Sales, AI and the formula.

Many sales teams are struggling to make AI work.

I think a big reason is trust. They switch the agent on, then find out what it said to their best prospects.

You already have most of what you need to fix that: your past deals, your emails, and what your best people actually sent. Test on your own data first, and get to a confidence level before anything goes out.

This is how I do it, and how I've done it;

1. Shadow. The agent drafts for every lead, and nobody sees it. Compare its drafts with what your team actually sent.
2. Approve. A person approves, edits or rejects every draft. Track one number: approved without edits.
3. Automate. Once a segment hits 95% approved without edits, over enough volume, it can send on its own.
4. Audit. Keep sampling. If quality slips, it goes back to approval.

The edits are the most valuable part. Each one becomes an example that makes the next draft better.

How are you deciding when an AI workflow is good enough to go live?

If you're building AI into your sales process and want to do it in a way you can trust, my approach is here: harryjamescoburn.com/ai

I've put an AI version of my voice on my website.

It's interesting. It's also a bit creepy.

It's built on everything on my site: how I work, my case studies and how I fix sales. You can have a proper chat with it about what's stuck in your sales, and it'll point you to a next step. It tells you it's an AI straight away, and I read every conversation.

Why? I'm testing loads of new AI tools at the moment, and the best way to understand them is to build with them. And speed matters in sales. At one company I worked with, we got first replies to inbound leads from about a day to five minutes, with AI agents.

Have a go and try to break it: harryjamescoburn.com/ai

So what do you think? Is it weird? Is it scary? Is it something you'd actually use?

And if there's an AI tool you think I should test next, drop it in the comments. I'll try it and share what I find.

When deals drag on for months, look at how much you're asking for in the first conversation.

One client I worked with, a forest carbon scale-up, was asking landowners to commit their land for 50 years. They were often older and traditional, cynical about carbon credits, and thinking about their children. Sales were struggling, and deals took 75 days on average.

We changed four things;

1. Who we sold to. Professional owners who were ready to commit, not anyone with land.
2. How the team worked. We split it into SDRs and AEs, so booking meetings and closing deals were separate jobs.
3. What we said. Their problems and hurdles first, including the fear of being locked in for 50 years.
4. Who we spoke to. We mapped every stakeholder and brought them in early. Often that was the whole family.

In the end, these sales were all about trust.

The average sales cycle went from 75 days to 16. Deals got bigger too: in one market the average deal went from about €5–10k to around €70k at its peak. Quarterly sales went from about €0.1M to €5.4M in nine months (both estimated on the company's own model).

My takeaway: find the right things to change, and sell to the people who are ready to say yes.

What's the one change that would speed up your sales right now?

If you want to see where your sales are leaking, my 2-minute scorecard is here: harryjamescoburn.com/scorecard