The Hidden Costs of Efficiency

Hello and invited to The GTM Newsletter by GTMnow – publication by 50,000+ gross professionals play to enactment up-to-date and standard their companies and careers. GTMnow is nan media marque of GTMfund – sharing go-to-market proposal from nan apical 1% of gross operators including nan 350 executives down nan fund, news, and our viewpoints from moving pinch hundreds of portfolio companies.

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The Hidden Costs of Efficiency: How to Counteract AI’s Impact connected Sales Skills

AI and automation devices committedness efficiency, but they besides travel pinch unintended consequences. Every automation — whether it’s acold calling, note-taking, aliases follow-ups — outsources tasks that build captious skills. These “skill byproducts” are basal to semipermanent success. Leaders request to rethink really to equilibrium exertion take pinch nan request to cultivate nan quality skills that thrust precocious capacity successful sales. Let’s get into it.

The accomplishment byproduct framework

Every activity comes pinch a accomplishment that’s acquired arsenic a byproduct of performing it repeatedly. When that activity is automated, nan associated accomplishment atrophies aliases is ne'er developed successful nan first place.

Examples of accomplishment byproducts:

• Cold calling: Builds grit, resilience, and speedy reasoning nether pressure.

• Manual follow-ups: Develops heavy listening, connection-making, and empathetic communication.

• Note-taking during meetings: Sharpens nan expertise to synthesize accusation and place patterns.

Automation isn’t caller — it’s been changing really we activity for decades.

• Google Maps replaced navigation skills.

• Dating apps reduced nan request for in-person approaches.

• Wikipedia diminished nan mahfuz of humanities facts.

The emergence of AI is only accelerating this trend.

“Back successful nan day, astir jobs made america physically strong. Now, we person to deed nan gym. The aforesaid is existent for cognitive skills successful sales—we request to deliberately build them.”

– Peter Kazanjy (Co-Founder of Atrium)

A playbook for preserving skills

With activities being automated, a deliberate strategy is needed to guarantee your squad doesn’t suffer basal skills while adopting AI. This is simply a 4-step model for doing so:

1. Map skills to activities

Identify nan cardinal income skills that automation whitethorn erode and nan activities that build them:

• Grit and resilience: Cold calls, rejection handling.

• Deep listening and synthesis: Writing follow-ups manually aliases reviewing telephone recordings.

• Pattern recognition: Manually analyzing purchaser behaviour aliases segmenting customer needs.

2. Introduce “Skill Gyms”

Like a gym for beingness fitness, create opportunities to believe these captious skills deliberately:

• Role-playing simulations: Use AI-powered devices to believe acold calls and find calls successful a controlled environment. Reps tin get hundreds of “at-bats” earlier going unrecorded pinch prospects.

• Manual onboarding exercises: Require caller hires to return gathering notes, draught follow-ups, aliases behaviour outreach manually earlier transitioning to automation.

• Reflection exercises: After each call, person reps summarize nan speech and place cardinal takeaways without relying solely connected AI-generated notes.

3. Maintain accountability loops

Automation tin lead to complacency if not paired pinch accountability. Use capacity metrics to guarantee skills are being actively developed:

• Track manual outreach activity for caller hires and periodically for tenured reps.

• Measure discovery telephone depth and place gaps successful really questions link to purchaser needs.

• Review manual woody notes to guarantee synthesis skills are intact.

4. Balance automation pinch quality growth

Use AI to heighten ratio but guarantee it complements quality skills alternatively than replacing them. For example, alternatively of automating gathering follow-ups entirely, usage AI to supply a draught and require reps to refine it pinch their ain observations and context.

TL;DR: Preserve skills, don’t switch them

1. Identify skills automation mightiness erode and representation them to activities.

2. Create deliberate “gyms” for practicing these skills — role-playing, manual exercises, and reflection.

3. Hold reps accountable for maintaining these skills done metrics and capacity reviews.

4. Leverage AI arsenic a instrumentality to support ratio while reinforcing skill-building.

Automation isn’t going anywhere, but nan teams that harvester exertion pinch deliberate skill-building will outperform those that trust connected AI alone.

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GTM 121: Listening to Your Customers Without Obeying pinch Crunchbase’s CRO Neal Patel

Nealesh Patel is nan CRO astatine Crunchbase, a starring level for backstage institution intelligence. With complete 25 years of acquisition successful nan tech industry, Neal has a proven way grounds of executing progressive maturation strategies, landing innovative partnerships, processing gross streams, and building winning teams. As nan leader of Crunchbase’s go-to-market functions (Strategic Partnerships, Sales, BD, Marketing, Customer Success/Experience, Revenue Operations), arsenic good arsenic nan de facto wide head of its information licensing business, Neal has a cross-functional and holistic knowing of really to supply worth to customers, make revenue, and accelerate growth. Under his leadership, Crunchbase has much than 4X’d its unsocial users, accrued its yearly recurring gross by complete 75x, and secured partnerships pinch ample brands for illustration S&P, LinkedIn, NVIDIA, Monday.com, Perplexity, G2, Factset, Amazon, and Snowflake. Neal is besides an progressive committee member, advisor, and investor successful respective high-growth startups, wherever he leverages his expertise and web to thief them standard and succeed.

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🚀 Startups to watch 

Writer – announced a $200M Series C astatine a $1.9B valuation. Writer CEO May Habib says nan caller cash, which brings nan full magnitude raised to $326 million, will beryllium utilized for merchandise improvement and cementing nan company’s activity successful nan endeavor generative AI category.

Pocus – launched their AI Strategy instrumentality to nan wide public. This is simply a instrumentality disposable arsenic a Google Chrome hold that helps reps prioritize, investigation and return action successful immoderate favoite engagement tools.

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This newsletter was wholly written and edited by Scott Barker and Sophie Buonassisi (not AI!).

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