Over the past few years I have taken quite a few trainings and courses at Competence Factory. Not as a box-ticking exercise because my employer had put it in my development plan, but because I genuinely came out better every single time. The material was always up to date, the trainers knew what they were talking about, and at the end of the day I went home feeling I had learned something I could put to use the very next morning. That may sound like a low bar, but if you know how many trainings fail to deliver on that, you understand why it stands out when one actually does.
So when we at AI-in-Sales started thinking about how to make our knowledge more widely available — beyond just our own clients — Competence Factory was the first party I approached. And it clicked right away, from the very first conversation. That wasn’t just the coffee; it was mainly the fact that we think exactly the same way about how people learn things: by doing them. Not by watching someone else do them.
Why this matters
Most people who start using AI in sales get stuck at asking a chatbot the occasional question. They type something into ChatGPT, get a reasonable answer, close the screen, and do exactly the same thing again tomorrow. Meanwhile, the real work — writing outreach, preparing meetings, putting proposals together and keeping the CRM up to date — just keeps piling up. And that’s a shame, because it’s precisely that repetitive work where a well-configured AI assistant structurally gives you back ten to thirty percent of your time. Not as a vague promise from a LinkedIn post, but in practice — provided you set it up properly.
The problem is that “setting it up properly” doesn’t happen by itself. You need to know which tools exist, how to configure them for your specific situation and, perhaps most importantly, where the limits are. When does AI perform brilliantly, and when do you actually deliver worse work by handing things over? You don’t learn that distinction from a ten-minute YouTube video. You learn it by doing it, with someone next to you who works with it every day.
The training: two days, going home twice with something you can use
The two-day training AI for Sales that I teach at Competence Factory is built on a single principle: if you haven’t made something by the end of the day that you can use tomorrow, we haven’t done our job. No endless theory about how large language models work at the molecular level, no slides about the history of artificial intelligence, no plenary discussion about whether robots are coming for our jobs — but: laptop open, your own sales case on the table, and build.
On day 1 you take a working AI assistant home. One that is tuned to your tone of voice, your customers, your industry. A week later, on day 2, you come back with hands-on experience. What worked? What didn’t? Where did you get stuck? Then you refine, improve, or simply build another one for a different use case. The beauty of that week in between is that you have already tested what you built on day 1 in the real world. That produces better questions than any theoretical exercise ever could.
The first edition is scheduled for 12 and 19 June in Utrecht. And for that very first group there is a substantial early-bird discount, because this is a pilot and we want sharp, honest feedback from the participants. So if you have always thought “this AI-in-sales thing sounds interesting, but I don’t really know where to start”, this is exactly the moment to jump in — at the lowest price this training will ever have.
Why Competence Factory
Honestly? Because it’s simply good company to be in. They have been working for thirty years with a philosophy that fits seamlessly with how we look at learning — practical, personal, no PowerPoint parade where you end the day with three pages of notes but nothing actually done. Their participants give them an average score of 9.3 on Springest, and if you know how critical people usually are about trainings, you know that doesn’t happen by accident.
But it goes beyond reputation alone. Competence Factory attracts the kind of participants we want to reach too: professionals who want to move forward, who aren’t afraid to try something new, and who want to go home with concrete results — not just a certificate that disappears into a drawer. That makes it a perfect match. We bring the content, they bring the infrastructure, the organisation, and a network of people looking for exactly the kind of knowledge we have.
What this means for us
For us at AI-in-Sales, this is also simply a great step in spreading something we genuinely believe in: that AI in sales is not rocket science, but it is a craft you have to learn. Just as you once learned to use a CRM (or in many cases: learned that you really should be using it), you also have to learn how to deploy AI in a way that actually moves you forward. And that is a lot easier with someone next to you who does it daily and who is honest enough to tell you when you’re better off just typing it yourself.
Want to know more? Check out the training on the Competence Factory website, or have a look at my trainer profile if you want to know who is in front of the group. And if you’re hesitating: the early-bird discount only applies to the first edition. After that it’s simply the regular price, so don’t miss it!