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It’s Only Common Sense: AI Makes Preparation Easier and Excuses Harder

The use of AI has changed sales preparation forever. With the right AI tools, a professional salesperson can research a customer’s products, markets, facilities, leadership, competitors, technology requirements, and potential supply-chain challenges before the first conversation begins.

But remember that AI is still just a tool. It helps the salesperson prepare to create a stronger human relationship, but it’s not a replacement, and it definitely doesn’t build trust, read the room, recognize hesitation, or understand the significance of a customer’s carefully chosen words. It cannot shake a hand, keep a promise, or take responsibility when something goes wrong.

Too many people talk about AI in sales as though it were an automated substitute for thinking. They use it to produce generic emails, robotic LinkedIn messages, and shallow sales pitches that sound exactly like the hundreds of other messages customers delete every week.

That’s simply faster mediocrity, not intelligent thinking.

I challenge you to use AI differently. Become better informed before you even walk into a meeting. Learn what the customer manufactures, which industries it serves, where its facilities are located, and what applications it may be developing. Research whether the company is expanding, acquiring businesses, launching products, entering new markets, or struggling with supply-chain disruptions.

Calling on a medical device manufacturer? You should understand the company’s major product families, regulatory environment, reliability requirements, and likely demand for technologies such as rigid-flex circuits, microvias, fine lines, advanced materials, or complex assemblies.

How about an aerospace and defense customer? Be prepared to discuss traceability, cybersecurity, domestic sourcing, ITAR compliance, long-term availability, counterfeit avoidance, and continuity of supply.

Someone approaching an AI hardware company should understand that high-performance computing is driving demand for advanced substrates, high-speed materials, thermal management, power electronics, sophisticated PCB fabrication, and enormous manufacturing capacity.

Let AI assemble that foundation in minutes, then you decide what matters. AI may identify 50 facts about a potential customer, but the salesperson must recognize which five are important enough to shape the conversation. Preparation is not about reciting everything you discovered. It is about using that knowledge to ask better questions.

Instead of beginning with, “Tell me about your company,” you can say, “I saw that you are expanding your medical monitoring product line. How is that affecting your need for smaller, more complex circuit boards?”

Instead of asking, “Do you have any boards we can quote?” you can ask, “Are extended laminate lead times creating risks for the new program you plan to launch next year?”

Those questions demonstrate curiosity, relevance, and respect for the customer’s time. They transform an ordinary sales call into a business discussion.

AI can also help you digest technical information. PCB and PCBA sales professionals encounter all types of technical content. AI can summarize complex material, explain unfamiliar terminology, compare technologies, and help prepare questions for engineers.

However, it must be used carefully. AI-generated information can be incomplete, outdated, or simply wrong. Technical claims must be verified with qualified sources. Customer-controlled information must never be uploaded to an unapproved AI platform. That includes drawings, specifications, pricing, proprietary designs, controlled technical data, and anything protected by an NDA, ITAR, export-control regulations, or confidentiality agreements.

After the meeting: AI can help you organize your notes, identify action items, draft a clear follow-up email, create a call report, and update an account plan. It’s your job to review the work and make it personal. A customer should never receive a message that reads like an AI-generated summary from someone who was not paying attention.

Follow-up: Reflect the actual conversation by confirming what you heard, documenting commitments, identifying next steps, and delivering something useful. Speed helps, but accuracy and sincerity matter more.

Account planning: AI can help identify possible contacts in engineering, quality, purchasing, operations, program management, and leadership. It can reveal market trends, competitive pressures, emerging applications, and potential risks. It can help you develop hypotheses about where the customer may need support.

This is a great starting point for a thoughtful question and a real opportunity because it removes much of the tedious work that once made thorough research difficult. It gives us more time to think, prepare, listen, and create value.

It also eliminates our excuses. We cannot keep asking customers questions that could have been answered by spending 10 minutes doing our homework.

AI makes sales preparation easier, but it has not made curiosity automatic. It has not created judgment, initiative, empathy, or integrity. Those still belong to the salesperson.

Use AI to become better informed, not less involved. Let it help you prepare the questions, but listen carefully to the answers. Let it organize the information, but decide what the information means. Let it save you time, but invest that time in understanding the customer.

AI will not replace you if you use it to become a prepared salesperson; using AI will give you a tremendous advantage over the unprepared salesperson who does not.

It’s only common sense.

Dan Beaulieu is president of D.B. Management Group.