A Few Thoughts on AI for Sales
I was in Austin earlier this week for an exclusive event for sales leaders and top performers put on by Scott Ingram. If you're not in his community of top-performing sellers, you should be.
The featured presenter at the event was Dr. Lisa Palmer, an experienced sales leader with a newly minted Ph.D. in AI. If there's a better room to be in to discuss the impact AI will have on the sales profession, I'm not aware of one.
Admittedly, I'm normally a skeptical adopter of technology. Most people jump on the bandwagon of scaling something before they actually understand what it is they're scaling. There's still much to be said about how effective it is to focus on the blocking and tackling of selling.
AI has my attention, though, and while I've goofed around with the Google-search-on-steroids functionality of CHatGPT, it's clear that there's a lot more to this tool than I realize at this point. You and I will each be served well by investigating things further. Lisa believes this technology will have a similar impact on society as electricity. Think about that for a second, even if she's only half right!
Much of what I've seen in sales AI to this point has been automating outreach messaging, and doing so in a very mediocre way. I've heard a lot of SDRs and BDRs talking about how they're having ChatGPT generate most of their messaging for them.
Let me be clear; if you're asking ChatGPT to do most of your job for you, it's probably time to start looking for a new job.
What is abundantly clear is that the computer can scale actions and activities at a nearly infinite rate. The next time you have a set of redundant tasks to do, you really need to ask yourself if there's a better way to do things. There probably is, and it doesn't require hiring someone to do it for you. There will be a learning curve, but at this point, I don't think you can afford not to lean into it.
For the first time ever, we can actually personalize at scale, not because we've managed to perfectly water down the messaging for our prospects, but because we can send thousands of individual messages. Do you think there are a lot of emails in your inbox now? Get back to me in a few months.
What can't be stressed enough is that AI is a tool to help you Sell Like You, not a replacement for your work (unless you're solely focused on repetitive, replaceable taskwork, which isn't actually selling anyway). AI has access to most of the world's knowledge and can articulate it in moments, but selling was never about knowledge anyway (more on that next week).
Selling is about how you use the knowledge you can access to solve problems in ways that nobody else can. How can you use these tools to access more knowledge, and, thus, more creative solutions?
AI is here. If you think you can put your head in the sand and hope it passes you by, you're mistaken. If you think your competitors aren't already investigating this, you're mistaken. If you're just too afraid to open Pandora's box to see what's inside, you're making a mistake.
It's a long weekend in my part of the world. Do something good for you with that free day.
Sleep in. Rewatch the Succession finale. Do some work in your yard. Play golf. Get ahead on some work. Finalize your summer vacation. Squeeze your loved ones.
Freebies like Monday don't come around very often. Make sure you don't squander them.
