Building Trust In The Age of AI Slop

How to stand out when everyone sounds like a bot

Let's say you're a B2B salesperson. Let's say a big part of your job is outbound sales.

Now imagine your CEO sits you down and gives you this advice:

"I don't want you to focus so much on booking meetings. I just want you to focus on creating a bunch of great first impressions."

What would you do differently?

What would your prospecting emails say? How would you approach cold-calling? What would you ask marketing for? How would you spend your time?

Whether or not anyone ever actually gives you that guidance, you should probably start doing a few of those things you just thought of.

Here's why, and why that thought exercise is becoming more and more important in the age of AI.

The Conversion Pressure Problem

Most salespeople operate under a high level of what I call “conversion pressure.” In other words, there's a constant expectation that every interaction you have with a prospect or customer advances towards a meeting, demo, or a closed deal. While there’s some goodness in conversion pressure (i.e., if you’re not spending your time on things that help you find and close business, you’re probably not spending your time wisely) it also can create a transactional mindset that prospects can smell from miles away.

Ever been told you have "commission breath?" Yep. This is what I’m talking about.

But have you ever sat in on a prospect call with a super-experienced strategic seller? The kind of person that closes million-dollar-plus deals? The kind of person who seems like they’ve mastered the art of selling?

There's something noticeably different about how they approach these conversations. Yes, they're curious. They’re asking good discovery questions. But they're also deftly peppering in bits of value as they ask those questions. They don't just gather information. They control the pace, create moments of levity, share “a-ha” insights and frameworks, and somehow knit together a feeling of trust while getting exactly the answers they need to position their product as effectively as possible.

And here's the really impressive part: The whole time they’re doing all of this, they don’t really seem to be selling at all.

There’s a lesson here. When you tone down the immediate conversion pressure and focus on creating positive, helpful experiences for the person you’re trying to sell to, something counterintuitive happens: you end up with higher conversion rates anyway.

Stealing from a quote I heard a long while back:

"Immaturity asks 'what do you got for me?' while maturity asks 'what's needed here?'"

What we’re talking about is a more mature approach to selling. It’s the difference between a transactional salesperson and someone who knows how to engineer the trust it takes to consistently find, close, and keep customers.

There’s a powerful compounding effect here to be tapped into for those willing to commit to this kind of other-centeredness and the delayed gratification that comes with it. Great first impressions, while they may not immediately turn into closeable sales opportunities, will turn into referrals, word-of-mouth, and people who remember and call you months later when they're actually ready to buy. This is how you build real brand equity (one conversation at a time) and how you start to cultivate the kind of harvestable demand inside a segment, territory, or market that can sustain you for years to come.

Why This Matters In The Age of AI

Here's what makes this approach even more critical right now: Everyone on LinkedIn these days seems hell-bent on convincing you that outbound is 100% automate-able. AI tools and platforms like Clay would love for you to believe that getting someone's attention and convincing them to buy your thing is now simply a matter of assembling a workflow and that they’ve cut the pesky human interaction part out of what it takes to sell something.

We’re all experiencing the unfortunate result. My inbox (yours too) is now flooded with AI slop: messages that sound like they were written by a bot, for a bot, about bots. And if you’re like me, the AI SDR calls to your cell phone are starting too.

Guess what? Whether you’re talking about AI emails or AI phone calls… I've never responded positively to one of them. Ever.

While AI slop sure is annoying and getting worse, here’s the exciting thing about where we’re at: In our rush to scale outbound through automation, we've created the perfect environment for human connection to become a massive differentiator.

When everyone else is optimizing for volume and efficiency, you can win by optimizing for helpfulness and memorability.

What This Actually Looks Like

Back to our initial prompt. If you were truly focused on just creating a bunch of great first impressions, here's a couple things you might think about changing:

• Your emails would answer one “mind reader” question per message. Not your whole pitch, company history, and value proposition crammed into a wall of text. You'd research what specific question your prospects are asking themselves as they learn about your category, then answer each question clearly and helpfully.

• Your cold calls would sound like consultative conversations. Instead of mindlessly pitching your robotic value prop, you'd earn the right to “guess correctly” about what challenges the person on the other line is working through, and you’d share your earned secrets about similar situations you've seen and similar people you’ve helped. .

• You'd ask marketing for content that’s actually helpful to your prospects. Not just lead magnets and ebooks designed to jiu-jitsu people into giving you their email, but genuinely useful resources that give them an answer to a question they have, or help them understand their options for solving their problem a little better. Stuff you write after talking to a bunch of customers, getting inside their heads, and discovering what they were wrestling with before they decided to work with you.

• You'd create give-to-get scenarios. Before asking for someone's time, you'd be crystal clear about what they'll get from the half-hour you’re asking them for. Market perspective? Stories about how others in their seat solved similar problems? Useful data? Whatever it is, make it a good trade. Sweeten the deal. Lower the cognitive load. Do your best to make it an easy yes.

The Human Touch in an AI World

As AI continues to flood our world with increasingly sophisticated but ultimately soulless outreach, the companies willing to double down on creating genuine human connections have a chance to stand out even more.

The technology isn't the problem. It's how we're using it. Instead of automating the human out of human connection, we should be using these tools to do better research, personalize more thoughtfully, and be more useful to the people we’re trying to sell to.

Your prospects don't want to feel like they're talking to a workflow. They want to feel understood, helped, and respected.

So here's my challenge: Pick one prospect interaction this week and approach it like your only goal is creating a great first impression. Turn down the conversion pressure. Just focus on being genuinely useful to this human being. Get curious. Ask some questions to honestly figure out if you can help, tell them clearly how, and share a little about the other options for solving their problem that might be worth looking at.

Do the work ahead of time this requires, and take a minute before you start talking to set a simple intention:

“I’m here to help this person.”

See what happens.

I bet you (and they) will be pleasantly surprised.