Roombas, Bad Email & the Capacity Mirage
Hot Take: AI multiplies motion, only capability turns it into progress.
The Takeaway
A friend with six Shih Tzus bought an early-model Roomba to “win back two hours a week.”
Day one, a pup had an accident.
The robot rolled right through it, packed the mess into its wheels, and spent the next forty minutes painting beige carpet taupe.
Every extra minute the Roomba delivered on the schedule was spent scrubbing floors.
AI promises the same windfall for sales: research in seconds, sequences in minutes, follow-ups while you sleep.
But capacity without judgment is just a faster way to smear the mess.
When a rep uploads a half-baked sequence, the bot scales it to a thousand inboxes.
When a team asks ChatGPT for “pain-point openers,” competitors get the same list by noon.
Speed goes up, differentiation goes down, and buyers mute the channel altogether.
The real savings still belong to the humans who decide what should be multiplied before they hit “run.”
The Real Lesson – Where Human Sellers Win
Automation is the accelerator; capability is the steering wheel.
Four human skills keep the wheels out of the mud:
Threat Radar – Great sellers notice the risk the board is whispering about (regulatory fines, covenant triggers, activist investors) days before it shows up in the RFP. They frame it in the first email—not the fourth sequence step.
Executive Translation – They don’t recite product ROI. They map the dominoes: “If this audit fails, cash is short in Q3, you breach leverage by Q4.” The CFO leans in because someone finally spoke her language.
Priority Pitch – In the opening forty seconds they answer three silent questions: Why this? Why now? Why you? Once urgency and authorship are locked, procurement debates price—not vendor.
Consensus Orchestration – Six stakeholders, six agendas. Bots can track titles, but they can’t balance ego, fear, and career risk. A skilled rep choreographs the room so no one loses face—and no one demands a discount to feel safe.
Miss any one of those and AI just multiplies yesterday’s mistakes. Nail all four and every bot becomes a force-multiplier instead of a stain-spreader.
How Revenue Path Group closes the gap
Prepare — threat-framed narrative tied to the buyer’s top priorities
Equip — a Priority Pitch that earns altitude and defends price on slide one
Develop — daily practice in Navi so upstream conversations become instinct
Try This — The Roomba Audit
Print the last week of emails your sellers wrote or approved.
Red-pen every line a competitor—or ChatGPT—could have written.
Sit with one rep, rewrite a single thread using threat framing and executive language.
Track reply rate and meeting altitude for one week.
If lift appears, scale the rewrite.
If not, coach again before you unleash another sequence.
In the Wild
Scroll-stoppers we caught on LinkedIn this past week:
“Doing nothing” isn’t neutral – A revenue leader catalogued how budgets quietly shift when prospects stall: retraining SDRs, hiring events, agency ad spend. Proof that the status-quo has a cost—and threat framing must beat it.
Cold calling lives or dies on preparation – A sales coach dissected the “hope and dial” routine: spreadsheet, AI-templated email, voicemail abyss. Capacity without capability equals static.
Product parity kills loyalty – Another thread argued that the only moat left is shaping priorities before price sheets circulate. Altitude, not features, protects margin cycle after cycle.