32  / SEEDWORLD.COM  OCTOBER 2026
Sales isn’t only an art. 
	   It’s also a science.
Shawn Brook  President, Seed World Group
T
here’s an old phrase from the 
early days of computing that 
we probably need to bring back. 
Garbage in, garbage out. Put bad 
information into a computer and 
you’ll get bad information back out. 
Somehow, in all the excitement 
around AI, we’ve forgotten that rule.
Everybody wants to know how 
AI will change sales. I think there’s a 
more important question: What are 
you going to feed it? AI needs data. 
It needs history. It needs informa­
tion to analyze. And when I look 
at a lot of sales organizations, that 
foundation simply isn’t there.
For more than a decade, sales­
people have been told to use a 
CRM. Record customer interactions. 
Track opportunities. Document 
what happened. And for more than 
a decade, a lot of them haven’t 
done it. Yet now we want AI to 
transform sales.
With what? If we haven’t col­
lected the information, there isn’t 
anything meaningful for AI to 
amplify. 
Part of the problem is that we 
love saying sales is an art. Heck yes, 
it is. Connecting with people, listen­
ing, asking the right questions and 
knowing when to push and when to 
shut up are human skills. But sales 
isn’t only an art. It’s also a science.
You’d never run finance or R&D without clear pro­
cesses. I regularly ask salespeople to explain their sales 
process. Most can’t. Sometimes their companies can’t 
either. And that matters because AI is incredibly good 
at working with whatever we give it.
Give it good information and it can identify patterns, 
improve processes and make people more pro­
ductive. Give it garbage and it can organ­
ize your garbage, analyze your garbage 
and confidently hand the garbage back 
to you.
We keep hearing that AI will make 
businesses faster. Faster at what? A 
good process? Fantastic. A bad pro­
cess? Congratulations. You can now 
execute it faster.
That’s why the biggest AI 
opportunity for many sales 
organizations isn’t actu­
ally AI, at least not yet. 
It’s building the foun­
dation AI needs. Define 
your sales process, 
get serious about your 
CRM, and then decide 
what information mat­
ters and consistently collect 
it. Then bring in AI.
Because AI is spectacular at amplification. It can 
amplify good data, good processes and human exper­
tise. The technology may be new, but the rule isn’t. 
Garbage in still means garbage out.
BUSINESS GROWTH

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