Sales needs more, not less humans

unless you believe in bots buying from other bots

Author

Krisztian Berecz
November 13, 2024

Hi, my name is Krisztian Berecz. 

I’ve been playing the sales game for startups since 2017, helping companies like SEON or TestGorilla scale their revenue from product-market fit to over $15 million in ARR.

In less than a decade, sales have changed a lot: playbooks and methods were tried, scaled, and beaten to the ground. The writing is on the wall: buyers today are tired, and outbound channels are succumbing to worsening returns as a result as we have entered the Great Ignore1 .

It seems that the sales world has painted itself into a corner: what started off as the “Predictable Revenue Model” over a decade ago has, under the blissful era of ZIRP developed into every company copying one another, leading to bad and unsustainable practices.

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While capital was cheap, it was trivial for companies to scale their sales motion with more people in seats and have them doing cold outreach to everyone imaginable. As the music stopped, budgets got tighter and all of a sudden this model simply made no sense anymore. Painful layoffs followed with the remaining staff asked to do more with less, resulting in missed targets and burnout as the macroeconomic environment never really recovered.

This should have been an opportunity for reflection, not the least for tech startups who now found themselves with unsustainable burn rates and overinflated valuations that just maybe things should be done differently.


That instead of focusing on numbers and metrics, we should be focusing on building trust and connection with our buyers, whether they’re in-market or not.

But that’s not what happened. Out of nowhere, AI came along, promising a magic pill for executives who were tasked with reinventing their GTM motions under precarious economic conditions.

As many of these executives have never known anything but ZIRP, AI seemed like a godsend: they could eat their cake and have it too.

Not to worry about growth if we axe our sales and marketing departments: just throw a few people at these fancy new AI tools, and we can continue scaling our previous playbooks without having to re-think our entire approach!

But that’s the point: the playbooks that evolved during ZIRP can only be efficient during similar economic circumstances. In the real world, people still buy from other people they trust, and that requires not just humans in the loop, but humans with passion and creativity.

Sorry, not buying it.

Hence the name of this newsletter: Human-Led Sales.

As a Founder and CEO myself, I’m not a Luddite. I can see the allure of AI technology. In certain ways, GPTs are transformative of tedious workflows and can help enable humans to do better, more engaged work in the Centaur model2 .

What I’m not a fan of, however, is the blind, cult-like trend-chasing, of retrofitting not just our tools, but our entire processes on a fancy new piece of technology that’s still largely unproven in the long run, and where the finances are underwritten by the biggest VC investments to date.

This is especially true in the field of sales, which is an art form based primarily on forming and fostering human connections, understanding one another, and building trust over time.

So the goal of this newsletter is to reflect on that human connection, how it’s built and formed despite the technological innovation (or enshittification3 ) around us that happens.

If you agree with me that it’s highly unlikely that we’ll be doing business in a world where AI bots sell to AI bots, I welcome you to subscribe to the Human-Led Sales newsletter. Here, I’ll share not just my thoughts about how our environment is changing, but share practical tips on what works and what doesn’t, as well as what we’re learning by building Captiwate.

So hit subscribe below!