Is a talent crisis coming to sales?

As businesses rush to prove AI competency to investors, common career entry points like sales development representative (SDR) and business development representative (BDR) roles are on the chopping block. Meanwhile, the value of more experienced roles like account executives or customer success representatives is soaring.

Jon Studham is heads of sales at inbound-focused GTM AI platform Spara, which helps companies introduce AI agents into sales. While passionate about what AI can do, Studham is by no means oblivious to change. In a conversation with Revenue Brew, Studham spoke about how AI could affect the sales talent pipeline.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

If the early advantage of AI was volume, which you say is now oversaturating outreach, what is AI better used for in sales?

If you had a chat on your site that was smart and intelligent, that could qualify people, educate the curious and disqualify those that you don’t want to talk to, that’s where we sit. I sit at your extreme top of funnel, where I can sit behind an 800 number. I’m trained like your best SE, your best support person, and your best salesperson all in one. So no matter how they come in, I can triage them to me.

That gets rid of your receptionist. That gets rid of your low-level inbound SDRs that are 20 years old that don’t know anything about the true technology or how to actually handle a sales call or an objection, talk about price, talk about a competitor. I can put all of that inside a prompt and take them out very, very quickly.

As AI takes on more workload, I’ve noticed companies focusing more on those human touchpoints. Can you tell me the importance of that part of the process?

Human touch is the sole reason why humans are going to still be in existence…[AI] can assist me with my job, but once you get to scale, there’s no way AI can do it. The human touch is truly where it’s at.

If sellers have to start in SDR and BDR roles, and they are being replaced, what does that mean for the future of sales talent?

I’ve been wrestling this because I have a six year old myself…I’m concerned, I really am, because when I think about hiring people right now, I will not hire an inbound SDR.

To me, it’s so hard. Smaller companies like me won’t take the risk. They would have to go [to] a larger organization like a Cisco, Microsoft, IBM, Red Hat, or somebody that has training programs…I would hire an outbound BDR because that is still broken. You can get trained on it.

Because of how much noise AI is causing, it seems like those more advanced sales roles are more important than ever. But if sellers have less opportunity to get to those roles then what does that mean for the future?

Right now I’m seed stage, so to me your rolodex matters more than what you’re doing with AI. “Do you have those relationships already built?” is what I need right now because I need to scale very quickly before we go into Series A. My main question for the people that I’m hiring right now is: “You have zero inbound. Who do you know within the first two weeks that you can pick up the phone and call?”

How do young professionals find opportunities for experience in this environment?

Cisco has an academy for college recruits that serves Microsoft, serves Oracle, like all the big ones do. Those companies I’m not too concerned about.

If you want to go get a job at Rubrik or Abnormal Security or Zscaler or Dynatrace— that really doesn’t have their act together, really doesn’t have a training program—it’s like you come in, best of luck to you.