Spending Human Tokens

Selling with real life humans for fun and profit.

Nov 09, 2024

A pixel art scene in a 1980s frontier adventure style. A robot dressed as a cowboy is standing at the counter of an Old West general store, exchanging goods with the storekeeper. The shelves are filled with various unlabeled items typical of the era, like canned goods, lanterns, and sacks of flour. The setting is warm and rustic, capturing the blend of futuristic and historical elements. The image is in a 16x9 aspect ratio. No text.

How will you spend your human tokens?

Every AI touchpoint in sales has a near 0 marginal cost—not even a dime a dozen.

Meanwhile, every human touchpoint has a real cost and brings with it the moral weight we assign to other human beings. Things like reciprocity.

Your AI touchpoint tells the prospect “your value is near 0”. Your human touchpoint says “your value is high”.

I think this is why a heavy outbound predictable revenue model used to work. It implied that a human being valued another human being enough to spend time researching and reaching out. It invoked at least a tiny sense of obligation to reciprocity in the prospect.

Automated sequences put that concept on life support. Full AI prospecting is pulling the plug.

In the next few years, the most scarce resource in outbound (maybe in all of sales) will be humans. We’ll have a small budget of human interactions we can dole out—each of these “human tokens” will have a high cost but potentially high return.

The teams that spend their human tokens wisely will get ahead. The teams that figure out how to mint more human tokens by making humans unreasonably efficient will win.

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I don't know know that they fully agree with me on this, but shoutout to 📈 Jeremey Donovan and James McArthur 👋 for letting me drone on about the idea last week at GTM 2024.

Uncharted Territory by Gradient Works

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