Safety, problem solving and creating value between organisations

30th September 2025 |   Guy Lloyd and Professor Nick Lee

ISP managing director Guy Lloyd and Warwick Business School’s Professor Nick Lee are in conversation with celebrated sales researcher and author Professor Neil Rackham, known for his pioneering sales research and developing the SPIN methodology.

Guy Lloyd: What are the big changes you’ve seen in selling activity since you were doing your research for SPIN Selling?

Neil Rackham: I think the fundamental change is the shift away from the transactional sale as a face-to-face sale. I’m seeing new changes that are quite alarming in some ways: that is AI is entering into the more complex transactional sale in a major way. It’s entering in two ways. One is it’s being used by sales organisations as part of their problem-solving algorithms that they can put to the customer. So, you increasingly see someone sitting down with a customer with a laptop and saying, well, we have AI here. Let’s program in your elements for your situation and look at what your alternatives might be. Technology-enabled selling with an AI component has become very common here in the United States in the larger sale. You scarcely see a significant sales meeting without people pulling out technology to assist in the interaction. That’s a huge change. The second change is you’re seeing it on the purchasing side. Increasingly, for fairly routine problems, you don’t need the salesperson that you needed ten years ago.

How far could AI go?

We’re getting the same erosion in the professional sale that you’re getting in the “professional everything” as AI becomes ever more sophisticated. That does raise an interesting question. The question is, how far could AI go? Already we’re seeing some organisations that have an AI interface, so it’s built into their supply chain that, with certain suppliers, “my AI talks to your AI and between them we set up schedules”. What that does is it speeds up the process and takes away some of the need for human interaction.