The discount answered the wrong objection.

The previous pieces looked at the buyer: who owns the money, who carries the risk, what a pilot really proves. This one looks at your side of the table, at the moment a customer says the price is too high.

Picture an experienced account manager leaving. In the budget discussion, someone suggests hiring a commercially minded person with less experience. AI can handle much of the research, meeting preparation, proposal writing and follow-up. Why pay a senior salary for work the tools now support?

It's a fair question. The first proposal looks excellent. The research is thorough, the argument convincing. The saving looks justified.

Then the customer pushes back on price. The salesperson works with AI on a response and recommends a discount. The reasoning sounds sensible, the manager approves it, and everyone expects the deal to move. A week later, nothing has happened.

Perhaps the contact never owned the budget. Perhaps another stakeholder had more to lose than to gain. Perhaps the customer needed reassurance about delivery, not a lower number. Nobody checked.

The AI didn't fail. It gave a good answer to the wrong question. The salesperson asked how to handle a price objection. The real question was whether price was the objection at all.

That is the seventh move, the one most challengers skip: confirm the customer will actually move. A discount that changes nothing is a failed seventh move with a price tag. You gave away margin, and you taught the buyer that pushing back pays.

The quarter-end discount is the same mistake on a timer. It sets a deadline that matters to you and not to the buyer. In twenty years I have rarely seen one move a customer to sign now. At best it pulls forward a deal the customer had already decided and was free to sign. Meanwhile it teaches the rest to wait for your next quarter-end. The exception is the end of the buyer's financial year, when unspent budget disappears. Then the deadline belongs to them. A deadline the buyer's own world imposes moves them. Yours doesn't.

An experienced salesperson could miss all of this too. Years on a CV don't guarantee judgement. But knowing when to question the customer's explanation, what to investigate and when to hold your position is what you hope to buy when you hire experience.

So if you use AI to justify removing experience, decide where the judgement will come from. You can't test every objection in every deal. You can make the discount the checkpoint. Nobody approves one until the salesperson can answer a single question: what will the customer do once we say yes? Ask it often enough and your team starts asking it before they come to you.

The offer they could not refuse

Late in a second quarter, I was about to close a deal we had already won. The customer had selected us over the competition. Management wanted it inside the quarter and asked me for an offer the customer could not refuse. It made no difference. The customer's internal policy didn't allow them to sign until they had written off the solution we were replacing, and that write-off fell at the end of the year. The policy only surfaced once the offer was on the table. They signed two quarters later, on the date their own books allowed.

AI absorbed the operations. What is left is judgement. Give it a clear place in the hiring decision, and in the budget.