When faced with difficult choices, we often reduce them to binaries – as we do with cognitive thinking. The subconscious battles the conscious. The right brain goes to war with the left. The retentive types tolerate the expulsive ones.
Binaries are convenient for humans when we don’t want to face the in-between. But what happens to this in-between when the binary becomes technological?
Generative AI presents an interesting conflict, where its technology – an aggregate of data – mimics the human mind and meets user input. In psychology, human thought is often divided into Kahneman’s two systems: System 1, which is fast, intuitive, and emotional, and System 2, which is slow and deliberate. When applied to sales tech, these traditional systems have been more System 2 – analytical, data-driven, and equipped for forecasting.
Numbers, for the most part, don’t lie, but unfortunately, people (and SaaS buyers) aren’t as cut-and-dry. Behind every sales deal or pipeline are veiled answers, human error, and ulterior motives. These lines, System 2 can’t always read – for what value is there to take from a face with many sides?
System 2 thinking, however, is not a villain. It’s a framework of successful B2B organizations. Without lead scoring and forecasting, emotional buying signals seem baseless and maybe even fabricated. ROI and YoY calculators exist to anchor, but they don’t necessarily tell the full story.
System 1 comes to play in the grey area – friction, tone shifts, and subtlety are where it shines. For instance, if a prospect says, “We’re not ready to buy,” System 2 marks them as unready. Revisit in Q4. However, let’s just say this same buyer attended multiple demos and showed positive sentiment scoring on meeting calls and emails. This is beyond the crossroad of structured versus unstructured data. Technology is most optimized when it best understands the human condition. The nature of sales itself is about as human as it gets – one human tries to match another’s needs in a series of both unspoken and explicit moves. It’s a courtship, dance, negotiation, and seduction at once.
The best B2B salespeople are silent, meaning that they listen more than they explicitly “sell.” This close observation picks up an energy shift on the Zoom meeting or maybe even an unspoken urgency. Salesforce can’t speak to these signals, but these signals can’t stand alone, either.
Data-driven, System 2 tech peaks when it’s married with System 1’s emotional intelligence. Sales AI, prioritizing semantics and sentiment, seems to be the Systems’ love child – a perfect blend of human-ness backed by data. The reality is that sales success can’t thrive in the binary. A closed deal isn’t the result of a System 1 or 2 practice, but perhaps a combination. Buyers are emotional actors, but driven by numbers.
While most sales tech is built for the latter, Kaboom is built for both.
Reading behavior like a sales rep, it picks up on engagement spikes and tone shifts – and places it against the backdrop of structured insights. Kaboom is not the substitute for account teams ; instead, it’s the companion. It sharpens their intuition and gives structured, numerical weight to their gut instincts.
Humans buy with a mix of head and heart. In the age of AI, your tools should have the ability to meet them exactly where they are.
