A few years ago, I bought a coffee bean grinder and started making my own Flat White. Before that, I used pods. The bright red Nespresso machine has been sitting unused on my countertop ever since. The push button convenience was replaced with literally, a daily grind, because the quality of the hand made product was so much better!

I’m seeing more and more sellers augmenting their sales superpowers with AI capabilities that they built for themselves. Like grinding their own beans, once they’ve started brewing their own solutions, they find it hard to go back to the immediately gratifying button push.

As a sales leader and a go-to-market technologist, I once believed that we need to reduce a seller’s non-selling time by delegating enablement, automation & go-to-market strategy to non-sellers. The basic idea still makes sense, but only if RevOps/SalesOps lift their AI game to a level the seller can’t match.

As a tech exec, I know these shadow IT, point solutions are not scalable and a bit scary from a risk and compliance perspective.

But boy oh boy does it feel good for a seller to just say what they need and not have to wait for their request to be prioritized and go through their RevOps’ software development cycle.

Here’s the challenge for us in RevOps and sales technology. If we don’t step up with enterprise-class AI solutions that are better than what sellers can build themselves… we’re going to lose this race. We have the advantages of access to more data, powerful integration tools and means of making the tools safe, reliable and credible. We just need to move faster, build smarter and learn from the amazing custom solutions created by our friends in Sales.

I’m not taking a position on what the right balance is. As a leader, I’ve always preferred to focus on a person’s results rather than how they do their work. But of course, if more non-selling time is spent programming point solutions with no yield, that’s a problem.

Let sellers experiment. And let RevOps rise to the occasion and help scale their best brews. As long as we’re all building safely let the results speak for themselves, shall we?

What do you think? How has AI changed your thoughts on build vs buy and sellers building their own systems?

Originally published on LinkedIn