No, AI Is Not Going to Kill the Closer Role

Being a real human being has never been more valuable in the business world than it is right now.

What's changing is the buyer.

Saw a post from a guy in industrial sales who said face time is MORE valuable in getting deals done than it was a year ago, not less.

AI is everywhere but deals are still closing in person, too.

Here's what I think that means for the Casino.

AI is killing the comparison shopper who wants to research 6 options and compare them all against each other. We all hate that buyer haha — and those chronic window shoppers don't convert well anyway.

What AI is letting the buyer do now before they ever book a call with a company is filter, and filter HARD.

By the time they're on Zoom with a closer they've already had Perplexity do Deep Research on your offer to find out if it's relevant and/or legit. Plus, if they use AI all the time and it's learned their preferences deep enough, it WILL recommend one way or the other based on those preferences if it's worth their time to meet with you.

And anyone who's NOT doing this yet… just give it time. It's coming full mainstream.

BUT, not to fret! This is where it gets cool.

If someone IS on a call with you, they are going to be a GOLD BIG MONEY PROSPECT.

They're going to be WAY more qualified and they've basically already half-bought. They just need to feel like a human is actually on the other side of this thing.

Which means objection handling is going out the window.

And what's going to replace it is YOU being the only NON-AI thing in a buyer's day.

You sound like a person. You laugh at the wrong moment. You get something wrong and self-correct, you stutter, trip over your words. No "pitching," just talking.

And that realness, the imperfection, is what's going to sell.

Forget tonality toggling.

Develop domain expertise. Be an actual expert. Be curious, tailor solutions and let the buyer buy the way they want. Because they are going to anyway and they have even MORE power to do so, whether you like it or not.

Whether real or perceived, AI is going to make people feel invincible, and they're NOT going to take generic gooroo gobbledygook or be talked to in word tracks and pre-loaded scripts without telling you to go pound sand.

AI is going to empower buyers, which if you allow it to do its thing, will pay off TREMENDOUSLY for you and your offer.

The ones who are going to get bamboozled out are the run of the mill, non-unique, doing-it-like-everyone-else offers and processes. Not a bad thing though. They were always going to lose to AI eventually because that IS what AI is good at. Pattern matching and saying the next right thing.

If your hiring filter is still "high tonality, high conviction, high closing rate," you're filtering for the version of a closer that's about to get automated into loony toon land.

The new moat is: can this person have a REAL conversation.

A real-time back and forth that changes depending on what each party says to each other. Basically, can we have a real conversation with another human being about something hard.

That's it. That's the whole thing.