The future of B2B sales: Specialists, AI, and real relationships

Welcome back to People in Sales. This is SparrowCRM's series on the leaders shaping how sales teams work, sell, and grow. This time, we sat down with Abhilash Kannan. He has a decade of sales experience across health tech, edtech, SaaS, and financial markets. We talked about where B2B sales is headed next.

Abhilash didn't plan a career in sales. In college, he and a friend started an event business. That is where his curiosity about business began. Ten years later, he has sold across four different industries. That curiosity still shapes how he sees the future of b2b sales.

How did you find your way into sales?

Early on, he noticed something important: the best salespeople in the room were never the loudest ones; they were the ones asking the best questions. That idea changed how he approached his work, and almost ten years in, he still calls sales one of the most intellectually demanding professions there is, not because of the pitch itself, but because of everything that happens before it.

What's a lesson you learned early in your career that still shapes how you sell today?

Preparation, that is the answer, without hesitation.

He used to think confidence came from personality, but now he knows it comes from being the most prepared person in the room.

His approach lines up with some simple sales prospecting tips: do the homework before you ever pick up the phone, because that habit has done more for his career than any single skill he has built. He has even built tools to make this kind of preparation repeatable, since he believes it can be engineered, not just practiced.

You've built and led teams. What are your biggest lessons on leadership?

When it comes to how to build a sales team, three things stand out for Abhilash. First, hire for curiosity, not just experience.

Second, a leader's job is to remove friction, not add process.

Third is the one he calls the golden rule: feedback.

The teams that grow fastest are the ones having real conversations early, not saving everything for a review.

What trends do you think are shaping the future of B2B sales?

Three shifts stand out to him. The generic pitch has died, because buyers know too much for it to work anymore, and this is the generalist vs specialist tension he keeps coming back to: being a generalist today just means being commoditized, while deep domain expertise earns trust.

Second, sales and marketing are blurring together, since the best salespeople build an audience before the first call even happens.

Third, AI has changed the game. Everyone can now send a hundred emails in no time, which means volume is no longer what sets people apart. The real differentiator is judgment, knowing who to reach, why, and what to say that actually matters.

After the AI wave, how have your sales processes changed, and what's changed the most in how you sell?

Abhilash now uses AI heavily for research, pattern recognition, and drafting. But he draws a clear line.

This is what AI in b2b sales looks like at its best for him: a tool that clears the busywork so the real thinking can happen.

Which tools are helping you work smarter today, and what difference have they made?

Abhilash has built more than he has bought, including custom scoring tools to qualify prospects, content frameworks to generate leads, and research assistants to prep for calls. Every sales process is different, so off-the-shelf tools rarely fit. Still, he is honest about what actually matters.

A calendar and a weekly rhythm, used consistently, will outperform any stack used sporadically.

In an increasingly digital world, how important are in-person relationships and events?

He recently spent three weeks in the UK and Ireland meeting clients and attending events, and it opened doors that six months of email could not. There's a quality of trust that forms in person that just doesn't replicate on a screen, in his view. His rule for relationship building in sales: use digital to scale your reach, but use the in-person meeting to deepen the relationship that actually matters.

What advice would you give to someone stepping into sales today, and to a budding sales leader?

To anyone just starting, Abhilash says to get obsessively curious about the people you're selling to, not just your product. Learn their world, their pressures, their goals. Product knowledge will come with time, but empathy and curiosity are much harder to teach, so build those first. To a budding sales leader, his advice shifts.

Learn to listen more than you talk. Build psychological safety at work so your team tells you the truth instead of what you want to hear. Abhilash holds himself to one rule: never ask someone to do something he wouldn't do himself.