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Research Blog
Human Centered Sales at Scale
January 8th, 2025 | 20 minute read
But why?
What happens when sales, AI, and human-centered design collide?
Having worked in sales before, I’ve experienced both sides of the equation: the pressure to move fast and the need to truly understand users. This paper is an exploration of what happens when those worlds intersect, and how Design Thinking and AI can help sales teams create more human, value driven experiences.
January 8th, 2025
Sales Today
Sales today are fast, automated, and often unintentionally pushy. Salesforce reports that 72% of buyers expect personalized, human interactions but rarely receive them. As one senior account executive at IBM stated, “people want solutions fast, but they want them tailored. Sales can’t just sell features anymore; it has to solve real pain.” [1]
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[Figure 1] Typical Sales Cycle
The problem is that many sales frameworks still rely on feature pitching and rushing to close a deal, or to get users on the next call, even as buyers now expect both speed and personalization. AI can accelerate the process, but when companies use it only for efficiency, empathy gets lost. This creates a world where speed beats sincerity, when true innovation means breaking old models and using AI to support, not replace the human connection in sales.
As a UX designer now, and someone who worked in the sales space, I thought to myself: what if there is a world where AI, Design Thinking, and the Sales world actually teamed up? What if empathy, co-creation, prototyping, and iteration weren’t just design buzzwords, but tools embedded into the sales process itself?
Sales Without Empathy is Just Noise
When a transaction lacks genuine connection, it doesn't build trust, loyalty, or long-term value. The research backs this up: companies that focus on empathy in their sales processes report dramatically better outcomes, one study found that empathy-based approaches improve win rates by around 38% and boost profit growth by 27% [2]. As one sales professional I interviewed put it: “It’s like a relationship, you have to read their language”.
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[Figure 2] The intersection of AI, Design Thinking, and Sales. Together, these disciplines enable human-centered sales by combining speed, empathy, and real-world business impact.
This is where Design Thinking comes in. At its core, Design Thinking is about empathy, stepping into the buyer’s shoes, uncovering hidden needs, and co-creating solutions that feel meaningful. It emphasizes listening, observing behaviors, and mapping out the buyer journey in a way traditional frameworks often neglect, but this reframes the sellers voice from selling what they think the users want to selling what the users actually needs.
For example, research shows top-performing sellers are 44% more likely to actively listen and 36% more likely to surface hidden buyer needs [3]. This demonstrates that empathy is a measurable advantage. And yes, AI has its role: it can speed up outreach, surface patterns, and automate tasks so salespeople spend more time engaging humans rather than entering data [4]. But here’s the catch: when AI is used purely for efficiency, empathy gets lost. One study on AI agents warned that systems lacking relational context can feel “cold and uncaring [5].” The key isn’t replacing humans, it’s designing systems where AI supports human connection.
When we ignore the human experience behind buying decisions, we end up with processes that are fast, but hollow [6]. If we intentionally build empathy into our workflows, we not only listen, we lead.
What Does This Actually Look Like?
Design Thinking gives us the tools to actually understand this messy, nonlinear experience. Journey mapping forces us to slow down long enough to ask:
Where is the buyer confused?
Where does empathy disappear?
Where do they feel pressure?
Who else influences the decision?
What touchpoints feel robotic or repetitive?
So, what happens when sales uses a Design Thinking journey map internally to better understand a user?
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[Figure 3] Example buyer journey map used internally by sales teams to understand a buyer’s actions, emotions, and pain points across the decision process. This template illustrates how Design Thinking helps sales move from feature-based selling toward empathy-driven understanding.
Think of journey mapping like designing a user onboarding flow, except the “user” is let’s say … Jordan, a VP of Operations trying to survive five meetings before lunch. When the sales team builds Jordan’s journey map internally, something shifts: Jordan stops being “a VP with a budget” and becomes a human navigating real pressures, confusion, and emotional highs and lows.
The map acts like a mirror, revealing where sales supports Jordan and where the process unintentionally adds friction. A request like “We need better response times” often masks the deeper truth: “My team is drowning, leadership wants answers, and I can’t afford to choose the wrong solution.” That emotional context becomes the opportunity, shifting messaging from features to relief, clarity, and partnership.
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[Figure 4] Rather than prescribing solutions, this framework helps sales teams identify buyer needs, challenges, and opportunities before proposing value.
As we spot low points in the journey map, reps can deliver value before selling: personalized insights, relevant benchmarks, quick diagnostics, or simple validation. Instead of generic demos, AI can generate tailored workflows or storyboards that match Jordan’s real environment. AI stitches together patterns from calls, emails, and engagement behaviors, revealing what each stakeholder truly cares about, efficiency, risk, clarity, support, while Design Thinking helps reps interpret those insights with empathy and reshape the journey around real human needs. The result is a living, adaptive buyer experience where AI handles scale and pattern recognition, Design Thinking guides emotional understanding, and sales turns it all into a personalized path that evolves with the buyer.
And this leads to the second breakthrough:
AI AS AN ENABLER
Paul, the CTO at Scale Social, captured the gap perfectly when he said, “I wish salespeople had engineering experience to help buyers visualize what’s possible.” That used to be an unrealistic expectation, but today AI essentially gives sales reps those engineering superpowers. Instead of relying on decks or abstract explanations, AI can instantly mock up workflows, sketch prototypes, visualize future-state processes, or even simulate how a team might use a product, all live during a sales conversation [7]. Design Thinking then turns these AI-generated artifacts into meaningful solutions by grounding them in empathy: What pain are we solving? Does this future state actually help Jordan breathe easier? Rather than asking buyers to imagine, sales teams can now show what’s possible and co-create solutions with the buyer in real time [8]. At that point, it’s no longer selling, it’s co-designing the future with your buyer.
In Conclusion...
At the end of all this research, interviews, sticky notes, and wondering if I am a sales person or a designer?, one thing became clear: if sales can be redesigned through empathy, iteration, and AI, the next question becomes: what does leadership look like in this new model?
Being a leader in this opportunity is not about adopting the newest tools first, nor is it about automating sales as quickly as possible. Leadership, in this context, means rethinking how sales works at a systems level. It requires shifting sales from a transactional function into an experience-design realm, one that prioritizes clarity, trust, and confidence for the buyer.
Leaders in this space channels empathy as a strategic advantage rather than a soft skill. They encourage sales teams to deeply understand buyer contexts, pressures, and constraints, and they design processes that reward listening, learning, and collaboration, not just closing speed. AI becomes a powerful enabler in this model, accelerating insight generation, visualization, and personalization, while human judgment remains responsible for interpretation, ethics, and relationship-building.
This leadership mindset also reshapes how sales works with product and design teams. In a future-state sales organization, sales does not operate downstream from product; it becomes a key input into product thinking. Buyer journey maps, emotional signals, and real-world usage insights gathered during sales conversations inform how solutions are positioned, adapted, and even built. Design Thinking provides a shared language across sales, product, and design, aligning teams around real user needs rather than assumptions.
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[Figure 5] A reimagined sales cycle informed by Design Thinking principles. AI accelerates insight generation and visualization, while empathy and iteration guide meaningful buyer engagement.
In this model, sales is no longer the final step before handoff. It becomes part of a continuous
feedback loop where learning from buyers informs future engagement, onboarding, and iteration. The result is not just better sales outcomes, but stronger adoption, clearer value realization, and more durable customer relationships.
Leadership here is ultimately about responsibility: responsibility for how technology shapes human experience, responsibility for designing sales systems that scale trust, and responsibility for ensuring that speed never comes at the cost of sincerity.
So the opportunity moving forward is simple but powerful:
Design the sales process the same way we design great products, with empathy, iteration, and clarity, and let AI handle the heavy lifting. Because in a world where speed is easy, sincerity becomes the real competitive advantage. And maybe, just maybe, the future of sales isn’t more automation or how fast we can close a deal, but better powered by design thinking.
References:
[1] Salesforce, State of the Connected Customer, Salesforce Research, 2024. [Online]. Available: https://www.salesforce.com/resources/research-reports/state-of-the-connected-customer/
[2] RAIN Group, “114 Essential Sales Statistics to Improve Performance,” RAIN Group Sales Training, 2023. [Online]. Available: https://www.rainsalestraining.com/blog/114-essential-sales-statistics-to-improve-performance/
[3] RAIN Group, “Top-Performing Sellers: What They Do Differently,” RAIN Group Sales Training, 2023. [Online]. Available: https://www.rainsalestraining.com/blog/top-performing-sellers
[4] McKinsey & Company, “The State of AI in 2022,” McKinsey & Company, 2022. [Online]. Available: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/the-state-of-ai-in-2022
[5] Forrester Research, “The Future of Sales,” Forrester Blogs, 2023. [Online]. Available: https://go.forrester.com/blogs/category/the-future-of-sales/
[6] A. Pasricha and T. Davenport, “AI Can Help Salespeople, But It Can’t Build Relationships,” Harvard Business Review, Mar. 2020. [Online]. Available: https://hbr.org/2020/03/ai-can-help-salespeople-but-it-cant-build-relationships
[7] B. K. Wells and H. J. Kim, “Customer trust and relational dynamics in AI-enabled service interactions,” ODU Digital Commons, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/marketing_pubs/22/
[8] Leads at Scale, “The Empathy Advantage That Makes Our Visually Impaired BDRs Outperform,” Leads at Scale Insights, 2023. [Online]. Available: https://leadsatscale.com/insights/the-empathy-advantage-that-makes-our-visually-impaired-bdrs-outperform
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