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THE INTERVIEW
THURSDAY
STATE
OF SALES
The State of Sales right now….
We used to annoy people one email at a time. Now we annoy them at scale. When people understand that, it shows why there has never been a better time to sell like a human.
THE SETUP
Viktor Von Paustian leads sales at Moxso and is building a method he calls human selling: eight mechanics rooted in neuropsychology and how the brain actually makes decisions. While most of the market races to automate the top of the funnel, Viktor is betting the other way. He talked us through why the personalised email is now the most generic thing in your prospect's inbox, why his team opens cold calls by admitting they are cold calls, and why the best thing a sales leader can do is become useless.
THE 60-SECOND VERSION
Automation turned personalisation into noise. When everyone personalises the same way, nobody is personal.
Practise the read, not the pitch. Reading the room beats remembering the script.
Lead with trust, not tricks. Say it's a cold call. Ask permission. Let the wrong people go.
Make yourself useless. Hand reps ownership of their development. Lead on outcomes, not activity.
3 THINGS YOU'LL TAKE AWAY FROM THIS
Where AI genuinely gives reps time back, and where it just adds noise
A trust-first cold call opener that filters out the people who don't want to be there
How to build a sales culture that doesn't burn people out
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01 · The personalised email is now the most generic thing you can send
Viktor isn't anti-AI. He's anti-shortcut. Asked where AI actually helps, he was clear: strip out the manual work and give reps their time back, so they can spend it on the phone. Phone first, with AI in service of that. Asked where it's just noise, he went straight for automated sequences.
A personalised email is the most generic thing you could create now, because everybody does it in the same way. That's where AI creates the most noise, both for us in sales and for all the prospects out there.
It's a neat inversion. The tools promised personalisation at scale. What they delivered was the same "noticed you recently posted about" opener, sent a million times. The buyer's brain spots the pattern in half a second and files it with the rest.
DO THIS THIS WEEK
List every manual task your reps do before a call. Automate the admin, not the conversation, and put the hours saved straight back into dial time.
02 · Practise the read, not the pitch
Viktor got into sales out of curiosity about how the brain makes decisions. His thinking: if you trained yourself to be the person most people instinctively like, you'd improve your odds of getting the meeting and the sale. That idea became human selling, eight mechanics rooted in neuropsychology.
We try not to practise the pitch, but to practise the read of a room and of humans.
It's also why he's wary of AI coaching done on the cheap. Feeding a transcript to a model because nobody has time to listen misses the thing that matters most, because the model has no sense of the room. And an easy route to success is exactly what our brains are wired to fall for. His verdict: there isn't an easy way in sales. It takes hard work and a lot of skill.
STEAL THIS
In your next call review, skip the script adherence score. Ask the rep one question: what did you notice about the buyer that the transcript won't show?
03 · Lead with trust, not humour
A lot of cold callers try to stand out with a clever or funny opener. Viktor's team does the opposite. They set the scene, show real intent from the first second and ask permission.
We don't say anything crazy. We just call up and say it's a cold call, they're speaking with a salesperson, and would they have anything against us pitching them our idea?
The point isn't to keep everyone on the line. Plenty of reps pride themselves on keeping anyone talking. Viktor sees no value in holding someone who has no reason to be there. Filter early, then spend your energy on the people who actually want the conversation.
TRY THIS ON YOUR NEXT CALL
"This is a cold call, I'm in sales. Would you mind if I told you why I'm calling?" Then genuinely accept a no.
04 · The best sales leader is a useless one
Viktor wants to hand ownership of development back to the reps, so the manager stops being the bottleneck. Lead on outcomes, not inputs. Sales is a numbers game, he accepts, but only when the numbers are done correctly.
I hope that I can be more and more useless for my team. It's crazy to say, but that's the aim.
He's blunt about why this matters. Sales sees more burnout than almost anywhere, and most people end up in the job by accident. His fix is to line up three things: the rep's personal ambition, the mission of the role and the mission of the company. When those align, people have a reason to take the rejections and keep going, because they can feel themselves progressing. When they don't, no incentive plan will hold them.
THE MOVE
In your next one-to-one, ask each rep what they personally want from the next 12 months. Then show them exactly where the role gets them there.
Where it goes next
Viktor thinks the industry is running so many experiments that it will eventually rediscover what it already knew: the old-school craft is the reason we call it selling. He's more excited than nervous. And if he gets knocked back along the way? "We're used to that on the phone, right?"
THE ONE THING
You can't automate your way out of everything. Human to human is where the deal happens.
Every week we sit down with the operators actually moving revenue.