What AI-Powered selling actually means for your sales team

Most founders and sales leaders assume their biggest challenge is finding the right people or having the right pitch. But what if the real problem is far more basic? What if your salespeople are only actively selling for less than a third of their working day?

That was one of the more uncomfortable statistics from our recent masterclass with Tom Nation, an Associate at Sandler. Research from Oracle and Salesforce suggests that just 28% of a salesperson's time is spent on selling activity. The rest goes on researching prospects, writing proposals, logging data, chasing follow-ups, and everything else that fills a working week but does not move a deal forward.

The question Tom posed was simple: what would it mean for your business if you could shift that to 50-50?

Why salespeople struggle

Before diving into AI and tools, Tom explored fundamental sales challenges such as timing mismatches, prospects going cold, and engagement issues, highlighting how AI can help identify and address these pain points more effectively.

The conversation that followed was revealing. Founders on the call described familiar patterns: timing mismatches, prospects going cold mid-process, procurement teams adding weeks of friction, budgets disappearing after months of work. One participant described spending three weeks developing a pitch proposal, only to learn the client had no budget.

A recurring theme was the absence of a clear, shared sales process. Not just a pipeline with stages, but a genuine methodology: how you move an opportunity forward, what questions you ask, when you qualify someone out. As Tom put it, without a system, you default to the buyer's way of buying. And the buyer's buying approach tends not to suit the seller.

The buyer-seller dance

Tom used a useful frame for thinking about the typical sales dynamic. The buyer expresses interest. You do a needs analysis. They act motivated. You send a proposal. They go quiet. You follow up. They avoid commitment, ask for a discount, or disappear entirely.

It sounds familiar because it is. And the problem, as Tom pointed out, is that this dynamic is structurally weighted in the buyer's favour. They get information, leverage, and options. The seller gets more work.

The way out is not to push harder. It is to take control of the process earlier, by qualifying more rigorously before investing time, understanding the real decision-makers before presenting, and ensuring a budget exists before you start writing.

None of this requires AI. It requires discipline and a clear selling system. But it does create the foundation on which technology can then do something useful.

Where AI actually helps

Once the process is in place, the opportunity is to reclaim some of that lost 72%.

Tom outlined four areas where AI tools are having a meaningful impact for sales teams at Sandler and beyond.

Tools like Fathom can help salespeople feel more confident and less overwhelmed by automatically transcribing meetings, summarising key points, and capturing notes, so they can focus on engaging with clients rather than administrative tasks.

The second is personalised outreach. Platforms like Humantic AI and Crystal analyse communication styles and help you adapt your messaging to the person you are writing to. If someone responds better to concise, data-led emails rather than relationship-heavy ones, the tool will tell you. Getting this right matters because generic outreach is increasingly invisible.

The third is prospecting support. Using tools like ChatGPT or Claude to research sectors, map out pain points by persona, and draft targeted messaging saves hours of preparation time. Rather than writing one email template and sending it everywhere, you can build variations that address the specific concerns of a marketing director versus a head of operations.

The fourth is deal scoring and pipeline management. CRM platforms like HubSpot now include built-in deal scoring, flagging opportunities that are stalling, contacts that have gone cold, and follow-ups that are overdue. The goal is to help you focus attention on deals that are genuinely progressing.

Gartner estimates that focusing on these four use cases can free up to 25% of a salesperson's time, underscoring the importance of tracking metrics such as deal velocity and pipeline health to measure AI's impact.

The question is worth sitting with

Tom closed with something that matters more than any specific tool: Are you spending your time on the right prospects in the first place?

AI can make you more efficient, but it requires addressing challenges like data privacy, integration with existing systems, and change management to ensure successful adoption and meaningful results.

If the system is strong, the gains are real. If there is no system, the tools add noise rather than clarity.

That distinction is worth thinking about before reaching for the next shiny platform. And it is the kind of thinking we dig into further in our live sessions, where the frameworks become easier to apply as you work through them against your own business.

You can connect or follow Tom Nation on LinkedIn and find out more about Sandler