After five decades in sales leadership, I have seen the sales profession transform through waves of technology, shifting customer expectations, and evolving business models. Yet, in the world of high-value, high-touch selling, one principle has remained constant: the irreplaceable value of human connection, judgment, and experience. Yet we cannot ignore the emerge of AI.

Demand Creation Selling

The most successful sales professionals are those who can build trust, navigate complexity, and adapt to the unique needs of each customer. I see this as a progression of: receptivity > rapport > trust > truth. This is at the heart of my sales method: Demand Creation Selling.

This is breaking the hermetic seal that surrounds decision-makers.

Demand Creation Selling combines Sales Coaching and CRM Optimisation. This means: Design Thinking¹ to maximise buyside-sellside stakeholder engagement; and, Value Engineering² that creates the business case for your solution.

Demand Creation Selling means proactively generating new business - versus the high-risk approach of Demand Fulfilment Selling, where the buyside invites responses to Request for Proposal (RFP) documents.

Remember, if if you are an innovator, the buyer does not know all. It requires a two-way conversation between buyside and sellside mapping solution to problem, maximising empathy between all stakeholders and underpinning everything with a solid business case.

My approach at Being Guided is pragmatic and clear: we start by identifying and engaging named target decision-makers in most-desired named target accounts. This means creating Mutual Value Discovery engagements as the first step in the buying and selling cycle.

To swerve the conventional arm's length procument 'rules' of Demand Fulfilment Selling, the Mutual Value Discovery gives buyers the assurance that meaningful things comes from this early stage - without commitment to buying anything.

Demand Creation Selling is where Design Thinking generates sufficient receptivity and rapport and where Value Engineering delivers tangible advantages to the buyside - well ahead of any later stage purchasing commitment.

At Being Guided I have 50+ years experience in the high-value, high-touch sell across tech industries, living and working in the UK and USA. I engage in exchange for affordable fees, which includes a tailored Statement of Work for Sales Coaching and CRM Optimisation.

See my Journal post Guided Selling Applied for a more detailed explanation about how Design Thinking and Value Engineering comes together with CRM Optimisation, underpinned by Sales Coaching. As explained below, this also includes the introduction of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

AI Agents Emerging

Today, we are entering a new era—one where emerging AI Agents are poised to become powerful allies in the Sales Coaching process. Rather than replacing the human element, these technologies can augment and amplify the wisdom that comes from decades of experience.

Sales coaching is about sharing stories, modeling resilience, and helping sales people develop the emotional intelligence needed to build lasting relationships (Ingram et al., 2019¹).

Emerging AI Agents can analyse vast amounts of data from CRM systems, emails, proposals, and call transcripts, surfacing patterns and insights that might otherwise go unnoticed (Syam & Sharma, 2018²).

See the infographic above: from Current State through to Future State. This shows a virtuous cycle from Current State, working through Design Thinking and Value Engineering, leading onto CRM Optimisation and Sales Coaching. AI Enabling is a dynamic picture, where at Being Guided at its simplest level, we introduce Chatbots to augment the human effort.

At a deeper level, as AI Agents emerge, we are moving AI Enabling from tactical Chatbots to allow integration in emerge AI Role Plays for Sales Coaching and AI Sales Brain to guide early stage buyers through Meaningful Journeys on Websites.

Over time we see AI Agents becoming next generation CRM apps and rather than being 'bolt-on' technologies to today's Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) apps, such as Salesforce, AI Agents will emerge as next generation CRM apps in their own right.

AI can increasingly identify subtle shifts in buyer sentiment, recommend next-best actions, and even predict which deals are most at risk. When combined with the intuition and judgment of an experienced sales coach, these insights become actionable strategies.

AI Agents can also help scale best practices across your team, ensuring that every sales person benefits from the collective knowledge of the organisation. However, it is the human coach who contextualizes these insights, tailoring advice to the individual and the situation.

The future of Sales Coaching lies in partnership: human wisdom guiding and interpreting AI-driven insights. For instance, while an AI Agent might flag a stalled deal, it takes a seasoned coach to know how to re-engage the client, what story to tell, and when to push or pause.

Summary

Demand Creation Selling is the opposite of Demand Fulfilment Selling. Instead of waiting for buyers to define their needs and ask sellers to respond to a dry (and often too narrowly-defined) Request For Proposal (RFP), if you are an innovator, the buyer does not know all. What's needed is a two-way conversation around a problem-solution fit. That's Demand Creation Selling.

Demand Creation Selling starts with a Mutual Value Discovery process between all key stakeholders on the buyside and sellside. It's where Design Thinking and Value Engineering come together - see my Journal post: Guided Selling Applied.

As illustrated above, a high-value, high-touch sell is equally a high-value, high-touch buy. It requires an optimum blend of human and digital conversations. It requires oppeness and above all, it works best when human receptivity and rapport creates trust, in turn, leading to truth.

References

1. The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design. (2004) Stanford d.school. https://dschool.stanford.edu/about
2. Miles, L.D. (1947). The Lawrence D. Miles Value Engineering Reference Center Collection.
   https://minds.wiscon.edu/handle/1793/301
3. Ingram, T. N., LaForge, R. W., Avila, R. A., Schwepker, C. H., & Williams, M. R. (2019). Sales management: Analysis and decision making (10th ed.). Routledge.
   https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9780429286926/sales-management-thomas-ingram-raymond-laforge-ramon-avila-charles-schwepker-jr-michael-williams
4. Syam, N., & Sharma, A. (2018). Waiting for a sales renaissance in the fourth industrial revolution: Machine learning and artificial intelligence in sales research and practice. Industrial Marketing Management, 69, 135–146. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.indmarman.2017.12.019
5. Dixon, M., & Adamson, B. (2011). The challenger sale: Taking control of the customer conversation. Portfolio/Penguin.
   https://mvbk.marmot.org/Record/.b37234845