Sales
As of August 2026. Phase 6. The department that absorbs the most budget and ranks mid-pack for production agents.
1. The scenario
A B2B sales organisation runs a CRM as the customer system of record, an outbound motion, an inbound qualification funnel, a quoting process, and a forecast cycle that consumes a day of every manager's week. Reps spend a widely lamented share of their time on administration.
2. Agent team design
- Agent
- Account research agent
- What it does
- Assembles account context from CRM, news, product usage and past interactions with provenance
- A x L position
- A2, L1
- Notes
- The unglamorous winner. Solitary work, measurable, contained
- Agent
- CRM hygiene agent
- What it does
- Proposes and applies structured updates from call notes and email
- A x L position
- A3 on structured fields, A2 on narrative, L1
- Notes
- Where the administrative time actually goes
- Agent
- Inbound qualification agent
- What it does
- Engages inbound enquiries, qualifies against stated criteria, routes
- A x L position
- A3, L2
- Notes
- Customer-facing. Inherits the entire customer-service control set
- Agent
- Forecast analysis agent
- What it does
- Explains pipeline movement against history, flags inconsistency
- A x L position
- A2, L2
- Notes
- Explains; the manager forecasts
Deliberately absent: an autonomous outbound agent. See honest limits.
3. Planes activated
Action (direct: CRM gravity is strongest here, and agents reach records through wrapped governed APIs), Knowledge (direct), Improvement (direct), Control (direct for the inbound agent, which sits in the customer-facing lane), Human, Evidence, Execution (supporting).
4. Controls
- Agents act as the requesting user; CRM entitlement and territory rules stay in the CRM.
- The inbound qualification agent is customer-facing and gets the customer-facing edge: disclosure, escalation to a real human, resolution instrumented, conversation retention.
- Commitments are gated. Pricing, discounting and contractual terms are not agent decisions.
- CRM write access follows a trust progression: structured field updates first, narrative later, never both on day one.
5. Economics
Per run. Low to moderate.
Per resolved outcome. The honest unit here is not deals. It is administrative hours recovered per rep per week, and qualified-opportunity rate for the inbound agent. Attributing revenue to a sales agent is a claim the guide will not help anyone make.
6. Honest limits
- Sales and marketing absorb outsized budgets while ranking mid-pack for production agents. One contested-methodology study frames that budget concentration as the signature misallocation of the current wave. The concentration is real even where the study's methodology is disputed.
- Autonomous outbound is a reputational liability with a compliance surface. Disclosure duties apply, anonymous recipients are not bound by an acceptable-use policy, and the failure is public. The guide does not recommend it.
- Product-usage and intent data quality caps the account research agent, and in most enterprises that data is worse than the CRM.
- No published measurement exists of agent effect on win rate that separates the agent from the sales process changes shipped alongside it.
7. Metrics
Administrative hours per rep per week, measured rather than surveyed. CRM field completeness and correction rate. Inbound response time and qualified-opportunity rate. For the qualification agent, the full customer-facing metric set including repeat contact.
Sources
research/R04-systems-of-record/ (CRM gravity, write trust progression), research/R09-experience-and-channels/ (the inbound agent's control set), ../../synthesis/vision-and-target-state.md (budget concentration).
Source: blueprints/departments/sales.md in the evidence repository behind this site.