Andreas Welsch

And to me, that was very insightful because in business as well, we have the same situation.

There's been this old or longstanding saying, sales is people doing business with people.

And I think that, again, holds true.

Yes, there are ways where we can augment or maybe partially automate tasks like business development, initial outreach, cold outreach, sending personalized messages and so on.

But for especially large transactions, complex transactions, complex sales cycles, we want and we need to have a person there.

to build that trust with the customer.

Here's what we can do for you.

We're also here to listen.

What are the pain points you have?

Where are things not going so well?

If you need somebody to escalate that to, I'm not giving you a 1-800 number.

I'm giving you my cell number, right?

And I will help you fix this or get this fixed for you.

So the personal relationship to me is something that we must not automate and that we must not automate away.

I agree.

So the other part to me is that everyone will eventually become a leader, right?

whether you lead people and you have responsibility there, or you lead systems or systems of agents, if you will.

And having gone through several iterations of leadership training in my corporate career with increasing responsibility, it starts with how do you lead a team?

How do you manage a team?

How do you manage teams and teams of teams?