AI Automates, Humans Close: Glenn Sandifer on Sales in 2026

Glenn Sandifer: Foreign.

John Golden: Welcome to another episode of Sales Pop. Uh, my name is John golden from Sales Pop online sales magazine and Pipeliner CRM M joining you as usual from a sunny San Diego and that is Pipeliner, now known as Covera. So, and today I'm delighted to welcome from Nashville, Tennessee, Glenn Sandifer. How you doing, Glenn?

Glenn Sandifer: I'm doing great, John. Thank you for the time and thanks to your audience. How are you?

John Golden: Absolutely, like fantastic. And uh, you are, you know, you're a 20 year sales and marketing executive and you're deeply passionate about driving strategic growth, operational excellence and effective change management. And as I say, you know, as somebody, as a sales leader with all that experience, what I really want to talk to you today about, Glenn, is, is, I mean you've led large inside sales teams, client experience teams, and in complex, you uh, know, uh, enterprise environments. Right. How, how do you see AI impacting them? Because this is the question on everybody's lips, right? You know, people are struggling with AI and the sales organization in particular.

Glenn Sandifer: Mhm. Well, I'll say this first. So if you're an individual contributor or a leader of sales individuals know that your executive team, your owner, is getting beat up with AI questions every day. They're getting beat up by the board, they're getting beat up by their investors, they're getting beat up by their customers about what they want to do. Um, but I think there's a responsible way for, uh, us as sales leaders to integrate AI into our processes in order to provide, uh, the best experience for prospects and for our clients. I live in the aim that an inside sales program should deliver a more qualified prospect to a field sales representative or uh, a finished new, uh, client to your operations team to deliver on excellent results. And I have found over the previous 10 years a lot of the manual processes that I used to deploy as an individual contributor and a frontline manager are now able to be automated, which saves me time. And now I have more time to develop those relationships and spend a little bit more time with discovery in the sales process.

John Golden: And there's another challenge I think that a lot of organizations have now. And you know, so as you said, everybody's under pressure and so leaders saying like, we need to adopt these AI tools. Meanwhile also the individual reps are off like using tools that maybe they come, um, across. So in some ways we're kind of at that, we're kind of back to that. Do you remember when smartphones first came on and people started bringing their own phones to work and all of that kind of stuff? It seems to me that you need to get on top of this before it becomes an issue. Like lots of people on your team using different tools. Uh, and there's security risks too.

Glenn Sandifer: Yeah. And we've seen that within some of the sales organizations I've been a part of, uh, where you'll have some team members that are outside sales Reps. They're on ChatGPT, not Copilot. They are using Sales, um, Navigator, while some are using Zoom Info, some are using DMV Hoovers and some are using seamless AI. There's an inconsistency with the tool, uh, and the tech stack issues and then there's an inconsistency in the result. Um, just like uh, in prior worlds when it was telesales for what is now inside sales where individuals started bringing in their own phones as companies, we had to make a decision. All right, if we're going to allow people to have their own phone, we need to be able to capture their conversations, um, uh, through our CRM, which Salesforce fixed. Um, so I think it's being proactive as a frontline leader and making the recommendation back to your leadership team on what the best tools are. Um, and as a leader not being scared of discovery because this is a new frontier and just like there's AI slot for all the content that's out there on all social media, there's a lot of AI solutions that I see see on LinkedIn that I have in my, my DMs about try us out because we'll save you X. Um, and as leaders we have to filter through what is the best solution, um, best solution for our organization really at the end of the day, if any technology does not solve a problem that we create or automate a process that is manual, that we shouldn't even consider it.

John Golden: Yeah. And one of the, one of the, one of the ways often of um, implementing this is to find, is to find a couple of people in your sales organization who are really enthusiastic about AI. Maybe they're the ones who are using all these tools and say, okay, we need your help in researching these and giving, you know, so actually co opting some of the team, especially the early adopters, co opting them into helping shape what tools we should be using.

Glenn Sandifer: Sure. That's what we did with Sales Navigator. I mean Sales Navigator today for the younger salespeople that are watching this, it wasn't what it is now. It was basically a way for me to connect with John golden and I could see his connections and then we could do an InMail. That was it. Now you get sales intent data, you get deeper connections, you get more insight. And then through the integrations um, that are just naturally happening with all the sales, uh, the sales technology that's available, you're getting insights into what individuals in the company are looking to buy, where they're going on websites, and then it allows you to have a more informed conversation with them. Um, you know, and you can create lists on something like a zoom info or seamless in a matter of minutes. That gives you an accuracy of around an 89 to 90% score. We had to. We were still using intellisales phone books. We were buying leads from leadless aggregators and hoping and praying someone would pick up their desk phone or that we had a correct mobile address. I think AI solves some of these problems. It solves a lot of the problems that a lot of us who are at this stage experienced as individual contributors that now it's just like, man, if I had those tools, I would have been diamond club every year.

John Golden: Yeah. So I think it's a good idea to capture those people and capture those ideas and come up, as you said, with the strategy because otherwise, uh, you know, otherwise things get chaotic and, and tell me in. So there's a lot of. Now people are people. Are you trying to use AI agents for outreach? People are using company. Here's the funny part, Glenn, right? You know, people are using AI agents for outreach. A lot of people are using AI agents for answering now. So now people are hitting new AI gatekeepers. Um, but my point is, um, where do you think AI works really well? And where do you think the human has to stay in control?

Glenn Sandifer: I think the human has to stay in control, uh, before the close of any new business or the extension of any current agreement. Like the human has to stay in for the first outbound, uh, reach of the outbound contact of an inbound lead. So if you get an inbound form fill or you get an inbound request from a trade show, there needs to be a human element for the initial follow up. Um, and I think those are the, those areas are going to be the key even over the next 10 years as we continue to figure out AI in the sales funnel. Um, I believe the AI is great for a couple of things. And I'll just give my own personal experience. This last week, my, my family keeps breaking the garage door. I don't know what they're doing. I don't know what they're doing, but I pick up the phone, I call our Vendor and I go through three prompts and then they have all the information that they need. They can either give me schedule or I can speak to a representative. I love it. So for the customer experience, I don't have to go on the website, I don't have to necessary pick up the phone and go through a phone tree and repeat the we all hate that information to a live human. It actually gets me scheduled. And guess what? The technician showed up during the time period that they said they were after. They sent me a text message saying that they would be there in 30 minutes. So I believe. So taking it out of sales and moving it back into the operations of the business, you'll find that you'll be able to automate a lot of the processes, um, that are necessary for your business, that are typical points of friction, that you'll be able to reallocate, um, those resources to parts of the business. This vendor in particular has moved their people from just inbound calls and appointment scheduling to higher level escalations, uh, to technical support. So maybe we can, instead of using, having us to deploy a resource, maybe we can come on and we can do tech support. So they've retrained them, um, and then they're doing a lot of billing, billing supporter. Um, so I see that a lot of companies right now are really, are cash strapped. So collections is a big deal. There's a lot of automation going on with collection efforts where we've even seen from some vendors where you can actually go in, someone picks up, yes, this is my debt. Yes, I owe this bill. You can take a payment or settlement right there on the phone without touching a human. Accounting is happy because now they've gotten a commitment and a payment. Um, so I think there's a responsible way for us to do it, um, because in sales you really need that first touch point. Everyone needs to deal with rejection in sales. You got it. If it's not door knocking, if it's not kiosks, if it's not special events, if it's not on the phone, you can't get your first sales experience by going to a warm lead that's qualified for you and ready to go. You got to go out there and you got to get, you have to, as we used to say, get your face cracked a couple times. And then it builds that character and that grit that's necessary for you to be, uh, an excellent sales professional.

John Golden: Excellent. Yeah. You may need to put a hidden camera in your garage to see what's going on.

Glenn Sandifer: I know what's going on. I know what's going on. No one's paying attention. They're just doing stuff and drop off, pick up, uh, things are falling and

John Golden: it's just, you know, it's great. So what do you think? The, so the sales, the salesperson who's going to succeed in the future, right? Um, what, what in, in the year of AI, what kind of characteristic and traits, characteristics and traits do you think, uh, they will need to have?

Glenn Sandifer: Yeah, the characteristics of someone who is going to survive as a sales professional in the world of AI are going to be twofold. So I think the first is as a sales professional, you have to be passionate and about what you're selling because you're selling the humans. And humans buy from people that they like and that they believe like what they're doing. There's nothing worse than buying from a sales guy who's desperate or a sales guy who isn't passionate about what they're selling. That's the worst. So you continue that passion because AI can't recreate the passion of an individual in a one to one connection. And then second, it'll be someone who takes a look at a market, uses AI from an information standpoint, um, or from a processing standpoint to really automate some of the more tedious tasks and systematize their lead creation, their list creation, their outbound reach, their email follow up, uh, their call scheduling, their appointment setting and integration into a seamless system that will allow them to scale their self. Because what we learned in Covid is we were actually able to sell over zoom and over the phone. When we used to believe in our industry, we had to go from trade show to trade show meeting to meeting, dinner to dinner. And we were actually able to outperform our plan at this time with Stanley, um, Stanley Security. Before our acquisition we were, we outperformed the market and we outperformed our business plan because, just because we were intentional with the things that we had talked about by staying connected and staying in front of our existing clients and with our prospects. Um, and I think that that same grit and characteristic will need to be true by just having passion and then adopting the tools and systematizing.

John Golden: Yeah. And like you said, I mean with the tools, I mean that gives you so much more uh, options to be so much more informed, you know, about the, about the prospect, about their industry, about what's going on about you. I mean you can be so much more uh, informed. And I think so I think the, the, the salespeople with genuine curiosity are going to, are going to excel because now they're going to be able to be so much better informed when they're engaging with clients. Tell me from a uh, from a sales leader point of view, what's the challenge for the future for sales leaders? As everything starts to things become more automated, more AI tools, salespeople may be m operating on a slightly different level, maybe slightly different types of people needed. Um, what do you see the future of sales leadership?

Glenn Sandifer: I think the future of sales leadership will be more. It will actually return to something that I think is mission is coaching. So we have a lot of coaching tools that are available and in the market but the best coaching is weekly or bi weekly one to ones with your individual contributor and your team at the human level. And so with all of this automation, with all of these AI tools that are at your disposal as a sales leader, technically you now have more time and you should be on planes, in a car, in the field, in meetings with your sales team, shoulder to shoulder helping them close deals. If you're not joining a discovery call for a new prospect that your individual contributor has been working on for nine months, I don't understand why you're in a role because that is exactly what you're there to do to help support them along. I still find myself and my team tells me all the time, my current team, you don't have to jump on this call. Yes I do. Because what inevitably happens is some, some question gets asked about our business, gets asked about our company, about our process, something that they've seen in the news. And my team isn't prepared to handle that.

John Golden: Right.

Glenn Sandifer: And you can't skirt around it because it, it's avoidance and avoidance is never good in any sales process. So I can step in as an executive leader, be like, oh, okay. Actually you know that's, that's partial information. I can't go into detail. But yeah, I can say that with certainty. This is what we're looking at by 2030. So this does not impact our discussion stage. They want more uh, information. I can schedule some time to talk about it, etc. Or I'm able to expound upon the technology side of our business because the uh, integrated part of the business may be the initial question but they, some, some in some person on the call because everyone has a buying committee now is asking one specific question about one specific spec and I'm able to answer it. Um, but that is key to building the confidence of your sales team. I had that as an individual contributor so I never wanted to lose sight of that. And I think sales leaders, uh, we need to return to that.

John Golden: Yeah, I would absolute percent agree. And I think coaching is. Coaching is one of the biggest things lacking in a lot of organizations. And in the past, as you said, often the excuse for, you know, why are you coaching? Is like, when do I find the time? You know, I'm doing this, I'm on these reports, I'm doing this, and blah, blah, blah. AI can take a lot of that stuff away. So now there's no, not that there was excuse, but there's absolutely no excuse anymore for you not being a proactive coach. Which then begs the question, Glenn, of course, is, is most, most people don't know how to coach. No, no, most people don't know how to coach. Most leaders don't know how to coach. Most people's last experience of coaching was probably their football coach shouting at them.

Glenn Sandifer: Yeah, uh, but, but that's because the person they're reporting to wasn't coached. So no coaching begets more no coaching, which begets no coaching. So, I mean, I, I stopped that in my role when I went to Sandy because I was a, I was a consultant. I was happy as a consultant. The, My former boss, the supervisor who convinced me to come back to corporate, um, he was an excellent coach. His boss was an excellent coach. His boss's boss was an excellent coach. And so it expanded and it helps scale my knowledge and understanding of the industry. So I was able to commit to my discipline, which I knew the industry I wanted expansion on. And they don't know how to coach. But there's no excuse, because in 2026, as, uh, of this recording, there are shows like this, there are programs that you can sign up for for free on Google and on LinkedIn that allow you to help understand who you are, your leadership style, your management style, and then to glean from individual contributors on your team what their style is, what do they respond to? Because as a, as someone who's coached maybe a thousand people, none of them were the same. None of them. I can still remember everyone that reported to me from my days in McDonald's court to today, none of them are the same. There's always a different motivating factor, and then there's always something, um, that there are some threads that are consistent and it's my job to understand it, to be able to coach them to success.

John Golden: And can you explain for people listening, what does good coaching look like? Because some people think, well, I do coach and I'm on there. I've asked them about their deals. I tell them stuff or whatever. Um, so I am coaching.

Glenn Sandifer: Yeah, I think coaching is a lot about helping a contributor or your direct report to self discover and self realize. So self discovery and self realization builds confidence long term. And that long term confidence leads to their ability to address issues head on. So as of this recording for my current role, my team's been in place for about a year and a half. A year and a half ago they didn't know the difference between two of our product lines. Now they know the difference between the two product lines and what we used to do in our old world. So now they feel more confident and capable because they say, this is what Glenn would say. This is what Glenn would do. This is how I need to approach it. And if they mess up, my job as a leader is to fix it. That's just the coaching. So they now have the confidence to know that, hey, I'm going to try it. If I don't get it right, he's going to be there to protect it. And we've never lost a deal and someone on my team misspeaking or saying something, uh, out of turn. We've always been able to continue to move things forward for the business. Um, but that is because I want to personally, I want to develop future leaders for our industry and then for our specific discipline. Because I knew, you know, three years ago, looking at the landscape, things were about to change. And so I said I got to get everybody on my team ready for these changes and get them ahead of the curve.

John Golden: Yeah. Which is great. Uh, you know, because a lot of people are in reactive mode right now. Um, what you were saying there about coaching is just, it's just very interesting because. Yeah, because some, some sales leaders, because they've been promoted, they were the best salesperson or whatever, you know, they tend to just parachute in at the end and just try and close the deal. And sometimes, you know, it's, it tramples over the salesperson. Instead of like what you were talking about earlier is making sure that you're playing that supportive role. You're not, you're not, you're, you're only intervening like on the call when you need to or when something is added. You're not taking it over, you're not dominating it. Because these are things that are the opposite of code. Those are the demotivating things is when you're like doing something and then your sales manager just, you know, barrels over the top of you.

Glenn Sandifer: Well, yeah, I returned last year, I picked up another line of the business. Um, I think I was volunteered. I don't know. But all I knew is I had another sales team and with a completely different discipline. I picked back up post, uh, game calls. And so, you know, I take notes on the call, I try to do it as discreetly as possible. But there were maybe one or two things that I would want to touch on at the beginning and ask the individual contributor on my team. What do you think went well on the call? What do you think you could have improved on? What do you think was a miss that we need to address? Mhm. And with those three questions, we typically are able to find that, okay, we missed this in that discovery. Oh, we missed this in that qualification. Oh, ah. We weren't able to identify it. Um, I mean every sales leader on here who was a contributor, you either did medic, Med pick or bands. So band. Go back to band. Stop looking at all these other acronyms. I think I saw one that had 15 letters in it. Go back to ban. Is there budget authority, need and a timeline established? If you can answer that question, we can move forward, uh, from introduction to full discovery to now a presentation. They're not ready. Why would we schedule a presentation if they're not? If they don't have the budget and they're just price shopping? I don't mind giving a price. I'm just saying. And um, typically, what I say is we're typically the most expensive. So if you're just looking from a budgetary standpoint, what are you currently paying? Oh, you have no idea. Here's what I recommend you do. And then in three months they come back inevitably because they're like, you know what? Glenn took care of me, this team took care of me and they didn't try to pressure me. So let me at least give them an opportunity to pitch. Um, and I think that that's kind of what's missing from the coaching right now.

John Golden: Yeah, no, I would agree completely. And as you said, I mean the great thing about AI now is with automation and all of those things, it's giving you better space to be able to do these things. So what would be your last, uh, piece of advice to maybe to a sales leader who's just, who's just struggling with AI right now, he's gotten mandates from above. He doesn't know. And he's like, I don't know what to do.

Glenn Sandifer: If you're a sales leader and you have mandates from above and you're struggling with AI, continue to go slow. Create for yourself a 30 day window to learn as much about the solutions that are available and make sure that they are solving a true stated problem. I hate to say this, most of our boards and most of our investor groups, they're not really solving a problem. It's not really solving a problem unless it's solving a problem. So first identify the problem because in sales we're supposed to be in the business of solving problems for people.

John Golden: Yep.

Glenn Sandifer: Garage door company comes, they fix it. I'm tired of my garage door not being able to go up and down when it needs to go up and down. The sales rep came out, made recommendations, we bought it. I felt, I felt really good about the relationship and the interaction. So I'm comfortable making the recommendation and I'm comfortable to continue to use them. That is what we need to be looking at in sales. And as a sales leader, AI is not going to solve that for you. AI should be able to automate some of the things related so you can deliver the best sales experience to a prospect and a renewal for an existing customer.

John Golden: Fantastic. Well listen, um, thanks so much Glenn for all of these insights. All of Glenn's information will be below this video. But before we go, please do remind people about you and what you do.

Glenn Sandifer: Yes. So I currently serve as an executive for Securitas, ah, usa. I uh, have the privilege of leading a, ah, very dynamic sales team and love every minute of it. Um, I get the privilege of working with marketing, sales enablement, finance, field operations, everything even work out of a local branch. Uh, but I do that. I can be reached@uh, www.glennsanderford.com and then all of our social links are there if you'd like to learn more and see uh, more videos like this.

John Golden: Fantastic. Well listen, thanks Glenn. Thank you for watching and listening and I'll see you all again very soon. Thank you.

Glenn Sandifer: Sam.