Customer Obsession Will Define the AI Era But Human Connection Is Still Sales’ Greatest Advantage

Recently, I sat down with Eric Berridge, CEO of Coastal – a top-ranked Salesforce, data, and AI consulting firm. We talked about everything from the heart of customer obsession to the future of CRM and why the hype around AI is both warranted and, at times, misplaced.

What emerged from our discussion wasn’t just another prediction about technology’s impact on sales; it was a manifesto for human connection in an increasingly automated world.

The Empathy Imperative

“Everyone talks about having empathy and listening,” Berridge told me, his voice carrying the weight of over three decades in sales. “These are core values that you hear thrown around corporate America all the time. Not a lot of people actually practice those values. They think they do.”

This isn’t cynicism; it’s a battle cry for authenticity in an age of shallow digital interactions. Berridge’s approach to customer obsession goes far beyond the platitudes found in corporate mission statements. At Coastal, they literally ride along with their customers, buy their products, and witness their daily struggles firsthand.

“Until you understand their vantage point, until you understand what is driving their success and what their challenges are, it’s very difficult to come up with products and services that will serve their needs,” he explained.

This philosophy aligns with recent research from Harvard Business Review, which found that companies with the highest customer empathy scores grew revenues 1.5 times faster than their less empathetic competitors. But Berridge takes this concept further, arguing that true customer obsession requires a kind of professional vulnerability – putting yourself in positions where you might discover uncomfortable truths about your own assumptions.

The Great AI Paradox

Perhaps nowhere is the tension between human and artificial intelligence more pronounced than in the current AI adoption landscape. Berridge cited a statistic from Coastal’s 2025 research report, AI Isn’t Delivering – Here’s What To Do About It, that should give every executive pause: “67% of companies expect to increase AI spending, but only 21% report proven outcomes.”

This gap isn’t a failure of AI technology; it’s a failure of foundation. “The tools work,” Berridge emphasized, referencing Salesforce’s Agentforce platform. “But they’re only as good as the quality of data that you give them access to.”

Forrester Research corroborates this assessment, with their latest report indicating that 73% of enterprise AI initiatives fail due to data quality issues, not algorithmic limitations. The constraint isn’t computational power; it’s the messy, inconsistent, siloed data that most organizations have accumulated over decades of digital transformation.

“Today, with AI, the constraint is the data,” Berridge observed. “The first step that CIOs are going through right now to release that constraint is they’re redoing their architectures and they’re building modern tech architectures that surround their CRM system.”

This insight reveals a deeper truth about innovation adoption. Just as the internet’s potential remained largely unrealized until bandwidth and infrastructure caught up, AI’s promise in sales will remain unfulfilled until organizations rebuild their data foundations. Berridge compared the current moment to 1998, when everyone understood the internet’s power but lacked the infrastructure to harness it effectively.

The Death of Administrative Selling

If AI’s immediate impact is constrained by data quality, its long-term implications for the sales profession are nothing short of revolutionary. Berridge painted a future where the traditional administrative burden of selling – the endless data entry, report generation, and process documentation that has plagued sales professionals for decades – simply disappears.

“If you think your job as a seller is to do a bunch of administrative work, well, I’ve got news for you: There’s a chatbot that can do that a million times faster than you,” he said with characteristic directness.

This isn’t a distant future possibility; it’s happening now. Gartner’s 2024 Sales Technology Survey found that 68% of sales organizations are already using AI for administrative tasks, with early adopters reporting a 23% reduction in time spent on non-selling activities.

But here’s where Berridge’s vision becomes truly compelling: As AI handles the mechanical aspects of selling, it elevates the importance of distinctly human capabilities. “Invest in your relationship skills, invest in your creative skills. Be able to paint a vision and a narrative for your customer about their future that they want to move into.”

This shift represents more than operational efficiency; it’s a return to selling’s fundamental purpose. When I started Selling Power decades ago, the best salespeople weren’t just order-takers or process-followers; they were visionaries who helped customers imagine better futures for themselves and their organizations.

The Conversation Imperative

In our increasingly digital world, Berridge made a distinction that every sales professional should internalize: the difference between communicating and conversing. “I work with a lot of sellers,” he explained, “and I always ask this question: Did you talk to the customer? And the first answer I get is, ‘Yes, I talked to the customer.’ But I clarify that question. I say, ‘Well, did you have a conversation with them?’”

The revelation is often sobering. What sellers describe as “talking” frequently turns out to be email exchanges, text messages, or conversations with partners rather than actual customers. This digital substitution – what Berridge calls “the digital chasm” – represents one of the most significant threats to sales effectiveness in the modern era.

McKinsey’s research supports this concern, showing that B2B buyers who engage in high-quality conversations with sales representatives are 8.2 times more likely to make a purchase than those who rely primarily on digital interactions. Yet their data also reveals that the average B2B salesperson spends less than 20% of their time in direct customer conversation.

“Read body language. Truly qualify what’s going on,” Berridge urged. “And this doesn’t happen over the digital chasm. It actually happens when, as human beings, we interact with each other.”

The Performance Acceleration Effect

One of Berridge’s most provocative predictions concerns AI’s impact on sales team dynamics. Rather than simply making everyone more productive, he believes AI will accelerate performance management – making the differences between top performers and underperformers starker and more undeniable.

“I think AI will accelerate performance management. I think sales is only going to get harder because we will be more adamant about sellers that perform. We will easily identify those individuals.”

This isn’t necessarily a dystopian vision; it could represent the professionalization of sales in ways the industry has long sought. When administrative barriers are removed and performance data becomes more transparent, organizations can focus their development resources on those with the greatest potential while helping others find roles better suited to their strengths.

The implications extend beyond individual performance to team composition. As AI handles routine tasks, sales teams may become smaller but more specialized – with each member responsible for higher-level strategic thinking and relationship building.

The Infrastructure of Innovation

Berridge’s insights on data architecture reveal a crucial truth about business transformation: The most visible changes often depend on invisible foundations. While executives focus on flashy AI applications, the real work happens in data lakehouses, integration platforms, and the unglamorous task of data cleansing.

“We’re big partners of Snowflake,” Berridge noted, “and a lot of our customers today are migrating a lot of their data into these data lakehouses like Snowflake, and they’re using modern techniques to get at that data to feed AI.”

This infrastructure-first approach mirrors successful technology adoptions throughout history. The companies that thrived during the internet revolution weren’t just those with the best websites; they were those with the best back-end systems to support digital commerce. Similarly, AI success in sales will go to organizations that build the right data foundations, not just those with the most sophisticated algorithms.

The Relationship Renaissance

Berridge revealed something profound about the essence of selling that has defined the greatest sales professionals throughout history: the primacy of human relationships. 

“Some people are cut out for it; some people aren’t,” he acknowledged. “And I do believe the skill that is going to be more important than ever in sales is your ability to relate to people.”

This isn’t the relationship-building of yesteryear, built on golf games and expense account dinners. Berridge envisions something far more sophisticated: the emergence of sales professionals who design experiences, craft narratives, and build trust in ways no algorithm can replicate.

Consider the profound shift: As AI handles routine interactions – answering product questions, processing standard orders, resolving basic service issues – the human sales professional’s role becomes intensely focused on the irreplaceably human: complex problem-solving, strategic visioning, and what psychologist Daniel Goleman termed “emotional intelligence.”

But here’s where Berridge’s insight becomes truly transformative. This isn’t about choosing between technology and humanity; it’s about creating what we could call “augmented empathy”: the seamless integration of human insight and machine intelligence that makes customer obsession both deeper and more scalable than ever before.

The companies that understand this synthesis – that invest equally in developing their people’s relationship capabilities and building robust AI infrastructure – will inherit the future of selling. They will create customer experiences so personalized, so anticipatory, and so genuinely caring that they transcend traditional vendor-client relationships to become true partnerships.

A Call to Action

Berridge’s vision challenges every sales professional to answer a fundamental question: In a world where machines can handle the mechanical aspects of selling, what uniquely human value do you bring?

The answer isn’t found in resisting AI or clinging to outdated processes. It’s found in embracing what Berridge calls the “impossible” – the audacious belief that deep human connection, combined with technological leverage, can create customer experiences that seemed unimaginable just a few years ago.

Berridge remembered a meeting where Oracle founder Larry Ellison told his salespeople, “You have to believe in the impossible.” Today, the impossible isn’t just closing bigger deals or entering new markets. It’s creating a future where technology amplifies rather than replaces human connection, where customer obsession becomes the foundation for sustainable competitive advantage, and where the art of selling reaches new heights precisely because we’ve automated away everything that isn’t truly art.

This is our industry’s moonshot moment. Just as President Kennedy didn’t call for better rockets but for landing on the Moon, we cannot settle for marginally better sales processes. We must reimagine what selling can become when freed from its administrative shackles and elevated to its highest purpose: helping human beings create better futures for themselves and their organizations.

To learn more, download this insightful research report: AI Isn’t Delivering: Here’s What To Do About It.