Almost Timely News: 🗞️ How Sales is Changing in a Chaotic, AI World (2025-09-14)
Christopher Penn
Co-Founder and Chief Data Scientist at TrustInsights.ai, AI Expert
Almost Timely News: 🗞️ How Sales is Changing in a Chaotic, AI World (2025-09-14) :: View in Browser
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What's On My Mind: How Sales is Changing in a Chaotic, AI World
I’ve been giving a lot of thought as to how sales is changing, not just from AI, but from how people are changing too. And after a whole bunch of research, the conclusion I’ve reached is that most sales methodologies are pretty badly broken. Not because the sales methodologies themselves are bad, but because well, when they were created, they were fine. They worked in the era they were made in. But times change, people change, behaviors change.
So this week, I’ll share my thoughts on the topic and some things we can do to potentially adapt. None of this should be brand new - humans don’t change that fast. Some of it will have practical AI tips, but sales is not yet an AI-led process, so there are limits as to what we can and can’t do with AI.
Most important, these are thoughts that I have about sales. Please don't take them as some sort of mandate or a definitive statement. This is just thinking and me sharing my thinking with you.
Part 1: The Big Picture
How many of us look forward to the sales process as a customer?
Yeah. About as many of us look forward to being on the receiving end of sales as we do dental work. It’s necessary, but it’s not necessarily enjoyable. When you start the sales process as a customer, you know what you’re in for.
Endless emails. Calls. Reminders. Cutesy “are you the right person” and “I don’t want to pester (and yet I will)”. Even more endless meetings, and depending on the purchase size, buyer committees, RFPs, presentation after presentation until every vendor blurs together and you pick the one that brought the best snacks or the cheapest one or the one the senior most stakeholder liked because the vendor took him out golfing or they were roommates in college or fraternity brothers or whatever.
There’s no shortage of ways the sales process sucks as a customer.
If we had our druthers and we were honest, we’d delegate the entire thing if we could until the very end where we quickly look at a high level summary of who meets our criteria, we pick one, and we get on with our lives. We would not want to invest the hours or days or weeks or months in dealing with the sales process as customers.
Increasingly, people are using generative AI, tools like Copilot, ChatGPT, Gemini, et. Al. To do exactly that. More on that in a little bit.
The other macro thing we have to acknowledge is that the big picture really kind of sucks right now. Deep uncertainty in the economy, job losses left and right, a planet that is on fire (in some cases literally) - I don’t need to rehash the massive psychological toll that reality is taking on us. Go over to Google Trends and look at “bar near me open now” and you’ll see some pretty interesting trends, especially in the 5 year timeframe.
What that does to us, what that has done to us over the past 5 years, ever since March 2020, is place enormous psychological and emotional stress on us. We’re given more to do than ever before in the name of productivity, more challenges, and fewer resources. That in turn means that we have less bandwidth to devote to any particular process - and especially the sales process.
This is where my commentary about sales frameworks comes into play - many sales frameworks are predicated on a key assumption: that people are willing and able to devote significant time to be rational, reflective, thoughtful, and thorough in the sales process.
We’re not, unless it’s something we deeply care about. We will overthink the hell out of stuff we care about.
That pile of sales RFP responses? That’s probably not even on the list of things we care about.
In turn, that means even if we have the outward appearance of being thoughtful, reviewing RFPs, etc. There’s a good chance we don’t actually care or we’ve delegated it off to someone or something else. (RFP response processing is a prime AI task).
So where does that leave the selling process? Mostly in shambles. Talk to any business owner now, especially if the business is a complex sale (i.e. not a simple transaction like buying a pack of gum or blindly clicking buy on Amazon at 3 AM). Sales cycles have slowed down. Decisions take longer. More sales end in “no decision”. No decision is our number one competitor. And I hear this a lot from other agency owners and from other folks who have complex sales. We're not losing to some big named competitor. We're losing to nothing at all. No decision. Prospects ghost you more than an Ivan Reitman film.
As someone with something to sell, I feel this in both directions. I get tons of pitches every day and I ignore virtually all of them. And as someone selling, I make tons of pitches a day and get very few responses.
So what do we do? Well, let’s think about sales itself.
Part 2: Moving to Buyer Enablement
Consultants love to come up with new, expensive-sounding words (mainly to justify ongoing high fees), from solution selling to sales enablement to RevOps. But all of sales is predicated mainly on the central idea that it’s the salesperson’s job to sell and behave as though they are the gatekeeper of knowledge about the customer.
Every framework, from the old-fashioned “grab ‘em by the tie and choke them till they buy” to Challenger Sales Methodology to SNAP Selling all assume the customer wants to take the time to learn, to be educated on the options, to make a rational choice, to be thoughtful and reflective. Agencies like Trust Insights especially are told in sales frameworks like Challenger that we need to reframe the customer’s problem, educate them on surprising ways the customer isn’t thinking about the problem, explain how they’re drowning, and show how we’re the novel solution to that problem.
The question is: is that how people actually buy these days?
During the conference and events I speak at, at the bar, in the halls, waiting in lines, I hear the same refrain more and more these days when I ask people about sales From their perspective as a customer. “Oh, I just ask ChatGPT about it.” And we know how reliable generative AI is at getting its facts straight, especially very specific facts.
But that’s how people WANT to buy. They want to delegate work they don’t enjoy to AI - and that’s what we’ve all been advocating as the best use case for AI. DOn’t give AI the work you love to do, the creative, the expressive, the things that fulfill you. Give AI the crap you don’t want to do, that you don’t have time for, that’s so repetitive and boring and painful that you wish it would go away. We call that the TRIPS framework - what to give AI versus what you want to keep - time, repetitiveness, importance, pain, and sufficient data. Katie Robbert walks you through this in our new course, the AI-Ready Strategist.
Guess where dealing with the sales process fits? Yeah. It’s time intensive. It’s repetitive. It’s important but not mission critical most of the time. It’s PAINFUL. And we certainly have enough data, what with RFPs and things, to evaluate whether a vendor meets our needs.
What if we approached sales from the perspective of the buyer? I know a lot of sales methodologies have given lip service to this concept, but they don't actually do it.
Sales enablement is predicated on the idea of giving sales folks materials that enable selling, case studies and scripts and downloads. What if you flipped that on its head to buyer enablement? What if we just gave the buyer our materials instead? The same materials we give to salespeople, just give to the buyer.
Certainly, lots of people do that already to some degree. We have case studies on our websites, we have content marketing, we have podcasts, YouTube, the works. We have all the content we’ve been cranking out for ever and ever to persuade potential buyers.
But all that is predicated on two assumptions:
We assumed, somewhat correctly, that people would use search engines to find that data when they had an unmet need, and from 1995-2015 that was largely true. But beginning about 10 years ago, Google and other search engines started consuming more and more clicks, keeping traffic for themselves.
We can no longer rely on search engines and social media to send qualified traffic to us. We have to provide the resources to prospects and buyers as best as we can.
How? Let's talk AI-powered buyer enablement.
Part 3: AI-Powered Buyer Enablement
AI powered buyer enablement sounds like more fancy consulting talk and I suppose that's true because well, Trust Insights is a consulting firm. But what it really means is providing tools to buyers to let them use what they're already comfortable with to make buying decisions, or at least narrow down buying decisions.
My friend Mitch Joel says that if you want to get on someone's shortlist, the easiest way to do so is to make sure you're never one more thing on their to-do list, to always be taking things off their list rather than putting things on their list. How would you do that from the perspective of the buyer?
The easiest way would be to take the current sales playbook that you have - you do have one, right? - and convert it to a buyer playbook.
Put this prompt in along with your existing sales playbook and look at what comes out. Make sure you're using a generative AI model that has a strong thinking or reasoning mode, such as GPT-5, Gemini 2.5, Claude Opus 4.1, etc.
What should come out is one or more detailed buyer playbooks that you can give to any buyer in any format that they choose and say "here, drop this into your ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini and have a conversation with how we might or might not be able to help you".
You might logically say, "Why wouldn't you create this as a GPT or a Gem or a Claude project for them?" Well, the ugly reality is that salespeople have always been less than transparent. Giving them a closed environment where they can't see what the instructions say probably isn't likely to build trust. (this is the premise of new "digital sales rooms", closed environments with chatbots that will only recommend you and nothing else, and your company is always the right answer for any problem)
You can certainly create one and ask if they'd prefer a pre-baked environment or the raw materials, but always give them the option of radical transparency.
Now what can you do with these buyer guides? Well in addition to just handing the materials to the buyer directly, you can also put them into a system like NotebookLM. As with Gems, GPTs, and Projects, NotebookLM is a closed system, but the key difference is that the buyer can see the documents in the system (which you 100% should enable when you share it). That gives them more transparency, that what you provided to them in raw materials is also in the final version.
Conveniently inside NotebookLM, you can save existing chats and information products in the pre-baked version, saving the customer the step of having to create them. For example, you could create an audio overview of your products and services for a mid market company if you know that that's who you're selling to. Or you could create a video overview from your buyer's guides for the healthcare company that you're pitching, if you know that's who you're selling to.
Here's an example notebook. You can see that it contains not only buyer's guides for our different ideal customer profiles, but pre-baked overviews.
Okay, so that answers the question of how you might use AI tools to create buyer enablement materials. How do you get them in the hands of buyers?
Part 4: The 98% of Non-Buyers
LinkedIn famously did a study a few years ago in which they discovered that for any given market, product, service or company, something like 98% of buyers in that market were not in the buying mode. And that generally fits; think of any major product category, from weddings to real estate to B2B SaaS software. Chances are, you’re not actively buying for most of them right now. I’m not, for example, in the market to buy or sell a house, despite the local realtors pestering me with 12 text messages a day.
How do we remain in the minds of our customers so that when the 2% of the audience that is ready to buy remembers us? I'll give you a hint: it's not twelve text messages a day.
That’s where you should be prepared to invest a lot of resources - time, effort, and budget. In my keynotes, I call these the ABCs - audience, brand, community. These are the three pillars you should be investing in and building every single day.
Let’s review these quickly:
Investing heavily in the ABCs means that when any given person moves out of the 98% of non-buyers into potential or actual buyers, you have multiple ways of reaching them right now. And if you’ve invested heavily in all three, then when your loyal community members do move into buying mode, guess who makes the short list right away?
This answers the question of “how do I get my AI-assisted buyer enablement materials to buyers?” You do it through your community in a non-pushy way. It’s just one more item on the menu that they can take advantage of when they’re ready.
You might have a pinned item in your Slack or your Discord server saying, "hey, here's our buyer enablement materials. If and when you have a question about whether Trust Insights is a good fit for your company, download this and have a conversation with it in ChatGPT or Gemini or the tool of your choice".
That's completely not pushy. It's saying, here's the resource, take it when you're ready, save yourself a bunch of time.
But this requires lots and lots of prep time - budget a minimum of six months of ramp-up time for these initiatives, because you likely have to rebuild trust with your audience (if you’ve been behaving like a typical corporation) and show them lots of value with no expectation of short-term return.
What kinds of value? Think about all the things I’ve built for you over the past few months:
These are examples of what I do and what Trust Insights does regularly and frequently to provide value to you, to give value with the full understanding that 98% of you aren’t going to buy from us at any given time, and frankly some of you never will at all. That’s okay. This is the stuff that paves the way for mind share so that should you be interested in buying, you know what we can do for you.
Additionally, there are people in your audience who can't buy from you. They can't afford you, but they are your evangelists, they are your cheerleaders, they are the people who will recommend you to a whole bunch of other people, and even though they personally can't buy, they know buyers. When you create value and just give value away, you enable those people to become advocates for your buyer enablement materials.
That’s fine, but as many people will quite rightly quip, hope isn’t a strategy and businesses can’t just wait around for the phone to ring. How could we adapt the selling process that we do know into something that’s compatible with the modern age? How do we satisfy stakeholders in sales who want to see salespeople doing something to bring in business?
Part 5: GRACE
Let’s look at the different sales frameworks over the years and what they’ve contributed.
The old days of Hopkins and Ziglar might have been hard-sell, pushy sales people, but they did emphasize one key point that’s lost in today’s world of AI-enabled RevOps (or whatever fancy term we want to use): the personal relationship between seller and buyer. Ziglar in particular was fond of rapport building and emphasizing that all other things being equal, people buy from people they like.
Solution selling taught us to be customer-focused, to see the customer less as an adversary to be overcome and more as a partner to help us understand and customize a solution. The easiest sale is the one the customer sells to themselves.
Insights selling taught us to think in terms of bite-sized content and surprising ideas to pique curiosity about our offerings and demonstrate value quickly.
Challenger taught us the value of a coherent narrative, laddering up from warming to reframes to rational drowning to emotional impact to the new way. Folks who are skilled at Challenger are skilled at good storytelling, at an emotional and factual arc.
As I mentioned at the top of the newsletter, many of these frameworks are predicated on assumptions like information asymmetry (where the seller has more information than the buyer) or rationality, where the seller has the time, energy, and resources to be reflective and deliberate. Those conditions exist less and less.
What could we take from each? What are the best parts we could merge, Voltron-style, into a framework for the modern era?
Let’s revisit our first principles:
If we take these 5 principles and look at all the different frameworks, how could we modernize them into a single, coherent framework to power our sales?
That’s GRACE: give time, reduce pain, assure safety, cover their ass, empower them.
That sounds nice. It also sounds like fancy consulting speak, doesn’t it? How do we put this into practice?
We’ve already talked about AI-enabled sales materials like NotebookLM and knowledge blocks people can use to have a chat with our sales offerings directly. That saves considerable time and shortens their to do list at least somewhat - we’re one less vendor they have to go do extensive digging on. Where one less vendor they have to sit through twenty eight presentations from. This also empowers the buyer to drive the purchase.
We’ve discussed community, which is where we create spaces of psychological safety.
That leaves air cover, and air cover is where we can take concepts from Challenger and Insight Selling - but with a modern AI twist.
When you look at most Challenger and Insight Selling pitches, they’re… bland. Mediocre. Sometimes, they’re painfully obvious or just flagrantly wrong. I’ve lost count of the number of pitches I’ve received in the last two weeks misquoting the MIT study - “95% of all AI projects fail!” (no, that’s not what the study said, dipstick). They were trying to be insightful but instead fell on their faces because no one bothered to read the actual study. Ninety-five percent of enterprise AI projects did not make it out of pilot phase during the six-month study period. If you've ever worked in enterprises, you can't even get a coffee machine approved in six months, much less an enterprise AI project. The fact that more than zero percent made it out of pilot is amazing.
To generate really useful insights, you need to dig deeper than the headlines - and with today’s AI tools, you can do this relatively easily. Here’s how.
First, develop at least one great ideal customer profile, something really robust that you can have a conversation with in your generative AI tool of choice. You need to understand their needs, pain points, goals, and motivations deeply. Once you have at least one ICP, start a conversation with them.
Specifically ask them what kind of study or research might be unique and insightful, something they haven’t come across yet, something that’s contrary to conventional knowledge that might give them a competitive edge in a highly competitive marketplace.
Then commission AI-powered deep research projects to find peer-reviewed research on these topics. Follow the Trust Insights CASINO Framework if you need a starting prompt. Once you get the research, ignore it. You don’t care about the AI synthesis, and there’s a good chance it’s wrong or oversimplified. Instead, you want the sources, the original papers themselves. Download them all and quickly review them.
Then put them all in NotebookLM along with your ICP and start asking specific, detailed questions from the papers. What useful, specific insights from recent research can you find in the papers?
Dig, dig, dig. Find your dozen insights or so, then pass them to your sales playbook and the GRACE framework, and come up with the pieces you need to execute GRACE fluently.
Here’s an example prompt:
Based on our ideal customer profile and the research insights we’ve gathered, let’s assemble these into bite-sized insights that are aligned with the Challenger Sales Framework’s major stages - warming, reframing, rational drowning, emotional impact, new way, our solution - but in compact, concise ways that fit the priorities of the GRACE framework. Each insight should be aligned with one or more GRACE principles, be buyer-centric, and provide value whether or not the prospect chooses to do business with us. Use our Brand Style Guidelines to create a single infographic-style page in the Canvas with HTML, CSS, Tailwind, CDNJS. If needed, use d3.js.
Those insights from real world data could provide air cover For the buyers, could save your prospects time and maybe even money, challenge their thinking, and streamline solutions.
Why does this work? Because it still requires innovative human thought - yours. It still requires understanding your customer. It still requires looking at things from a different lens. We’re not throwing away still valid frameworks like Insight Selling, Challenger, etc. - we’re modernizing them. People are so stressed and so fried that we need to fit our sales to their reality.
Part 6: Wrapping Up
What I’m proposing in this newsletter is a departure from traditional sales. It’s not for the faint of heart. It’s probably best as a pilot, a test at very small scale. But I’m willing to wager a small pastry, retail value less than USD 5, that it will deliver as good results quantitatively as your current sales process, and ideally better because it’s better aligned with how we need to sell today to be relevant.
But I will really bet that it will deliver qualitatively better results because your buyers, when they reach you, will be ready to buy, and you might even shortcut some of the steps of the buying process because you follow the GRACE framework - and because you've truly put the buyer in the driver's seat, even at the risk of them not buying from you.
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Christopher S. Penn
Fractional CMO • B2B Tech Growth Leader • Drove +26.8% MRR (SaaS), +74% Member Growth (InsurTech) • Category Design • ABM • Content Engines • Vibe Marketer
1moThis is great, Christopher. I wonder...If more decisions are being delegated to AI, the real moat might be machine-readable sales: specs, pricing, case studies, FAQs structured so an LLM can scan you in minutes. Not just saving time for buyers, but for their agents too, isn’t just polished for humans, but also structured for machines. For most, this is a whole new layer of alignment. Content that wins hearts, but also parses into an AI’s shortlist. I'm starting to work with companies at a basic (blog and website structure) level to help in this transition. Curious how other teams tackling this new opportunity.