You spend your time proving the number
A salesperson's day has five steps. In a business measured on volume, the widest one is writing up what already happened.
We gave the complexity to an agent. The salesperson just asks.
Which routes declined last week. How many outlets were active today. What volume actually sold.
That is where we ended up. Here is what it replaced.
You leave home before six. Morning meeting at the outlet, set the targets, work the route plan, sit with retailers, find out what is lagging and why.
Then the other half of the job. Writing it up for head office. Answering your own boss on WhatsApp. The same numbers asked for three different ways, in the market and again at the desk.
Long hours in both places. Somebody's evening pays for that.
When I was running sales, one of my priorities was simpler than it sounds. Make the day easier for the person living it.
We mapped the routine properly. What stood out was not the travel and it was not the retailers. It was how much of the effort went into reporting what had already happened, rather than changing what was going to happen next.
That is what being measured on volume looks like from the inside. You spend your time proving the number.
So when agentic AI arrived, we used it to change the job rather than to automate the paperwork. Plain language, in the app they already carry. The feedback head office used to wait for no longer needed writing.
Productivity went up five times. Daily use crossed sixty percent, and that took three months of hard change management, which deserves a post of its own.
Every technology shift changes the work before it changes the job title. I wrote recently about channels moving through phases and how the measure has to move with them. Roles do the same thing, and sales is next.
Everyone is asking whether AI belongs in a sales team. The more useful question is where you point it first. I would not start with the strategy. I would start with the routine.
Not to take cost out. To give the day back to the people living it.
The pointer
Salesforce, State of Sales research, 7,775 sales professionals across four regions, fielded August to September 2022. Reps reported spending 28 percent of the week actually selling. Two caveats before anyone quotes it at me. It surveys B2B sellers rather than field distribution teams, and it is now some years old. I use it because it is the only large sample I can point to that measures the thing this piece is about, not because it describes a Pakistani sales route.