The most expensive moment in the B2B sales cycle is unlike any other.
The account executive is thirty minutes away from the live call. The discovery is complete, the buyer is engaged, and the conversation turns to the part where deals are settled out of polite interest. Then comes the important question: how does the integration handle the legacy data model, or what does the security architecture look like once the acquisition acquires it?
The account executive does not know. A sales engineer who does this orders three deals.
So the representative offers the only thing available, which is a word to follow. The call ends amicably and the chase begins sometime next week. Nothing about it registers as a failure, and that’s the problem. By the time the specialist reaches the buyer, already acquired land must be acquired a second time, and the already long sales cycle is extended.
An impossible paradox
This scene is the apparent culmination of three forces pulling against each other: growth costs more than ever, buyers will wait less than ever, and the people who can do both don’t scale. Call it the impossible paradox, because the usual answer to any of the three makes the other two worse.
Start with the cost. Alexander Group puts the increase in customer acquisition costs between 40% and 60% across most segments since 2023 alone, and sales cycles have lengthened from an average of 107 days in early 2022 to 134 days today. It now takes about 20 months for a company to recoup what it spends on acquiring a customer, so new accounts sit at a loss for the better part of two years.
The buyer’s patience went in the opposite direction. The same executive who spends four months evaluating a platform resolves a consumer’s purchase in ninety seconds and doesn’t consciously recalibrate between the two.
The board did not respond by lowering growth targets. Revenue leaders are being asked to grow faster with smaller budgets, and the instinct is to hire. This is where the third force bites. At the time a particular buyer asks a particular question, headcount adds capacity without adding availability, and the intention is not matched to staffing.
Handoff Tax
Most deals never die. They die in the spaces between people. Every time a buyer moves from one role to another, context, momentum, and credibility are lost during the transition. The cost is repeated at every opportunity pipeline whether it is shown in the dashboard or not. Call it the Handoff Tax.
In most companies, the relay works in roughly the same way. The buyer comes ready. The booking chatbot grabs a calendar slot and disappears, turning a live intent into an invite within four days. The sales development representative approves the account and forwards it to the account executive, and the buyer explains the situation a second time. The AE executes the deal until it needs technical depth, at which point the buyer explains it a third time to the sales engineer pulled the day before.
The first two passages are warm-ups. The third is where the real money goes, because it happens after the company pays for everything: the request is received, the meeting is won, and the buyer asks the question that indicates serious evaluation. Coverage is running out right now.
There is a number attached to the magnitude of this loss. Matthew Dixon and Ted McKenna conducted a study on 2.5 million people sales conversations There was a JOLT effect, found 40% to 60% of deals are lost to buyers who signal their intent to buy now and then don’t act. These deals don’t lose out to a competitor. They stand between asking for the product and signing for it.
The reason friction exists is structure. Sales engineers, also called solution engineers, are the people who answer a difficult technical question, and there aren’t many of them. 1mind puts the media at four account managers for every sales engineer, reaching eleven in many organizations. Independent criteria By the end of 2025, nearby land, in a median of about one in five, expanding to seven after a company passes one hundred representatives. Any of these numbers have the same meaning when applied against the full calendar. Most live sales calls happen without technical depth in the room.
This refinement has a price. Alexander Group, 100 sales force comparisonsfound that companies employing one sales engineer per five reps generated an average of $2 million in revenue per rep, compared to $3.2 million for those employing one-to-one. Richer coverage follows more complex products, so causation goes both ways, but it’s a gap most revenue leaders want to explain.
Hiring more of them will not solve the coverage problem. Sales engineers are few and far between, and few companies can justify keeping one in reserve for a question no one knows is coming.
“The most expensive lead in your pipeline is when the AE is alone on the call and the expert has three deals booked,” says Jonathan Kvarfordt, VP of marketing at 1mind.
Design for the buyer
The main reason is a design choice that no one wants to make. Go to the market it was assembled to serve the seller’s process, and the buyer’s experience was left to emerge from whatever was produced. Routing, specialization, and calendar capture have each become software categories with their own budget lines, and each has added space to deliver to the buyer.
The arrangement was held as long as buyers were willing to wait. It’s failing now because buyers are coming in by researching through search, communities and, increasingly, AI chatbots. They appear with a specific constraint and want a specific answer. Asking them to wait a week when a person is vacated is asking them to treat the vendor’s staffing model as their concern.
The direction of travel was visible before instruments existed. Speaking at Gartner’s CSO conference in 2023, analyst Robert Blaisdell claimed that generative AI and digital people could change the role of the salesperson and that was the change about “giving more responsibility to technology”. instead of giving sellers more. The vendor-facing version of this came first. The buyer-facing version took another three years.
Destination is a B2B buying experience that’s closer to better consumers: immediate, on the buyer’s terms, with depth at the point of question. Companies that win in the next decade will shorten the distance between a buyer’s request and a qualified response. Economics favors this because the demand has already been met and it costs less to convert more of it than to buy more.
Putting the expert in the room
1 mindBuilt by Amanda Kahlow, it builds against this gap. Kahlow founded and ran 6sense and 1mind before leaving in 2020 It was announced to the public in November 2025 with 30 million dollars Series A It is led by Battery Ventures and brings the total funding to $40 million.
The company’s framework is a suite of Super People that go to market: a continuous system with face, voice and account-level memory, used throughout the buyer’s journey. Active May 19, 2026 it shipped Superhuman built for a live sales call, pitching it as the first artificial intelligence to join calls as a visible, named participant speaking directly to buyers.
Ride-Along Superhuman appears in Zoom, Teams, or Meet as a participant alongside the account leader listed under the human name. By 1mind’s own calling, the persona is Nigel. It operates in one of two modes assigned to each meeting: active or silent and listen-only. In active mode, it answers technical questions that arise, provides slides on request, and can conduct a live demo with cursor control through the product’s interface. 1mind says proprietary safeguards keep it company-verified information on pricing and technical claims. He withdraws and the representative retains command of the room.
The important difference is who the AI is talking to, because live sales calls already have an AI category, and it points the other way. Rep-assist tools help the seller: the software listens to the conversation and displays a competitive fact or suggested answer in the sidebar, and the rep reads it back. The recipient is still waiting for the person to pass it on, and is still hearing from someone who learned it four seconds ago.
“Rep-assist tools whisper to the salesperson,” says Kvarfordt. “The Ride-Along Super Human talks to the customer during the call with the depth of a sales engineer.”
1mind’s own engagement data shows Ride-Along sessions deeper than the website crack, with a median of close to 26 conversational turns almost entirely spoken. A finding shaped the format. In live calls, buyers prefer a voice without a face on the screen, as a face competes for attention during a business session.
What should be true
The obvious objection is that this is, more frankly, downsizing. No company employs a skilled sales engineer on every live call at the time of need, so the Ride-Along Superhuman works where a human never will. Repetitive technical work is moving to AI. Judgment and attitude rest with the representative.
A less obvious risk is trust. A live call is the highest-risk area an AI salesperson can choose, because a security question answered incorrectly in front of a buying committee does more damage than the follow-up email it replaces. Railings are what 1mind is pointing to, and the hard part of engineering this is giving up. A once-extended participant carries more credibility than a never-empty seat.
Trade numbers deserve the same scrutiny. 1mind reports a two- to five-fold increase in conversions, a 62% reduction in sales cycles, and $110,000 worth of deals closed without human intervention. These are first-party figures from an early access cohort, none of which have been independently verified. They describe what happened to some early customers, which is not the same as what a new buyer would expect.
One system, less clutter
Live calling is where the Handoff Tax is most affected, although it is not the only place where it is charged.
The same leak is seen when a website visitor receives a calendar invite and nothing else, and when a new customer explains their business from scratch to a support team with none of the contextual sales collected.
Single purpose tools address one of these points and leave every handover around intact. 1mind’s argument for a unified system is that the same brain drives the score from first touch to refresh, leaving no seams for context to flow through.
At least one customer tested it instead of taking it on faith. Experity, a healthcare software company, replaced its old chatbot and ran 1mind against a competing tool along the same funnel. Win rates increased from 26% to 50%. “We were making a 2015 move in the 2026 market,” said Jonathan Moss, Experity’s EVP of patient affairs. The numbers still come from 1mind, and it’s one company, but the comparison was made rather than confirmed, which is more than most vendor testimonials suggest.
Underlying it all is faith, simpler than architecture. “The way people buy has changed,” Kahlow said. “Companies have no way to sell.”
Whether 1mind is the company that bridges the gap between the two will take longer to build than the funding stage. On most calls, the seat next to the representative is empty, and the cost is now so obvious that someone will sell the repair.
