The reconstruction tax paid before a sales decision

A lot of the work we call selling happens before the rep has actually decided what to do.

Not because they lack information.

Because they have to establish what that information means now.

Deals change continuously:

→ A conversation changes the strength of the champion
→ A new stakeholder changes the path to a decision
→ A missed commitment changes the significance of the timeline
→ New evidence can strengthen, weaken or contradict what we previously believed

Most sales software records these things.

The rep maintains the interpretation.

That distinction matters when we think about AI.

The obvious application of AI is to make reconstruction faster.

Summarise the meeting. Surface the relevant history. Answer a question about the deal. Prepare the rep for the next call.

That is AI-assisted.

I think AI-native sales starts from a different assumption:

Why are we reconstructing the deal at all?

If the system observes the evidence as it changes, it can maintain a current interpretation of the deal continuously.

Not simply a summary.

The commercial State of the deal.

What we currently understand. What has changed. What remains unknown. Where evidence conflicts. How momentum and risk are developing. What those changes mean for what should happen next.

Then the division of labour starts to change.

The system doesn’t wait for the rep to ask it to understand the deal.

It maintains that understanding as part of how it operates.

The rep can spend more of their time on the part that actually requires them: judgement, relationships, creativity and execution.

There is an economic consequence to that distinction too.

The reconstruction tax isn’t paid once.

It is paid across every deal, by every rep, before countless decisions. And then often paid again by managers trying to establish the same reality.

AI-assisted can reduce that tax.

AI-native gives us the opportunity to design it out.

Originally posted on LinkedIn