Sales 2.0

AI Oil

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Data has been called the “new oil” because of its value to today’s computer systems. When it comes to AI, data is critical. AI needs huge amounts of data for training.

Essentially ChatGPT is now giving us access to a portion of the knowledge out there on the Internet (which is a lot—at least 1,200 petabytes.)

For many of us our focus over the last several months has been how to develop the best prompts to get the best responses from ChatGPT. Prompts have been getting longer and more complex, some of them essentially turning into a form of computer programming language. “Experts” are designing prompts that squeeze just a little bit more out of ChatGPT each time by “talking to it” in a way that makes it work more effectively (or just harder.)

Here’s my forecast though: Prompt engineering will not be enough to give any business a lasting competitive edge.

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Will you trust “her”?

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“Her” is a 2013 film about a lonely writer named Theodore Twombly, portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix, who develops a romantic relationship with an AI on his phone named Samantha, (voiced by Scarlett Johansson). The film predates the “coming out” of ChatGPT by a decade but surfaces some of the behavior that apparently is already happening on certain online dating sites.

In our more mundane, but still relationship-centric, world of sales, how far will buyers go with replacing relationships with humans with relationships with AI? My guess, for the foreseeable future, is not that far—at least when it comes to large purchases.

I believe AI will play the role of sales assistant not sales lead when it comes to important buying decisions.

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AI-Powered Selling and the Social Graph

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In the near future, savvy salespeople are going to greatly enhance their sales by leveraging AI. One of the mechanisms for this improvement will be leveraging the “social graph” more effectively.

It’s always been true that a referral beats any other lead, with referrals converting to customers 50% of the time, according to Joanne Black. AI will help us use our “social graph” to find referrals without spending too much time on research. Up to this point, this kind of research has generally been too time-consuming for the average salesperson.

The best tool today for this research is LinkedIn. LinkedIn can show us who knows who. Unfortunately, this connection data is not reliable, with the system showing people knowing many more people than they actually do in “real life”. In my research, I find that less than half the connections someone has on Linkedin are people they really know.

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Send Your Proposals to the DEA, Part 2

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In my last post I was ranting about how I hate proposals.

My preferred solution to this is not developing proposals at all. I highly recommend not spending your time generating beautiful documents for every person that says, “send me a proposal”. It’s a surefire way to eliminate your prospecting time and have a sick pipeline.

However, if you have situations where you have to generate a proposal, or a part of a proposal, consider the remaining two options from The 4-Hour Workweek: Delegate and Automate.

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Send Your Proposals to the DEA

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In general, I think “proposals suck!”

I was reminded of my (bad) attitude to proposals again a few weeks ago when I was co-opted into developing one. This one was of the typical kind that I have seen over three decades of working in B2B services companies. The kind that takes a salesperson, plus other members of the team, days to develop. The kind that takes a salesperson away from selling for a couple of days and turns them into some kind of Word (or PowerPoint) jockey, trying to find the perfect paragraph spacing or font.

My experience of this proposal development process (at several companies) has been one of colleagues obsessing over producing the perfect document where our business’s credentials shine so brightly and our layout and formatting are so perfect that the prospect will just sign on the dotted line as soon as they’ve read it…and yet, somehow, consistently, they don’t!

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Removing some sales drudgery with AI

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Wharton professor Ethan Mollick describes ChatGPT as an “intern”. This seems like one of the best analogies so far for ChatGPT, especially when you are considering what work to give it, and what work not to give it.

One of the areas of complex sales that I have seen soak up tons of time from entrepreneurs and senior salespeople over my years is writing proposals. And sad to say, not all these beautiful proposal documents ended up closing big deals.

Now that we all have this new “intern” that can help with the proposal writing work. But as with all things AI at the moment there are some caveats. I don’t think AI is at the point yet for large deals where you should just have your “intern” write the whole proposal but used carefully I think ChatGPT can save you time on this task that few people savor.

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