In this episode, Patrick Monnot, founder of Pod, sits down with Sean Piket—a sales veteran with over two decades of go-to-market experience and now the founder of Smooth AI. Sean’s roots in sales run deep. Raised in a family where both parents were top performers (his mom was the “bulldog” real estate closer), he picked up the craft early and never looked back.

Over the past 25+ years, Sean’s built and led sales orgs, worked as a fractional CRO through his consultancy Sales Integrity, and been in the buyer seat over 100 times. Now, he’s channeling everything he’s learned into Smooth AI, an AI-powered advisor designed to remove friction from the B2B buying journey.

In this conversation, Sean shares what’s broken in modern B2B sales, why most AI tools miss the mark, and how he sees the role of sales evolving as organizations begin to scale with AI agents—not just headcount.

Let’s get into it.

Sales is in His DNA—Literally

Sean didn’t stumble into sales. He was born into it. Growing up in a house of seven kids, both of his parents worked in sales—his dad spent nearly three decades at Sears, eventually helping open the iconic Sears Tower, and his mom built a reputation as a powerhouse real estate closer. Together, they ran a business known as “spouses selling houses”—and were even early adopters of online marketing.

But Sean’s first official step into sales came during college, selling Cutco knives with Vector Marketing. It was a true crash course in entrepreneurship—he learned how to recruit, manage, sell, and deliver. He later thought he might follow in his brothers’ footsteps and go into software development, but quickly realized sitting behind a computer wasn’t for him. Instead, he leaned into selling IT services, eventually building a career helping small B2B tech companies scale from $3M to $50M+ and beyond.

That builder mentality has been his compass ever since.

From Executive Buyer to Friction-Fighter

After years of leading sales teams, Sean started noticing a pattern: buying software sucked.

Despite being a lifelong seller, he found himself increasingly frustrated on the buyer side—especially after purchasing over 100 software tools. “I can count on one hand the number of good buying experiences I’ve had,” he admits.

The problem, in his view, is rooted in how sales orgs were restructured during the predictable revenue era. Full-cycle reps were broken down into SDRs, AEs, SEs, CS, and onboarding roles. While that specialization brought internal efficiency, it created a disjointed, slow, and frustrating experience for buyers—especially for simpler, lower ACV purchases.

What made it worse was the complete mismatch with modern buyer behavior. In a world where 70–90% of the buyer journey happens before someone fills out a demo form, organizations are still forcing people through linear sales processes, gatekeeping basic information, and ignoring context entirely.

Sean’s north star? Flip the focus. Stop obsessing over how sellers can sell better—and start building systems that help buyers buy better.

Building Smooth AI: A New Kind of Sales Teammate

That insight led Sean to start building Smooth AI—an AI advisor built for the buyer, not the seller.

Smooth AI acts as a virtual AI agent that greets inbound visitors on your site and guides them through discovery, evaluation, and conversion. Think: a highly trained, digital sales assistant who knows your product inside and out, can answer questions instantly, present slides, qualify leads, and book meetings.

What sets Smooth apart from traditional chatbots or form-based workflows is its avatar interface. These AI advisors look and speak like humans—with natural latency, facial expressions, and context-aware responses. “If I added Sophie, our AI advisor, to a Zoom call, you’d think she was a real person,” Sean says.

Unlike many tools that are little more than wrappers around a language model, Smooth AI goes deep on context. It’s trained not just on your help center or pitch deck, but on your go-to-market strategy, your pricing logic, your discovery framework, and your buyer personas. That enables it to adapt in real time—whether someone’s doing early research, actively evaluating vendors, or ready to buy.

In other words, it’s not just answering questions. It’s selling.

Buyer-Led Growth > Predictable Revenue

If there’s one phrase Sean is trying to popularize, it’s buyer-led growth.

Where product-led growth (PLG) focuses on letting users try before they buy, buyer-led growth is about letting people buy the way they want—whether that’s self-serve, consultative, or something in between. And unlike predictable revenue-era thinking, buyer-led growth doesn’t assume every deal should be qualified and funneled through the same rigid path.

For simpler tools or lower-ACV products, Sean believes most of the traditional sales process is unnecessary friction. A form → SDR → AE → SE → Proposal → Close flow might work for complex enterprise deals, but it’s overkill for a $2K tool where the buyer already knows what they need.

That’s where Smooth AI shines. “The more that you can enable buyers to guide themselves through the process—and raise their hand only if they need help—the better,” Sean says.

Still, Sean’s not naive. In more complex buying journeys, some friction (or collaboration, as Patrick reframes it) is necessary. That’s where a good AI agent should know when to escalate—and how to hand off context smoothly.

Sales Teams Are Changing—Here’s What’s Next

Sean doesn’t believe AI agents are replacing salespeople. But he does think org charts are about to look a lot different.

In his view, every GTM team will soon have AI teammates—agents or advisors that work alongside humans to handle repeatable tasks, engage buyers 24/7, and remove bottlenecks. Some of those agents will be behind-the-scenes (like an AI pipeline coach), while others will be customer-facing (like Smooth AI).

What matters is mindset. You shouldn’t treat these tools like magic black boxes—or passive software. “Think of them like employees,” Sean says. “You don’t expect a new hire to crush it on day one. You need to train them, coach them, review their work, and iterate.”

The sales leaders who adopt that perspective—investing in AI agents like they would in human reps—will see the biggest upside.

And it’s not just theory. In Sean’s world, the best sales teams in the next five years will be the ones who build AI-first processes and treat buyer experience as a competitive advantage.

Want to follow along with what Sean’s building?

You can find Smooth AI at getsmooth.ai  I think not. Is it a good version to polish and follow Sean’s latest thinking on LinkedIn, where he shares insights on frictionless selling, buyer-led growth, and AI-powered go-to-market.