--- title: Don't Sound Like Everyone Else | The Sales Factory with Coach Carroll description: AI made every business sound the same. The Sales Whisperer® tells Coach Carroll why that forces you onto price, and how to stand out and win the sale. image: https://thesaleswhisperer.com/hubfs/tsw-sales-factory-807-og.jpg --- [Skip to content](https://thesaleswhisperer.com/blog/dont-sound-like-everyone-else-the-sales-factory-with-coach-carroll#main-content) [![Wes Schaeffer is The Sales Whisperer®](https://thesaleswhisperer.com/hs-fs/hubfs/wes-header-lockup.png?width=1560&height=360&name=wes-header-lockup.png)](https://www.thesaleswhisperer.com/) - Work With Me Show submenu for Work With Me - [Fix Your Follow-Up](https://thesaleswhisperer.com/follow-up) - [Best Day Ever](https://thesaleswhisperer.com/best-day-ever) - [HANK The AI](https://thesaleswhisperer.com/hank) - [AI Tools Compared](https://thesaleswhisperer.com/ai-compared) - [12 Weeks To Peak™](https://thesaleswhisperer.com/12-weeks-to-peak) - [48-Hour Fix](https://thesaleswhisperer.com/48-hour-fix) - [Start](https://thesaleswhisperer.com/start) - [Blog](https://thesaleswhisperer.com/blog) - [The Daily](https://thesaleswhisperer.com/daily) - [Speaking](https://thesaleswhisperer.com/sales-keynote-speaker) - [Podcast](https://thesaleswhisperer.com/podcast) Show submenu for Podcast - [Podcast Guests](https://thesaleswhisperer.com/podcast-guests) - [About](https://thesaleswhisperer.com/about) Open main navigation Close main navigation - Work With Me Show submenu for Work With Me - [Fix Your Follow-Up](https://thesaleswhisperer.com/follow-up) - [Best Day Ever](https://thesaleswhisperer.com/best-day-ever) - [HANK The AI](https://thesaleswhisperer.com/hank) - [AI Tools Compared](https://thesaleswhisperer.com/ai-compared) - [12 Weeks To Peak™](https://thesaleswhisperer.com/12-weeks-to-peak) - [48-Hour Fix](https://thesaleswhisperer.com/48-hour-fix) - [Start](https://thesaleswhisperer.com/start) - [Blog](https://thesaleswhisperer.com/blog) - [The Daily](https://thesaleswhisperer.com/daily) - [Speaking](https://thesaleswhisperer.com/sales-keynote-speaker) - [Podcast](https://thesaleswhisperer.com/podcast) Show submenu for Podcast - [Podcast Guests](https://thesaleswhisperer.com/podcast-guests) - [About](https://thesaleswhisperer.com/about) - [Get The Daily](https://thesaleswhisperer.com/daily) [Get The Daily](https://thesaleswhisperer.com/daily) Oct 14, 2026 # Don't Sound Like Everyone Else | The Sales Factory with Coach Carroll ![Picture of Wes Schaeffer](https://thesaleswhisperer.com/hs-fs/hubfs/Wes%20Schaeffer%2c%20The%20Sales%20Whisperer%20black%20white.png?width=50&name=Wes%20Schaeffer%2c%20The%20Sales%20Whisperer%20black%20white.png) [Wes Schaeffer](https://thesaleswhisperer.com/blog/author/wes-schaeffer) Share: [facebook-f icon](http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=https://thesaleswhisperer.com/blog/dont-sound-like-everyone-else-the-sales-factory-with-coach-carroll) [linkedin-in icon](http://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&url=https://thesaleswhisperer.com/blog/dont-sound-like-everyone-else-the-sales-factory-with-coach-carroll) [Twitter icon](https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?url=https://thesaleswhisperer.com/blog/dont-sound-like-everyone-else-the-sales-factory-with-coach-carroll) [pinterest-p icon](http://pinterest.com/pin/create/link/?url=https://thesaleswhisperer.com/blog/dont-sound-like-everyone-else-the-sales-factory-with-coach-carroll) [envelope icon](mailto:?body=https://thesaleswhisperer.com/blog/dont-sound-like-everyone-else-the-sales-factory-with-coach-carroll) Most businesses don't have a lead problem. They have a sameness problem. Coach Carroll had me on [The Sales Factory](https://www.coachcarroll.com/podcast/the-sales-factory-episode-807/), one of the last guests before he puts a lid on ten years of the show. We talked about why AI, automation, and recycled "best practices" are making businesses look and sound exactly alike—and why that leaves your prospect only one way to choose between you and the next guy: price. **Watch or listen:** [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uf_A-ukryEk) · [Episode page with Apple, Spotify, and Podbean links](https://www.coachcarroll.com/podcast/the-sales-factory-episode-807/) ## What you'll learn in this episode - **Why sameness forces you onto price.** When your website, your messaging, and your follow-up look like everyone else's, price is the only thing left to compare. - **Why AI won't replace good salespeople.** Technology always gets rid of the bottom. It always has. - **The workflow math that hooks owners on automation.** Build one, clone it, and watch the hours you get back stack up week after week. - **The rat in the cookie dough.** How too much "personalization" makes prospects feel manipulated, and what to do instead. - **Why best-of-breed tools are back**—and why somebody now has to orchestrate them. - **Why most entrepreneurs are stuck in a cave**, and what it takes to get them out. ## The sameness problem Remember when WordPress was new? A hot theme would come out, everybody would grab it, and if you were in the business you could look at a site and name the theme. AI already has that look. You can see a website and know AI built it. There's nothing wrong with that by itself. But when your messaging sounds like everyone else's and your website looks like everyone else's, you're back to the oldest problem in sales: > *"The only way a prospect can differentiate between you and your competition when you look and sound like them is on price."* > —Wes Schaeffer Everybody says they zig when the market zags. They think outside the box. The hell they do. They wear the same clothes, drive the same cars, use the same tools, and build the same websites. People are afraid to stand up and stand out, so they use these tools to look like everyone else. Technology changes. There's still a human on the other end of the screen, and you still have to get that human to trust you enough to buy. Even if somebody's AI agent is doing the shopping, a human programmed it, instructed it, and prompted it. ## Technology always gets rid of the bottom Coach asked whether AI will eat the bottom 20% of salespeople. Yes—and that's nothing new. The loom got rid of the worst seamstresses. Desktop publishing was going to kill the book business. Email was going to kill the post office. Airplanes were going to kill cars. The extremes are always wrong. There will still be salespeople. And the people who say "AI isn't that good" are usually using the free plan to ask where to get sushi. Open up the back end, build something real, and you quickly see what's possible. It feels like 1998 to me. We are early. If you paid to build a website a decade before your competitors could install WordPress themselves, did you waste that money? ## Most entrepreneurs are technicians Michael Gerber nailed it in *The E-Myth*: most business owners are technicians with random fits of entrepreneurism. Ask them about systems, processes, and SOPs and you get a blank stare. They're good at what they do and they wing the rest. Back when I was selling Infusionsoft, people would ask, "How long before we're up and running?" I'd say, "About 25 minutes." A web form, the fields, a tag in the CRM, a thank-you email, and a task assigned to somebody to call the lead back. Done. What they really meant was, "How long before my whole business runs itself while I sit by an infinity pool in Thailand?" That's a different answer. Work harder than you ever have for 90 days and you'll build the foundation to get there. Here's the math that hooks people once they start: - **Week one:** we spend about eight hours building one workflow together. It saves you 30 minutes a day—two and a half hours a week, forever. - **Week two:** the next one takes four hours because you can clone it and you know the buttons. Now you're getting back five hours a week. - **Week three:** the third takes two hours and saves you an hour a day by itself. A few weeks in, you're getting back a full day every week. Now you're excited. Now you're asking, "What else can I automate?" Coach told a story about an HVAC client with 9,000 people on their email list who had never emailed them once. One ten-minute "spring is around the corner, half off a tune-up because you're on our list" email booked 26 tune-ups. Most companies don't need fancy AI first. They need to start following up. ## The rat in the cookie dough Coach is excited about agentic workflows that research a new client and personalize onboarding—"How about them Seahawks?" in the subject line instead of "Welcome." I get it. It's powerful. Here's the warning, and why you still need a gray-haired guy who drinks coffee and knows things. If I drop one little rat turd into a big bowl of cookie dough, do you want any of those cookies? Overdo the personalization and the prospect decides you were trying to pass off a machine as a human. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. They get offended, they block you, and they're gone. The better play: let the tools bubble up the signal, then reach out as a human. Bust out your phone and record a 13-second video. "Hey Mark, how about them Seahawks? Looking forward to catching up. Let me know how I can help." Hit send. > *"If you can use these tools to make you more human—I keep saying humanity is the next killer app."* > —Wes Schaeffer ## Same ingredients, same cookie Large language models are math. They're trained on what's already out there, so they build damn near the same stuff for everybody. Put two chefs in separate kitchens with the same ingredients, say "make me a cookie," and you get two nearly identical cookies. So what's your extra chocolate chip? What makes you stand apart? Years ago I copied a UK sales trainer and put a little red phone emoji in my first name on LinkedIn—and only on LinkedIn. Suddenly emails, texts, and DMs started showing up addressed to "Hi Wes" followed by a garbled symbol. My name had been scraped everywhere. I delete about 90% of those on sight because I know right away it's a lie. ## Best of breed is back, and somebody has to run it All-in-one platforms promised one throat to choke. Then they got lazy, charged more for less, and counted on the switching costs to keep you stuck—like living next to a new freeway because you don't want to give up your interest rate. AI flips that. We're back to picking the best tool for each job: the best deliverability, the best ease of use. I'll grab raw code from an email tool that's great at deliverability but ugly on landing pages, hand it to an AI builder, and have a working, integrated landing page minutes later instead of a week of back-and-forth with a VA. Coach made a great point here: most software is just a nice interface on a database, and the founder can now go from idea to proof of concept without the project manager, the VAs, and the sprints in between. But you have to orchestrate it. Where does the lead come in? What's your email system? What talks to what? And you still need a jump master to shove you out of the airplane—somebody neutral who tells you when good enough is good enough and when bad enough is bad enough. ## The caveman is in a cave Henry Ford said that if he'd asked customers what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse. A caveman doesn't know what a 747 is. He's not dumb or evil. He's just in a cave. Most entrepreneurs are literally in caves. My brother-in-law is the best hands-on guy you'll ever meet. He can walk into a room and see the hidden cabinets and flush sliding panels in four dimensions. I'd never think of that stuff. He won't touch AI or email sequences, so he doesn't know what's possible there. > *"If you don't know something, it doesn't mean you're stupid. It means you're ignorant."* > —Wes Schaeffer Ignorant just means unaware—and now you're aware. The question is whether you trust the people giving you the advice. Selling is still a transference of feeling, and that feeling is confidence. Zig Ziglar said that 60 years ago. ## Perfection never arrives. Ship it. My tech guy wants clear specs before he builds anything. I tell him we're going to sell the idea first. If we can sell it, then we'll build it. Nobody should spend two weeks coding something there's no market for. Call it a beta. Call it a soft launch. Give the first ten people a founder's deal to help you work out the bugs. Get real users, real use cases, and real feedback, because you only know so much. Push the decisions down to the people using the thing and let the feedback bubble back up. AI helps with all of it. At the end of the day, we're still cavemen with a lizard brain that hasn't changed in a million years. Your message has to talk to that part of your prospect. And for the record: I don't use AI to reply. If you hear from me, it's me. ## The best lines from the episode - "Technology always gets rid of the bottom."—Wes Schaeffer - "Bad customer service is going to kill your business faster than anything else."—Wes Schaeffer - "The buyers of the future are going to expect you to use AI in your business to make their experience better."—Coach Carroll - "The caveman is in a cave. And most entrepreneurs are literally in caves."—Wes Schaeffer - "Perfection never arrives."—Wes Schaeffer ### Want to stop sounding like everybody else? 12 Weeks To Peak™ is 84 days of private, 1-on-1 coaching with me: daily accountability plus custom AI built in your voice, so your follow-up sounds like you—not like every other bot in your prospect's inbox. [See 12 Weeks To Peak™ →](https://thesaleswhisperer.com/12-weeks-to-peak?utm_source=blog&utm_medium=guest-appearance&utm_campaign=sales-factory-807) ## Keep listening More conversations like this one live on [The Sales Podcast](https://thesaleswhisperer.com/podcast), and you can browse every guest on the [podcast guest index](https://thesaleswhisperer.com/podcast-guests). Want to get a little better at selling every day? [Get The Daily](https://thesaleswhisperer.com/daily), my free email from The Sales Whisperer®. *Thanks to Coach Carroll (DJ Carroll) for having me on The Sales Factory. Watch the [full episode on his YouTube channel](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uf_A-ukryEk).* [Small Business Marketing](https://thesaleswhisperer.com/blog/topic/small-business-marketing), [Marketing Automation](https://thesaleswhisperer.com/blog/topic/marketing-automation), [Artificial Intelligence](https://thesaleswhisperer.com/blog/topic/artificial-intelligence), [Entrepreneur](https://thesaleswhisperer.com/blog/topic/entrepreneur) ```json { "@context" : "https://schema.org", "@type" : "BlogPosting", "author" : { "@type" : "Person", "name" : "Wes Schaeffer", "url" : "https://thesaleswhisperer.com/blog/author/wes-schaeffer" }, "dateModified" : "2026-10-15T03:09:27.507Z", "datePublished" : "2026-10-15T03:09:27.000Z", "headline" : "Don't Sound Like Everyone Else | The Sales Factory with Coach Carroll", "image" : [ "https://thesaleswhisperer.com/hubfs/tsw-sales-factory-807-og.jpg" ], "mainEntityOfPage" : { "@id" : "https://thesaleswhisperer.com/blog/dont-sound-like-everyone-else-the-sales-factory-with-coach-carroll", "@type" : "WebPage" }, "publisher" : { "@type" : "Organization", "logo" : { "@type" : "ImageObject", "url" : "https://thesaleswhisperer.com/hubfs/wes-header-lockup.png" }, "name" : "Fixer Wes" } } ``` ```json { "@context" : "https://schema.org", "@id" : "https://thesaleswhisperer.com/#organization", "@type" : "Organization", "founder" : { "@id" : "https://thesaleswhisperer.com/#wes" }, "legalName" : "TSW Group, Inc.", "logo" : { "@type" : "ImageObject", "url" : "https://thesaleswhisperer.com/hs-fs/hubfs/Wes%20Schaeffer%20The%20Business%20Fixer%20white.png" }, "name" : "The Sales Whisperer®", "sameAs" : [ "https://www.instagram.com/fixerwes", "https://x.com/fixerwes", "https://www.linkedin.com/in/thesaleswhisperer/", "https://www.youtube.com/@TheSalesWhispererWes" ], "url" : "https://thesaleswhisperer.com/" } ``` ```json { "@context" : "https://schema.org", "@id" : "https://thesaleswhisperer.com/#website", "@type" : "WebSite", "name" : "The Sales Whisperer®", "potentialAction" : { "@type" : "SearchAction", "query-input" : "required name=search_term_string", "target" : { "@type" : "EntryPoint", "urlTemplate" : "https://thesaleswhisperer.com/hs-search-results?term={search_term_string}" } }, "publisher" : { "@id" : "https://thesaleswhisperer.com/#organization" }, "url" : "https://thesaleswhisperer.com/" } ``` ```json { "@context" : "https://schema.org", "@id" : "https://thesaleswhisperer.com/#wes", "@type" : "Person", "alternateName" : "The Sales Whisperer", "image" : "https://thesaleswhisperer.com/hubfs/wes-suit-forward.jpeg", "jobTitle" : "Founder", "name" : "Wes Schaeffer", "sameAs" : [ "https://www.instagram.com/fixerwes", "https://x.com/fixerwes", "https://www.linkedin.com/in/thesaleswhisperer/", "https://www.youtube.com/@TheSalesWhispererWes" ], "url" : "https://thesaleswhisperer.com/about", "worksFor" : { "@id" : "https://thesaleswhisperer.com/#organization" } } ```