Revenue Brew poll highlights AI’s impact on jobs and the art of closing a deal

AI isn’t killing sales; it’s killing the way sales used to be done. The problem is nobody’s sure which changes are going to be stickiest. This might encourage a scattergun approach to deployment: throwing everything at the wall and hoping for the best (from what we’ve learned at Revenue Brew, this way leads to confusion, chaos, and—worse yet—slop). The sentiment among employees tends to range from enthusiastic to reluctant, as organizations navigate this changing landscape. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the generational divide is also a barrier.

So how do the people expected to get the best out of AI actually feel about it? In the spirit of reimagining revenue, we took a closer look with a new audience poll.

Eyes on the prize: Revenue Brew asked our readers if AI had made their day-to-day jobs easier or harder. Nearly half (47%) said the tools made their jobs easier and saved them time. However a combined 34% are either not using it yet (22%), or find it adds more noise than value (12%). As we’ve been covering for some time, much of the debate around AI isn’t necessarily about what it could do in a perfect world, but whether it’s being deployed in the right way in your organization.

According to a December report from Gong, teams using AI are 65% more likely to increase win rates and saw 77% more revenue generation per sales rep. While that’s encouraging for sellers at large, there’s a lot of AI out there and a lot of teams that could benefit from it: An organization might optimize for real-time guidance, or instead focus on the burgeoning multiplayer capabilities. Use cases are becoming more and more idiosyncratic, and often teams have to consider the wider implications of adopting a tool or platform (training and change management come to mind).

Let’s make a deal: While AI can no doubt help revenue teams get over hurdles, we asked our audience what they think is most to blame overall when a deal stalls?

Most respondents (40%) said pricing or budget conversations were the biggest reason. This was followed by the buyer going quiet mid-journey (28%), too many stakeholders and no clear decision-maker (20%), and internal misalignment (7%). Using AI in a more deliberate manner to solve some of these problems could be a good starting point for rev orgs to consider.

The ideal meeting point between human beings and AI tools will continue to be a debate here at Revenue Brew. While automation and agentic systems can no doubt help with prospecting, data enrichment and conversational intelligence, there’s an art to closing a sales deal.

We asked our audience for the most underrated part of getting the account signed, sealed, and delivered: They said understanding the buyer’s internal politics (33%), prepping and researching (28%), following up without being annoying (27%), and knowing when to not push prospects (10%).

If you’re like me, you’ll immediately be thinking about the parts of these processes that are best left to a human, or best augmented by that AI sidekick. We’re in the early innings, so watch this space.