Relationships Aren't Enough Anymore

I’m going to ask you a question that might sting a little. As a sales professional, are you just friction with a friendly face?

Think about it. A whole lot of salespeople are good people. They’re polite, fun to be around, and are good conversationalists. They are good at building relationships and getting along with people.

They’re the type of people that buyers say they like.

The problem is, those buyers who say that they like them often don’t buy from them. They stall. Ghost. Go dark and say things like, “Let’s circle back next quarter.” But they don’t pull the trigger on purchases.

When push comes to shove, they justify not buying with words like, “We really liked you and thought you had a great presentation, but in the end decided to go in a different direction.”

The truth is that they went in that direction not because of the relationship (they truly liked you). Not because your product isn’t competitive or that your solution wasn’t a fit (they were). And not because they thought your intentions were bad (you wanted the best for them).

They decided not to do business with you because dealing with you over the course of the buying process was too much work. And by the way, buyers don’t experience your good intentions. They experience your process.

So today, I’m going to give you a wake-up call and a fix. Because in the age of AI, people expect seamless, frictionless buying experiences. And they compare you—consciously or not—to the easiest experience they’ve had anywhere. Not just to your competitors.

How Salespeople Become Friction for Buyers

Let me paint you a picture.

A buyer sits through a discovery call. You’re friendly. You build rapport. You ask good questions, and they ask hard questions. You end the call with, “Thank you for your time today. I’ll get with my team and send over answers to your questions.”

They say okay, and you end the call.

A week goes by, and they don’t hear from you because you moved on to the next thing on your list and forgot to follow up with your team and them.

Finally, after a week and a half, they remind you that you haven’t provided any answers to their questions.

Embarrassed, you jump on it and send over the answers. But it’s not your best work because you were under the gun and moving too fast.

Three days later, you email: “Hey! Just checking in. Wanted to see if I answered your questions.”

The buyer is busy. They’ve got a million things going on, and they’re irritated because you didn’t give them the complete answers they were looking for. And now your email is another item piled onto their overflowing plate.

They don’t respond. So you send another email: “Bumping this to the top of your inbox.” (Trust me, overwhelmed people just love it when you bump stuff to the top of their inbox.) You create even more irritation.

Then you call and leave a voicemail: “Just following up on the answers I sent you.”

You’re thinking: I’m being persistent. I’m doing my job.

They’re thinking: You made me follow up on you to get the answers I needed, then you failed to give me what I want, and now this is suddenly urgent.

From their perspective, no matter how nice you’ve been, you are friction. Your delay slowed down their decision-making process, the conversation was left open-ended, and now all they have are loose ends, and you’re driving them nuts.

The Hard Truth About Relationships in the Age of AI

Here’s the brutal truth: Relationships are vitally important. Trust matters. But relationships only carry you so far if buying from you isn’t easy or pleasurable.

You can be likable and still be a drag. You can be “a great person” and still be the person the buyer avoids—because every step with you along the decision-making process comes with friction.

And the thing about friction is that it shows up in small ways that feel normal to you but are exhausting to your buyer. Here are just a few examples:

• Meetings that end with no decision map or next steps
• Follow-up messages that add no new value
• Slow answers to simple questions
• Stakeholders have to push you
• The buyer is repeating the same story over and over because you are not listening and taking notes
• Your failure to follow through when you say you will
• Proposals that are generic marketing documents rather than valuable insight, value bridges, and recommendations

AI Just Set the NEW B2B Sales Bar

This problem is getting worse right now because of AI. And I don’t mean this in some hypey, “AI is changing everything” way.

I mean, AI is retraining buyers. Buyers are being conditioned to expect frictionless experiences: instant answers, clear options, smart recommendations, and smooth paths from questions to answers to decisions.

So when they hit your sales process, and it feels like walking through mud, they notice. They may not say it out loud, but their behavior says it for them. They stall faster. They ghost faster. They lose patience faster.

This is a big part of what I talk about in my bestselling book, The AI Edge. Your edge isn’t that you use AI to crank out more activity. Your edge is that you understand the expectation shift and use AI to help you reach that new bar.

In the age of AI, the new bar is FASTER with less FRICTION. For this reason, you need to combine your gift for connecting with people and developing relationships with leveraging AI to:

• make progress faster, follow up faster
• answer questions and provide clarity faster
• give insight faster
• understand your buyers’ organizations and problems faster
• deliver proposals and recommendations faster
• help your buyers feel trust and certainty faster.

All with less friction for your buyers.

How to Conduct a Sales Friction Audit

To gain insight into how buyers may view you, take a hard look in the mirror and run a Sales Friction Audit. This takes five minutes, and it will tell you exactly what’s killing your deals.

Score yourself 1 to 5 on these seven areas:

• Clarity: After every interaction, does the buyer know exactly what happens next?
• Speed: Do you respond at the speed of the buyer’s curiosity or the speed of your internal process?
• Effort: Are you reducing the buyer’s workload or adding to it?
• Progress: Do your meetings create decisions and movement, or just conversation?
• Packaging: Do you make it easy for the buyer to share your insights, information, and recommendations internally to their team?
• Certainty: Do you reduce uncertainty and risk, or do you create more?
• Reliability: Do you do what you say, when you say, without reminders?

Now, after you add this all up, if you don’t like the number, don’t get defensive. Change your mindset.

Because the fix is simple: Stop trying to be liked and start making it easier to work with you. Because if you are just friction with a friendly face, in today’s marketplace, you are going to get crushed by competitors who are friendly, competent, fast, and frictionless.

But I want to be crystal clear: Frictionless doesn’t mean spineless. It doesn’t mean you turn into a people-pleasing slave to your buyer’s every whim. It certainly doesn’t mean handing out discounts like candy to make buyers happy.

It means you run a sales process with structure, discipline, and competence, and that you understand that the buying experience and how you sell matter more than what you sell.

Two Easy-to-Implement Ideas for Eliminating Friction in Your Sales Process

Here are two easy actions you can implement immediately to reduce friction in your sales process.

End Every Meeting with a Map and Next-Step Commitment

The map is clear on who does what, by when, and what done looks like.

Too many sales calls end with vague commitments. “I’ll send you some information.” “Let’s reconnect next week.” “Think about it and let me know.”

That’s not a map or a next step. Those loose ends are friction.

A map sounds like this: “Here’s what happens next. I’m going to send you a detailed proposal by Wednesday at noon. You’re going to review it with your team on Friday. We’ll reconvene on Monday at 2 PM to give it a thumbs up or thumbs down. Will this work for you?”

A map is clear, specific, and has no ambiguity. You are leading the process and driving it forward to a conclusion.

Turn Proposals into Recommendations

Don’t dump choices on the buyer and say, “Let me know what you think.” Give options AND your recommended path.

“Based on what you’ve told me, here are three options. Option A is the safe play. It has the lowest risk but only a moderate impact. Option B is my recommendation because it solves your core problem and gives you room to scale. Option C is the aggressive play. It’s also a higher investment with the highest potential return and the highest risk. Here’s why I’m recommending Option B . . .”

In a world filled with uncertainty, your confident, assertive, expert advice reduces friction and helps your buyer make faster decisions.

How AI Can Give You the Edge for Removing Friction

Now here’s where AI comes in. If we’re honest, most sellers use AI to write emails. That’s fine, but it’s not the edge.

The edge is using AI to remove friction for the buyer and to shorten the distance from interest to decision.

• Generate decision-ready call recaps: outcomes, risks, open items, next steps, deadlines
• Speed up the process of understanding your buyer’s organization and beef up your industry-specific business acumen
• Create a one-page business case that the buyer can forward internally, along with stakeholder-specific FAQs
• Record your meetings so that you never forget anything the stakeholders tell you and use those recordings to speed up the process of crafting personalized proposals and expert recommendations.

Wake Up B2B Salespeople. The World Has Changed.

The bottom line is that the relationships you build are crucial but not enough, because people do business with people they like, trust, and who remove friction from the buying process. They reward sellers who engineer a buying experience that feels seamless.

But if you are just friction with a friendly face and buying from you feels like a slog, buyers will do what people always do when something feels too onerous. They’ll avoid it, delay it, or take the path of least resistance and buy from your competitor.

The world has changed. Buyers have been retrained by frictionless experiences everywhere else in their lives. And they’re bringing those expectations to you.

So be the seller who’s both likable and easy, who builds relationships and eliminates friction, who uses AI not to spam harder but to sell better. That’s the AI Edge.

And remember, when you are tired, worn down, and feel like you can’t take another objection, when all you want to do is quit and go home, always stop and make one more call.