Sales was never “just talking.”
In this Builder Series post, a former engineer breaks down why great sales depends on human judgment—and how Revenue Builders use automation to remove friction without replacing what makes sales work.
“Sales is just talking.”
It’s one of those statements that sounds harmless—until you’ve actually done the work.
That’s why Eduardo Ordax’s post struck such a nerve. Not because it was provocative, but because it named something many people in tech quietly learn the hard way.
Eduardo didn’t start in sales.
He started as a computer engineer.
He wrote code.
Shipped features.
Lived in dark mode.
And at 25, he made a move most engineers hesitate to make: he jumped into sales.
That decision reshaped how he thinks about work, systems, and people.
Because sales, as it turns out, isn’t talking.
Sales is a people system, not a personality trait
What Eduardo describes isn’t a career pivot story. It’s a systems awakening.
Sales demands:
- Emotional intelligence
- Negotiation under uncertainty
- Resilience in the face of rejection
- Deep product understanding
- Storytelling grounded in real problems
But above all, it demands knowing the customer better than they know themselves.
That line became the heartbeat of the discussion in the comments. Engineers, data scientists, founders, RevOps leaders—all echoing the same realization:
When you step into sales, you stop seeing systems as logic trees.
You start seeing them as human experiences.
Everything begins and ends with the customer. Everything.
Where “AI-driven sales” usually goes wrong
Here’s the uncomfortable truth surfaced in the thread:
Most teams don’t struggle with selling.
They struggle with everything surrounding selling.
- Finding the right people
- Validating roles and context
- Pulling accurate data
- Moving between tools
- Repeating the same prep work, over and over
That’s why so many sales teams say they want to be “AI-driven”—
and then freeze the moment someone says API.
APIs sound technical.
Sales feels human.
The gap feels intimidating.
This is exactly the friction Revenue Builders try to eliminate.
The builder move: make automation disappear
Eduardo’s response wasn’t to argue that sales should be automated.
It was subtler—and much more powerful.
Using Lusha connectors and Zapier, he built a prospecting agent in under five minutes.
Not to replace sales judgment.
But to protect it.
The workflow is intentionally boring:
Schedule the agent
Search contacts at target companies using Lusha
Enrich them automatically
Export results into Google Sheets
That’s it.
No dashboards to babysit.
No CSV gymnastics.
No fear of “breaking something.”
Pipeline appears.
Time waste disappears.
Why this resonated so strongly
If you read through the replies, a pattern emerges:
- Engineers admitting sales forced them to think in people, not abstractions
- RevOps leaders calling out friction as the real enemy
- Builders agreeing that speed isn’t the win—cognitive load is
One comment captured it perfectly:
“APIs didn’t make sales easier. They exposed how much of it was manual busywork.”
That’s the Builder Series thesis in one sentence.
Automation doesn’t remove the human element.
It removes the non-human work humans were doing by mistake.
This is what sales now looks like
Sales isn’t becoming less human.
It’s becoming less manual.
The best sellers don’t want to spend their energy:
- Hunting for contacts
- Fixing bad data
- Second-guessing titles and numbers
They want to spend it:
- Understanding buying context
- Teaching, not pitching
- Navigating real objections
- Building trust at the right moment
RevOps and GTM Engineering exist to make that possible.
They design systems so humans can show up where they matter.
Where Lusha fits — and why it stays in the background
In this story, Lusha isn’t the hero. And that’s intentional.
It plays the role builders care about most:
- Verified data
- Reliable enrichment
- Clean inputs for automation
When the data layer is trustworthy, everything above it gets calmer.
AI stops feeling risky.
Automation stops feeling scary.
Sales stays human.
The Builder takeaway
Sales was never “just talking.”
It’s empathy under pressure.
It’s judgment with incomplete information.
It’s teaching, timing, and trust.
The job of systems and the job of RevOps is not to replace that.
It’s to clear the noise so it can actually happen.
Next in the Builder Series:
FAQs
Yes. Sales requires emotional intelligence, negotiation, resilience, product mastery, and deep customer understanding. Talking is just the visible output of much deeper work.
Engineers are trained to think in logic and systems. Sales forces a shift toward people, context, and uncertainty—seeing systems as human experiences, not just workflows.
Most teams try to automate decisions instead of removing manual busywork. The result is fear around APIs and tools, rather than confidence in clean, reliable systems.
Revenue Builders automate everything around selling—data prep, enrichment, routing—so humans can focus on judgment, empathy, and timing.
Connectors and automation tools allow teams to build simple, repeatable systems that generate pipeline quietly, without adding dashboards or cognitive load.
Platforms like Lusha provide verified contact data and enrichment as infrastructure, making automation reliable without forcing sellers to manage tools.
