One thing that makes sales (really) hard is that you lack information on what people need.
Imagine if you knew exactly what every company in your market needed to buy right now in your category. You would sell an amount way beyond any reasonable dreams.
This lack of information causes us to use ham-fisted approaches to prospecting. These ill-informed approaches are working less and less effectively. Buyers simply don’t have the time to deal with salespeople approaching them on topics that are not relevant to their challenges (and job/company survival.)
If it doesn’t work, do more
Without knowing what a prospect needs we approach a “segment” of buyers assuming they all must need the same thing (but knowing they don’t all want the same thing.) We take the approach that it’s a “numbers game”. “So, what if 97% of people won’t want this offer of min, let’s email them anyway. The 3% will let us know who they are, and we don’t care about the other 97% anyway”.
As buyers are more and more frazzled and do a better job of ignoring our irrelevant pitches, we decide to use technology to compensate. If the 3% of people interested in our kind of solution drops to 1%, then our solution is to use software and AI to produce 3 times as many prospecting emails.
AI agents can help (a bit)
AI can help with some of this “information gap” if we use it for research (not for creating hundreds of emails). Tools like ChatGPT’s new Deep Research are an AI agent that can be thought of as a sales assistant on your team. You can tell the agent to go away for 15 mins and research all the public information on XYZ company and their issues around what you sell, and it comes back with a decent report with links on what it has found. It’s not BCG-worthy yet but it’s a start—and clearly this is only going to get better.
But there’s still a gap with the information this AI assistant can produce for real selling. The agent can only research publicly available information.
Humans can help more
But we all know much of the “juiciest” information, and often the most useful for selling, is not out in the public domain. This is the “unobservable” information. This is the stuff that makes companies tick in reality–things like who is being let go, who is moving departments, which project is being cancelled and what upcoming acquisitions may be on the horizon.
You won’t get this information from ChatGPT because it’s not public.
If you knew this information for all accounts on a prospect list, you could be super-relevant each time you approached a company but the only way to find out this information is to talk to people in the know.
The people need to be people that know what is going on at that company and they need totrust you enough to tell you the “juicy” stuff. These people do not need to be the CEO of the companies we are interested in; they just need to be in “the information flow” of the company, so they know what is going on there.
Open relationships vs. close deals
If these people can help you so much, then why don’t salespeople and business owners invest time in developing them? Why don’t we “open relationships” instead of focusing on “closing deals”?
I have found in my years of selling that we should spend some of our time on developing such a network. If we plan to spend a significant number of years in our market, then our success could depend on our network of people who will help us find out the key information we need to effectively sell there.
Summary
- If you had perfect information on your market, you would sell an amount beyond your reasonable dreams.
- New AI agents can help with some of the drudgery of compiling all the public information available on a topic relevant to your sales.
- AI agents only access public information. Some of the “best stuff” is private. You will only know the stuff if someone that knows what is going on at the company trusts you enough to tell you.
- If you plan to stay in your market for years, you should invest in growing a network of people that will help you find out what is going on there.