Every salesperson starts the day with the same puzzle:
“What should I do with my next hour if I want to close more deals?”
The obvious answer has always been:
Make calls. Send emails. Follow up.
It feels productive.
It feels direct.
It feels like the path to a deal.
But if we zoom out, something surprising appears:
Sales behaves more like a lottery than a linear machine.
Most calls = $0 outcomes (no pickup, no interest, dead lead)
Some calls = $10–$2,000 outcomes (appointment booked)
A rare few = six‑figure outcomes (deal closed)
Each call is a ticket.
You don’t know which one will hit.
You just know that most won’t.
For decades, humans have been the ones buying these tickets with their time.
A salesperson making $5,000/month ends up costing about $1.04 per 2‑minute outbound attempt.
And with today’s pickup rates, 80% of those dollars evaporate instantly.
This is why the traditional mindset pushes everyone toward “work harder, make more calls.”
But that mindset only existed because humans were the only ones who could dial the phone.
Then something changed.
Eric Schmidt recently discussed the model of AI Voice Customer Service companies:
“These conversations can be worth $10 to $1,000.
The cost of running the AI to make the call is 10–20 cents, and so they would buy massively more compute to improve the quality of the conversations. There aren't even close to enough. We count about 10 million concurrent phone calls that should move to AI in the next year or so. And and my view of that is that's a good tactical solution and a great business..”
Suddenly the price of a lottery ticket collapses.
And once the ticket gets cheap, the optimal strategy changes completely.
The Moment the Math Flips
If a human call costs $1 and an AI call costs $0.10, then the smart question is no longer:
“Should I work more or work harder?”
The smart question becomes:
“Which calls deserve my $1 thinking, and which calls can be handled by a 10‑cent machine?”
This is where marginal value of the next action comes in.
Every lead — every next phone call — has a different expected value.
You can estimate it using three simple factors:
Chance they’ll pick up
Chance that, if they pick up, they’ll move forward
Value of that forward movement (appointment or deal)
Multiply them together, and you get a rough score:
How valuable is the next 2 minutes?
Once you know the value, the rule becomes obvious:
If the next action is worth less than $1 → AI does it.
Humans shouldn’t buy low-value lottery tickets.
AI can hammer these attempts endlessly for pennies.
If the next action is worth $1–$10 → AI warms it, human finishes it.
AI tries first.
If the lead responds or engages, the expected value jumps — then the human steps in.
If the next action is worth $10+ → human acts immediately.
Because nuance, persuasion, and trust create disproportionate upside.
But “compute” doesn’t matter to the salesperson
You don’t need to know what a GPU is.
You don’t need to know what “compute” means.
Just think of it this way:
A human and an AI both have to “think” to make a call.
The human’s thinking costs $1.
The AI’s thinking costs 10 cents.
So the basic principle is:
Use humans when the upside justifies spending a dollar.
Use AI everywhere else.
This is how you win the lottery.
When tickets are expensive, you buy carefully.
When tickets cost 10 cents, you let the machine buy thousands — and only step in when one of them starts flashing green.
The New Job of the Salesperson
The salesperson doesn’t disappear.
They evolve.
AI now does:
the cold attempts
the follow-ups
the reminders
the first touches
the qualification
the retries
the “just checking in” messages
Humans now focus on:
high-intent conversations
negotiation
complex questions
guiding buyers emotionally
closing
refining the AI’s playbook
The salesperson becomes the closer, not the grinder.
The Real Lesson
When the cost of a sales attempt drops from $1 to $0.10:
You don’t keep working the same way.
You don’t dial faster.
You don’t push harder.
You redesign the system so humans do expensive actions and AI does cheap ones.
The companies who adopt this mindset will feel like they’ve suddenly found a cheat code.
Because in a lottery, the winning edge isn’t picking better numbers —
it’s being able to buy more tickets, at lower cost, with smarter timing.
And if you control that machine?
That’s how you win.
