If it feels like every morning brings another headline about AI not living up to expectations, you’re not imagining it. At the June 2026 Revenue Acceleration Summit, sales trainer and author David Varner argued that the disappointment isn’t really about the technology — it’s about what’s feeding it.

Varner’s insight traces back to a sales training program he ran for a global sales team on the West Coast. After a two-day workshop focused on a single, real sales opportunity, four different breakout groups were each asked to present a best action plan for moving the deal forward. All four came back with different answers. “How can that be?” Varner recalled thinking. “They just went through two days of a program designed to give them these skills to win these opportunities. When we get done, they can’t even agree on what to do next.”

That experience led him to develop what he calls the case study question: take any opportunity your team is currently working, hand it to multiple people, and ask what the next best step should be. If you get more than one answer, Varner says, you have a problem — and it’s a problem AI can’t fix for you. “AI operates off of evidence, not opinion,” he explained. Feed it opinion-based selling, and it simply won’t work, for the same reason it doesn’t work for a misaligned sales team today.

The consequences of opinion-based selling are concrete: lower win rates, inaccurate forecasts, and investment in the wrong opportunities. Varner’s forthcoming book, “The Sales Checklist: The End of Opinion-Based Selling,” out July 27, tackles this problem directly — diagnosing why teams default to opinion over evidence and laying out a framework to fix it.

To help sales leaders see whether the problem applies to them, Varner has built a companion assessment. It takes a real opportunity from your pipeline and runs it through the book’s framework, surfacing specific answers about risk, blind spots, and coaching gaps in under five minutes — grounded in your actual deal, not a generic demo. Interested leaders can request it by emailing or texting Varner directly with their name, title, company, and phone number.

Varner also pointed to a real-world win: a global building materials manufacturer whose regional sales teams were essentially operating as disconnected islands when pursuing the same national accounts. By aligning everyone around shared, evidence-based visibility — who’s being called on, what problems are being solved, what the next step is — the company replaced five or six competing efforts with one coordinated sale.

Beyond the book, Varner’s team also offers a Sales Checklist app that gives managers real-time visibility into whether their team’s deals are evidence-based or opinion-based — not just in a monthly meeting, but minute by minute. Summit co-host Gerhard endorsed the book as “a must-have, not a nice-to-have,” urging attendees to pre-order it ahead of its late-July release. To learn more, visit: https://millaugroupglobal.com/

Gerhard Gschwandtner is the founder and CEO of Selling Power. He has interviewed Marc Benioff and hundreds of the world’s top sales leaders and authors over a career spanning more than four decades. Reach him at gg@sellingpower.com.