The rise of the sales creator: How they’re fighting off “purposeless” tasks using AI

Sellers are allergic to anything that feels like busywork. They want to focus on what matters, not get lost in complex tools that feel distant from revenue-driving activities. This is the fundamental flaw of traditional sales tech tools: Reps’ daily tasks don't directly contribute to moving deals forward.

Thankfully, the proliferation of “purposeless” sales activities, as many of us see them, is a flaw that AI is poised to fix by democratizing workflow creation.

Companies everywhere are moving beyond top-down programming and toward a future where sales teams are empowered to create their own solutions. Yes, these “sales creators” are playing within the bounds of the platforms that are provided, but the seller is in the driver’s seat. It's fascinating to see what happens when sales ICs have the power of software developers, and how quickly they’re streamlining tasks and refocusing on true selling activities.

The real revolution of AI isn't just its processing power, but its ability to democratize creation. Sellers can build their own tailored workflows using a prompt or a sequence of prompts as a tool. It’s an ability that transforms my sellers from passive users into active creators.

This empowerment taps into a fundamental human desire that extends far beyond the sales floor. When the predominant use cases for ChatGPT are "Help me write" and "Help me learn," this isn't just a consumer trend; it's a profound market signal. People want to learn more, and faster, and they want to communicate better. If a sales organization isn’t joining or, preferably, facilitating and accelerating those two manifest demands, it is necessarily failing.

In this new paradigm, sellers are no longer just executing strategies; they are co-creating them. Adapting, iterating, and sharing prompts that lead to successful outcomes fosters a dynamic, creative environment where insights and best practices proliferate organically. It’s customization that’s built by and productionized by sales, for sales.

When it’s implemented correctly, AI should feel like a perfectly executed "alley-oop" in basketball. Ideally, AI acts as a superintelligence that gives us the ball so we can make the slam dunk ourselves. That’s a technology I can trust, and it’s one my teams and I want to play with.

The goal isn't to have AI make the shot for you, but to have it lay up the ball in such a way that you can deliver the dunk. Technology shouldn’t remove our agency or our responsibility for the outcome, and the final shot is where the accountability, creativity, and ultimate value of the play reside. AI provides critical intelligence, refined data, and contextual insights, but the human seller retains the final judgment and the glory of a beautifully executed play.

What AI should not do, however, is automatically compose territories or take propensity-to-buy scoring to an extreme. Instead, I want reps to have this information and be able to make discerning decisions as they go through their top prospects, considering whether to deprioritize one retailer in favor of another because they think it’s a better fit.

This is the essence of the alley-oop machine. AI empowers sellers with insights, allowing them to make more informed, critical decisions, and ultimately achieve greater success. It supports, enhances, and amplifies their capabilities.

The AI landscape is moving fast, to say the least, and I’m watching FOMO (the fear of missing out) impact purchasing behaviors. You’re likely seeing it too. But simply rushing to adopt every new solution can lead to further tool fatigue and failed initiatives.

The key to AI’s successful adoption on sales teams lies in building trust through purposeful implementation and proven success. I advocate for tight pilots with very small groups, to build really powerful use cases and customer stories. When our sellers see their peers, people they identify with and whose KPIs they share, achieve tangible success with AI, they’re naturally inclined to explore its benefits. Then I take those success stories to increasingly broader concentric circles within our organization to create organic buy-in.

I’ve shared, for example, my team's current upsell opportunity ritual. With the current shift of account managers into a revenue-generating function, my team uses a synthesis of product signals and conversational AI to identify upsell opportunities. These aren't just handed over; they're workshopped on a weekly basis in our mid-market channel. AI is our intelligent scout, finding the alley-oop, while our team collaboratively plans the slam dunk.

This is the type of purposeful integration that must be the foundation of any successful AI pilot.

With revenue AI, the path forward is about charting a course with intention, trust, and a deep understanding of what truly motivates sales professionals.

By transforming AI into an assist and ally-oop machine that empowers sellers to create, learn, and perform with purpose, we’ll not only avoid purposeless activity, but unleash unprecedented levels of creativity and success. As a member of Gong's Customer Advisory Board, I get to preview and help shape AI’s upcoming capabilities, and it’s incredibly exciting to consider how teams might put them into practice. I can’t wait to see their playbooks come to life.