Trusted Across Enterprise Tech
The growth is already in your accounts.
Your sellers are not working thousands of prospects. They have a defined patch: fifty to a hundred accounts that actually matter. Some are customers they need to grow into much larger partnerships. Others are whitespace they need to break into.
Then the quarter starts. There is a number to hit and live deals that have to close, so hunting is what gets squeezed. Account research gets rushed. Sellers stay close to the stakeholders they already know. The relationships that went cold stay cold, and the people they should be meeting never hear from them.
Nobody is missing that growth for lack of talent. They are missing it for lack of hours.
AI changes what is possible, by giving your sellers the time back to hunt.
Where AI breaks the trust equation
Three signals the buyer is already pulling away.
- Over-adoption: AI generated, AI sent, AI ignored.
- Under-adoption: out-paced, out-scaled, out by 2027.
- Training that did not stick: bought the tools, ran the training, nothing landed.
0.2%
AI OUTREACH RESPONSE RATE
AI Slop Kills Trust
The buyer's brain is a prediction engine. One generic AI message lowers trust in everything else that seller sends. The damage outlasts the message.
Bounti, 2025
50%
SELLERS OVERWHELMED BY TECH
Tool Overwhelm Is Real
Nearly half of sellers say their AI stack is hurting their ability to hit quota. The tools were meant to help. Now they get in the way.
Gartner
65%
TASKS AI AGENTS FAIL
Autonomous Agents Hit a Ceiling
Salesforce tested nine leading AI models on realistic, multi-step sales tasks. They failed nearly two thirds of the time. The relationship still needs a human.
Salesforce CRMArena-Pro, 2025
Why your sellers are the limbic brain
The limbic system is the part of your brain responsible for emotions, instincts, and social judgment. It processes trust, reads body language, senses political dynamics in a room, and drives the gut feelings that experienced sellers rely on, often without realising it.
No AI system can replicate these functions. AI excels at logic, pattern recognition, and processing data at speed. This is the work of the pre-frontal cortex.
Your sellers are the Limbic Brain. AI is the Rational Brain. The best results come when both work together, with your people in charge.
- 95% of a buying decision happens in the emotional brain: fast, instinctive, unconscious.
- 5% is the rational brain: slow, logical, effortful.
- People decide in the 95% then justify it in the 5%.
- Which is why a technically correct message still gets deleted.
The Division of Labour That Wins
You Are the Limbic Brain
- Reading body language
- Sensing politics
- Adapting to personalities
- Building trust and relationship
Your EQ. Your instinct. The things no AI can replicate.
AI Is the Rational Brain
- Research no salesperson ever had time for
- Hyper-relevant first drafts
- ROI business cases
- Driving momentum on deals
Boosting your IQ. Heavy lifting at speed and scale.
The salesperson is the orchestrator. AI works for them, not the other way around.
- Your seller is the limbic system: instinct, reading people, building trust, creativity.
- AI is the prefrontal cortex: research, analysis, logic, scale.
- EQ decides what to say. IQ finds what to say it about.
- The seller stays the orchestrator. AI works for them.
Why any of this works
- Trust is empathy plus relevance plus credibility, all divided by perceived self-orientation.
- Credibility is what you already have.
- Relevance is what the research buys you.
- Empathy is the part no model can produce.
- Self-orientation is the divider: the more the message is about you, the lower the trust goes.
Where AI Does The Heavy Lifting
First Outreach to Qualified Pipeline.
01
Prospecting & New Stakeholder Hunting
AI researches. Your seller crafts. Outreach the prospect actually replies to.
02
Insight-Led First Meetings
AI preps. Your seller runs the room. First meetings that earn the second.
03
Facilitated Outline Business Case Workshop
AI models the case. The customer co-owns it. Their internal champion is built in.
The output: a qualified opportunity with a customer-validated business case. Ready for your existing sales process.
Built in the Room. Owned by the Seller.
A facilitated workshop. Each seller brings a priority account they want to win. Together we build the workflow and execute prospecting in real time.
Real Accounts
Each seller brings a priority account they want to win. The method runs live, on their real pipeline. They see traction before they leave the room.
Co-Created Workflow
We facilitate. Sellers build their own workflow with AI doing the heavy lifting. Adoption follows because they own it. Nothing is forced.
Use What You Have
Even a free Microsoft Copilot account works. No new tools. We make whatever's already in your seller's hand earn its keep.
The method runs in the AI you already have.
Each mega prompt runs to three or four pages. That is not a long prompt. It is where the methodology lives: what to research, how to reason, what to produce and, just as importantly, what to avoid. Your seller fills in a handful of inputs. The prompt does the rest.
No new tool.
It runs in Copilot, ChatGPT or whatever your company has already approved. Nothing to buy, nothing to integrate, no security review, no procurement.
Live in a week, not a quarter.
A short virtual onboarding session and a team can start working real accounts the same week. Nothing gets relearned later.
A method, not a clever prompt.
A prompt gets one seller an answer. A method gets the same quality of answer from every seller, every time, on every account.
The prompts are versioned and reissued as the models and your portfolio change, so what your team is using does not quietly go stale.
What people say about working with Ben
Improve everyone by 5%. That's what Ben did for my team in under 9 months.
Gini
Cognitive strategist | Bringing science into corporate decision systems
Global Partner for Advanced Hunting Enablement
Delivering B2B sales transformation at scale.
Who you would be working with
I sold for twenty years before I taught any of this. Ten at Computacenter, where I finished as their number one seller, then a decade in outsourcing across Capita and Serco. Somewhere in there I closed more than $2 billion of B2B partnerships.
For the last seven years I have run Ben Drakes University, delivering sales enablement for global technology vendors across the UK, Europe, North America, the Middle East and APAC. I also host the AI Outcomes Podcast, where more than 31,000 subscribers watch me ask operators what AI actually changed for them rather than what it promised.
eqai8 is not a framework I read about. It is the way I hunted, written down and handed to AI.
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