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Episode 8: Your Sales Org Is About to 3x in Size (Without Hiring Anyone)
Description
Most sales orgs think they're "doing AI." Alex McNaughten thinks they're kidding themselves.
Across hundreds of conversations with B2B sales teams, Alex keeps seeing the same pattern: an AE running a clever ChatGPT workflow here, a sales manager with a cool Claude automation there, impressive in isolation, invisible in aggregate. No compounding, no consistency, no real ROI anyone can point to. He calls it isolated experimentation, and he thinks it's where 99% of sales organizations are still stuck.
In this episode, Alex joins Paul Perrett to unpack what it actually looks like to move from scattered AI experiments to a real system, one where a "digital teammate" builds, runs, and self-improves your sales operations every day. Alex has lived the sales talent problem from every angle: intern turned VP of Sales at 20, founder of Sales Leaders (advising 140+ tech companies across Australia and New Zealand), co-founder of Apprento, and now co-founder of Grow AI, the company behind Taylor, an AI teammate built to run the operational backbone of a sales org.
Together, they get into why span of control is quietly expanding from 6 reps to 15 to 20 per manager, why the profile of a great sales hire has shifted from "organized and disciplined" to "builder DNA," why hierarchy is flattening as agents absorb the admin layer, and why "we built it ourselves" is a much harder sell now that tokens aren't free and the ROI math actually has to work.
Why you should listen:
If you're a founder, CRO, or sales leader wondering whether your team's AI usage is actually moving the needle, or just making everyone feel clever, this episode is a reality check with a roadmap attached. Alex doesn't deal in hype; he deals in what's actually reliably running inside real sales orgs today, what's still human by design, and what separates teams compounding real advantage from teams collecting cool demos.
This is a conversation about hiring in an AI native world, why confidence (not information) is the real unlock for new reps, why in office culture still matters even when remote works fine, and why the gap between "AI did something cool" and "AI is a system we can trust" is bigger, and more important, than most sales leaders realize.