The Generalist Seller Is Disappearing. Here's What Comes Next.

For a long time, one of the easiest ways to establish credibility as a salesperson was to know your product better than anyone else. The features, integrations, competitor comparisons, the industry at large—you were the subject matter expert.

That used to be a meaningful advantage... but maybe not anymore.

That was one of the ideas that stood out to me in a recent conversation with Ronnell Richards for the Sales Operator Series. Ronnell has spent years training and coaching sales organizations, and his perspective on AI is refreshingly practical: Yes, the technology is just changing how sellers work, but it's also changing what buyers need from sellers in the first place.

I'm going to give a recap of the highlights from our conversation in this article, or you can watch the full episode on Youtube here.

AI is making the generalist less valuable

Ronnell's take is that sellers need to stop being general practitioners and become specialists.

The analogy is pretty perfect. If you have a complicated medical problem, you want the orthopedic surgeon who understands your particular condition (not the general practitioner who knows a little bit about everything). The same concept applies to sales.

Buyers can now research products, industries, competitors, use cases, pricing, and alternatives before they ever talk to a salesperson. AI makes that process even faster. And as more software products incorporate AI into the buying journey itself, buyers can increasingly educate themselves and move through parts of the process without a human at all.

If the buyer can get product information from ChatGPT, Claude, Google, or the vendor's own digital buying experience, there's less value in being the person who can simply provide that information. The opportunity is to become an expert in the customer's business, a value-add that's much harder for AI to replicate.

Stop selling the product and understand what motivates your buyer

One of my favorite parts of the conversation was Ronnell's advice for discovery: figure out what gets your buyer promoted and what gets them fired. You can see how that's a much more useful question than simply asking what initiative they're working on.

Think about it from the buyer's perspective. They aren't waking up thinking, "I need a new software platform today." They're thinking about the business problems they have to solve, the goals they're responsible for, the risks they need to avoid, and the outcomes their leadership expects from them.

Ronnell shared an example from early in his career selling T1 circuits. Saving a customer a few hundred dollars a month wasn't necessarily enough to make switching providers a priority. But if he could connect those savings to something the customer actually cared about—freeing up budget for an initiative that would help them solve a larger business problem—suddenly the conversation became much more relevant.

The ability for sellers to provide that connective tissue is where specialization becomes valuable. A specialist understands the problems their buyer is trying to solve and can connect the product to the outcomes that matter.

The goal isn't to be a vendor. It's to become the person they call.

Ronnell has another useful distinction: vendor versus trusted advisor.

A vendor gets called when someone needs to buy something.

A trusted advisor gets called when the customer has a question—even when that question has nothing directly to do with what they sell.

When information is abundant, trust becomes more important, not less. If five vendors can give me essentially the same information about their products, I'm going to place more weight on the person who understands my business and can help me think through the decision. That requires a different kind of expertise where the seller understands the buyer's world well enough to help them make the right decision.

Your LinkedIn profile is part of the sales process

Ronnell and I also talked about how sellers establish credibility before the first conversation even happens. His analogy was the Yellow Pages.

If someone wanted to find a plumber twenty years ago, the Yellow Pages was where they looked. Having a credible-looking listing mattered.

Today, social media is increasingly that directory, and LinkedIn is often the first place a prospect will look after a salesperson reaches out.

That makes the typical LinkedIn profile a missed opportunity. Most salespeople treat their profile like a resume: where they've worked, what they've accomplished, which awards they've won. Ronnell's argument is that it should instead be a selling tool that tells a prospective customer how you serve people like them and why your experience makes you credible.

The same goes for content. Ronnell isn't arguing that every salesperson needs to become a LinkedIn influencer. In fact, he specifically says most people shouldn't try to replicate the volume or visibility of his own content. The goal is credibility, not clicks or likes.

If the right prospect searches for you and finds something that reinforces your expertise and demonstrates that you understand their world, that's valuable—even if only one person ever sees it.

Technology is only as valuable as the philosophy behind it

There was one other thread running through the conversation that I think ties all of this together.

Ronnell has been building and experimenting with technology himself, but he's very deliberate about what he uses it for. His philosophy is simple: technology should either get you closer to the customer faster or help you create better outcomes for them. If it doesn't do one of those things, you're probably using the tool because it's interesting—not because it's useful.

Just because you can build something doesn't mean you should.

Ronnell has used AI to create marketing assets, websites, and landing pages in-house, saving what he estimates to be roughly $100,000 this year. But he's careful to distinguish those relatively simple, low-risk applications from trying to build an entire sophisticated platform yourself.

The same principle applies to sales. Just because a seller can use AI doesn't mean they should.

If they're using it to actually become more knowledgeable about their customers, more relevant in their conversations, and more effective at connecting what they sell to the outcomes their buyers care about, that's a good use case.

The technology will continue to make information cheaper and easier to access, which means the differentiator for the salesperson will lie in whether they can turn that information into understanding, relevance, and trust.

The generalist seller may be disappearing. But I think that's ultimately a good thing. It gives us a clearer picture of what great selling has always been about—and what it will take to stay valuable as AI reshapes the buying journey.

Listen to or watch the full conversation with Ronnell Richards on the Sales Operator Series for more on becoming a specialist seller, building credibility in a digital buying environment, and adapting your sales strategy for what's coming next.