Notion put an engineer in sales to build better AI tools

This week on Applied Intelligence, we learn how an AI engineer at Notion joined the sales team for a month to understand their challenges and build better tools to solve their problems.

Context Before Code: How Notion Put an AI Engineer on the Sales Floor to Discover What Actually Needed Building

His first day on Notion’s sales team, AI engineer Theo Bleier made 40 cold calls. He didn’t land a single meeting — but he did discover insights that would change how Notion built internal AI sales tools.

Instead of just throwing AI at the sales team and expecting results, Bleier became a card-carrying member of the sales pod for a month. He had named accounts. He learned about objection handling. He (unsuccessfully) cold-called.

Sitting with Notion’s most successful salespeople, Bleier noticed they spent extra time doing account research before any outbound. But he learned the result of that research wasn’t better email messaging — these reps developed a better understanding of when to reach out to these accounts and prioritize them accordingly.

“From the outside, it seems obvious we should make the sales team move faster by doing account research for them. But when Theo came in and did research, where he ended up was actually account prioritization.