The #1 Way to Win as a GTM Exec in the Age of AI: Be a True Product Guru. Know Your Space 10x Better Than Any Customer.

It’s not enough to be a “people person” anymore. Not even close.

Here’s a test I want every sales leader to try right now: Upload your company’s pitch deck, product documentation, and competitive battlecards to Claude or ChatGPT. Then ask it hard questions—the kind your best prospects ask. Technical questions. Industry-specific questions. Competitive comparisons.

That AI will outperform 80% of your sales team. Right out of the box.

And here’s what makes it worse: AI with memory gets better with every interaction. It compounds knowledge. It never forgets the Q3 release notes or confuses them with the Q4 roadmap.

Your average sales exec? They plateau at month six and start looking for their next job at month twelve. Many never even really learn the competitive landscape. Many never even use their own product.

So here’s the uncomfortable question every GTM leader needs to answer: If your prospects can get better answers from an AI that has your data than they can from talking to you… why would they talk to you?

The “People Person” Myth Is Dead

The Challenger Sale methodology identified this years ago: the “relationship builder” profile—the classic “people person”—was one of the worst-performing sales archetypes. AI didn’t create this problem. It just accelerated it.

Being able to chat about who won the NBA finals doesn’t close deals. Knowing your product cold does. Understanding your prospect’s specific industry challenges does. Having deployed solutions for similar companies does. Teaching prospects something they didn’t know about their own business does.

I hear it constantly from sales candidates: “I’m a great people person. People like to talk to people.”

But people don’t want to talk to you because you’re a people person. They want to talk to the best solution architect in the world who also deployed their exact use case at their buddy’s company down the street.

That’s the bar now.

Three Stories That Should Make You Pause

Story #1: I had a demo recently for an enterprise AI product. Should have been a slam dunk—great product, real traction, I came in ready to buy.

Then I asked about their MCP support. The rep had no idea what I was talking about. When I mentioned Claude, they said “my guys will look into it.” When I pressed on technical details, they responded: “Your secret to being good at AI was really sick prompts.”

Then they threw up a pricing slide. I didn’t buy.

Story #2: One of my SaaStr Fund portfolio companies was meeting with their largest prospect ever—potential $1M deal. The first meeting included their well-regarded CRO, someone with a strong background in “technical selling.”

When the prospect started asking technical questions, the CRO looked confused and asked: “What’s an API call?”

For the follow-up meeting, the founders made a brutal decision: they left the CRO sitting in the lobby and went into the meeting themselves. They closed the $1M deal without him.

Story #3: A $100m+ AI B2B Leader Just Hired a CRO from a Well Known Public SaaS Company — And a Big Prospect Wanted to Pay $3M a Year!! But They Wouldn’t Talk to the New CRO.

Instead, they just worked directly with the head forward deployed engineer. They refused to talk to the CRO. The senior FDE was on site, getting the product deployed. The CRO was still learning the industry.

You Cannot Sell Value If You’re Not a Product Expert. Be Honest. Are You a True Guru?

Let me be blunt: most sales folks want to talk with a war sheet, a tear sheet. They know six things. You cannot sell value if you’re not a product expert.

Value-based selling means providing value. You cannot provide value in the age of AI if you do not know the product cold. Ideally, you know how to deploy it, how to get it going, how to deploy real value—not just having a valuation calculator on your website that says 18 months down the road the product will work.

The worst sales rep you can hire today is the one that tells you they’re a “great people person.” Who cares? Your prospect wants someone who can say: “I want your AI SDR deployed in 30 days. I want it to get you this amount of quota. I want to do this workflow. Here’s exactly how we’ll do it.”

The Real Bar: Know Your Space Better Than AI

Here’s what “product guru” actually means in 2026:

1. Know the product better than an AI trained on your documentation. This is table stakes. If ChatGPT with your docs can answer questions better than you can, you’re already obsolete.
2. Know your competitive landscape cold. Not just the talking points on your battlecard. Actually know what your competitors do well, where they’re ahead, where you’re behind.
3. Know your customers’ industry better than they do. This is the Challenger approach: teach, tailor, take control. You need pattern recognition across dozens of similar deployments.
4. Know how similar customers deployed and succeeded. Specific use cases, specific outcomes, specific lessons learned. This is knowledge AI can’t have.
5. Know what questions to ask that prospects didn’t even know they needed to answer. This is where the magic happens. AI isn’t great at this.

Why “People Person” Isn’t Fixable

Here’s the hard truth: if a sales exec isn’t curious enough to know the product reasonably well before they start, they never will. This isn’t a training problem. It’s a hiring problem.

Candidates who haven’t signed up for a trial of your product before the interview? Who can’t articulate your basic value prop in their own words? That’s a fundamental lack of curiosity and initiative that tells you everything you need to know about how they’ll show up for customers.