach, your prospect needs to believe that you—and only you—can solve their challenge. That’s about connecting solutions to business drivers. Spotting synergies between your organizations. And again, to do that right takes research, preparation, time and some daring.

   
   

When you combine urgency and differentiation, you create an interaction that resonates with the human beings on the other end of the conversation. It communicates the biggest factor - TRUST. This is how you double your first-to-second conversation conversion rate—by being compelling and differentiated in a way that speaks directly to the needs and emotions of your prospects.

Victims of another numbers game

So now the problem would be – how do I prepare my team to be compelling AND unique AND personalized during all those first calls? AI doesn’t care about big numbers. So instead of keeping blindly throwing numbers at the problem, apply (I guess) another form of numbers – those of AI. Specifically, a specialized sales a.i. like Shadow.

Breaking Free from the Numbers-First Fraud

The idea that lead generation is purely a numbers game ignores the human element at the heart of every buying decision. By shifting the focus away from lead volume and toward improving early-stage conversion rates through probabilistic thinking, B2B companies can finally unlock sustainable growth.

Here’s the bottom line: you don’t need more leads—you need better conversions. The companies that win in today’s B2B landscape are the ones that think probabilistically, cast off the fictions of the past, allow for human behavior and tailor their sales processes accordingly. Focus on answering "Why Now?" and "Why Us?"

It’s time to stop playing the numbers game and start playing the human game. Because in B2B sales, it’s the only game that matters

Time to Rethink Sales Training with GenAI?

The Persistent Problem with Sales Training: Sales training has been the bedrock of professional development for decades, yet the methods we cling to haven’t evolved much. The result? Increasingly outdated and ineffective practices. Whether it’s the traditional face-to-face workshops (class – room) or the never-ending video marathons (class-zoom), the current approach fails to tackle the real enemy: "knowledge decay." Ever heard of the Forgetting Curve? You probably have, but guess what? You forgot!  Introduced by psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, it’s a phenomenon that shows how quickly we lose newly acquired knowledge. Think about it—within just an hour, 50% of what we learn slips away. Give it 24 hours, and 70% of that new information is gone. After a week? We’ve forgotten up to 90%.

Is This Really Working? As if the Forgetting Curve wasn’t enough to make you question traditional sales training, consider the other challenges we’re up against:

• Turnover Turmoil: It’s tough to pin down exact figures, but B2B sales turnover hovers around 35% to 45%, according to Forrester and HubSpot. That’s nearly half of your salesforce walking out the door each year. What does that mean for you? A constant cycle of recruiting, onboarding, and training—only to do it all over again. And after all that effort, it’ll take another six months for these new hires to become truly effective. Are we really okay with this?

• Mixed Teams, Mixed Results: With turnover comes inconsistency. Your sales team becomes a patchwork of varying skill levels, which is hard to manage. It’s no wonder we see the infamous “bell curve” of sales performance—some sellers excel, others flounder, and most hover somewhere between average and mediocre.

• The Death of Mentorship: Technology, budget-conscious CFOs, and even COVID-19 have changed the workplace forever. One casualty? Mentorship. Back in the ‘80s (the 1980s, to be clear), I learned more from seasoned mentors than from any formal training course. But today? Sellers are more isolated, and the opportunity to soak up that invaluable wisdom is fading fast.

Why So Complicated? Sales training has somehow turned complexity into a badge of honor. We’ve traded simplicity for a labyrinth of techniques, acronyms, and “clever” processes. It’s as if we believe the more intricate the training, the more effective it must be. But let’s be real—does anyone actually benefit from this convoluted mess? Too often, sellers are left with an overflowing toolbox, unsure which tool to use when it matters most. Isn’t simplicity the soul of efficiency? Yet, sales training has drifted far from that ideal.

The truth is, the complication of sales training, and the rise of the “deal coach,” serves another purpose: keeping consultants in business. The longer they stay involved, the more fees they collect. But is this really the best way to equip our sales teams?

A Brighter Path with GenAI: The old methods? It’s time to let them go. Instead, let’s acknowledge the limitations of traditional training and the new challenges we face. Enter a fresh approach: targeted, timely enablement and readiness. Let’s use tools that don’t just add to the noise but actually help—tools that do the research, connect the dots, and provide actionable insights right when sellers need them. Imagine getting your team better prepared, faster, and with less effort. That’s the promise of GenAI.

Conclusion: So, isn’t it time to say goodbye to outdated sales training? Let’s welcome a smarter, more efficient way to empower our sellers. With Shadow’s specialized GenAI, we can transform how we enable, prepare, and manage our teams. Curious to learn more? Visit our website to see how GenAI can revolutionize your sales training. Empower your team with the tools they need, exactly when they need them.