This is the TitanX newsletter, where GTM is built on conversations, and the precision that makes them possible - Read more.
Gong published their big State of Revenue AI report.
The thread is pretty simple: because AI hasn’t been fully adopted, quotas are not being hit.
Meh.
Correlation, not causation.
My guess is more cynical: your reps are distracted by AI.
Your leaders are distracted by AI.
You
are distracted by AI.
Smartphones already did this to us, so it’s nothing novel:
We traded real connection for a sense of connection.
AI is doing something else:
We’re trading real productivity for a sense of productivity.
Haven’t you noticed how the mere availability of AI reduces your desire to do hard things mentally?
The Gong report shows real signs of this:
87% of orgs use AI, but only 6% say it’s a revenue driver
Opportunities per rep dropped nearly 10% across the board, in every segment. Where did all the prospecting go?
You could argue reps are spending more time researching accounts. But as one good friend told me, his reps spend way too much time researching with AI, so they’re 2 or 3 days in before attempted outreach. With a good prompt/skill/data, it’s a 5 minute exercise before you should be engaging.
Or better yet, just call the account and ask them questions. Crazy idea.
Stanford/Betterup beat me to this punch, though they weren’t look at sales. They estimate 40% of knowledge workers received “workslop” in the last month.
I’ve been guilty of workslop.
Half-hearted attempts to quicken output with AI.
It feels like you’re making something in the moment.
It really does.
I have been part of marketing orgs that really struggled with this kind of “productivity-focused productivity” rather than “outcome-focused productivity” before.
There were 40 of us on the team. Every Tuesday we had a 90-minute all-team session where the CMO had every team lead walk through a powerpoint with status updates.
Each team spent 2-6 hours every Monday updating that powerpoint.
You do the math.
It was extreme waste.
Marketing teams live or die off of their ability to create touchpoints with other humans not at their same company. These should be external people. ICP people. Fit prospects.
Shipping stuff “out the door” is the single key ingredient to marketing success.
Sales is no different. Conversations with other humans cannot be forsaken in an effort to… what? Make cool documents?
Most orgs are reacting to the problem of AI adoption with more AI initiatives. That can help, but it’s mostly the wrong lens. nstead, think about what your objectives are without using the phrases “prompt” or “AI” or “LLM” or anything else AI-related.
Push AI to the edge of agendas, as a tool for accomplishing your objectives. I know it’s hard with linkedin hype everywhere offering to fix everything, and there are key initiatives where AI can level up your outbound (TAM modeling, ICP definitions, automated account scoring).
But this is still mostly tinker-land thinking; the teams we see who succeed militantly protect their reps’ focus time for calling and speaking with prospects.
If you found out your top reps were messing with middleware (Zapier, Make.com, etc) for fun for an hour a day, how would you feel? It’s not that AI isn’t extremely interesting, useful, and novel in its ability to synthesize, but it’s also highly hallucinogenic and wildly expensive in the wrong hands.
Those initiatives should be kept with expert operators who share results out with the rest of the team (revops/GTM engineering is the common example).
Then lean into the hard questions to ask yourself and your teams:
Are we protecting time that should be spent talking to prospects?
What are the activities where distributed AI use is really meaningful? And how do we ensure they don’t balloon to suck up too much of our time?
Who knows how to do with AI the main creative strategies and initiatives we’re trying to accomplish? Why not park with them to get it to a feedback-ready level and then share around?
Has our time devoted to conversing with prospects gone down in the last 12-24 months?
If you do make stuff to share externally with AI, for the love of all things good please make it concise. Otherwise your prospects will drop it into their AI and boom - now your LLMs are talking to each other. Not in a good way.
Read Gong’s report here and let me know if I’m wrong.
Thanks for reading,
Evan Dunn (LinkedIn)
P.S. Where do you fall on the simplify-versus-tinker thing? Hit reply, I read every response.