What Happens When The Buyer Is No Longer A Human?

Nobody in sales wants to talk about this one, so I will ask it.

I spent thirty years on the selling side of enterprise deals. Telecom, mostly. The ritual never really changed. A request for proposal lands, sometimes two hundred pages of it, with a due date that is always a week too soon. You pull the team together, split the sections, write until midnight, and ship a document you hope scores well enough to make the short list.

The whole exercise rests on one assumption nobody ever says out loud.

A person is going to read this.

So you write for that person. You know the committee. You know who the technical evaluator is, who holds the finance seat, and who actually makes the call in the room after everyone else leaves. You put the executive summary at the front for the one who will only read the executive summary. You put the weak answer on page 94, between two strong ones, because that is how a tired human reads a long document on a Thursday afternoon.

That was not cheating. That was the craft. Everyone did it.

Here is the question I keep coming back to.

What happens when the buying decision maker is no longer a human?

THE FIELD NOTE

I do not mean assisted by AI. I do not mean somebody ran it through a chatbot first. I mean the first full read of your proposal is done by a machine, against the requirements, and what reaches the human is a ranked summary of how you scored.

If you have not watched that happen yet, run it on yourself. Take your last proposal, the one you were proud of, and hand it to an AI assistant with the actual requirements sitting next to it. Ask it to score you line by line and show you every place you did not answer the question.

It takes about four minutes. It is not a pleasant four minutes.

Because here is what a machine will not do for you.

It does not get tired on page 94. It does not give partial credit for a good relationship. It does not read past a section that dodges the question and assume you probably meant the right thing. It does not remember that you flew out there. It does not notice that you are a good guy.

It notices that requirement 6.3 asked for a number and you gave it an adjective.

THE WORKING EXAMPLE

I am living the other half of this in my own business right now, one layer down and a lot of decimal places cheaper.

A real piece of what I do now is write pages whose only reader is a machine. Not a website. A plain page on a business’s own web address that states, in flat language a machine will not misread, what the business is, where it is, what it sells, what it does not, and what is true today. Nobody browses it. It exists because an AI assistant reads it before answering somebody’s question, and I get paid to make sure it tells the truth clearly.

Two years ago that would have sounded like a strange way to make a living.

It is the same shift as the RFP, at the other end of the price scale. Something reads it before a person does.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Everything I learned in thirty years about writing to win is not wrong. It just got narrower.

What still wins: answering the question that was actually asked, in the order it was asked. Claims somebody can check. Numbers instead of adjectives. Structure that hides nothing. Saying plainly what you do not do.

What stops working: volume as a strategy. Burying the weak answer in the middle. Winning on the read of the room, because at that stage there is no room yet.

The relationship still matters. I would not have had a career without it. It just may have stopped being the thing that gets you into the finals.

If you sell anything that has a written proposal in front of it, the honest move here is not to panic. It is to go find out how you actually score, before somebody else’s software tells your buyer for you.

Then go fix requirement 6.3.

If you want a second set of eyes on how your proposals read to a machine, that is a conversation I am glad to have: kerzie.ai/schedule

Wade