Five Ways Gen AI is Changing Sales
You salespeople - you take on a job that terrifies most people.
You're vulnerable. The person on the other end of the call holds all the power. It takes serious guts.
I did it for a while. I sat in a cubicle with a list of potential clients. I stared at that phone for two days before I mustered up the courage to pick up the phone.
You have to learn to be fearless. Then you have to learn how others think. Then to communicate your ideas. Then to become outstanding time managers.
That’s…a lot.
Enter generative AI. (Which was created too late to save me from my cold calling anxiety - thanks for nothing, Sam Altman.)
If you are in sales now, or you're looking to get into sales, ChatGPT is transformational.
Here are the ways you can actively use ChatGPT right now to make you - or your sales team - better, faster, and stronger. Because as any team knows, the battle is won on the practice field, am I right? (I've never had a chance to use that phrase, but it sounds so cool when I do.)
Let's dive into the Five Ways ChatGPT Will Transform How You Do Sales.
1. REAL-LIFE PRACTICE with VOICE
Nothing can replace practice.
But when you, or somebody on your team, is just getting up to speed on sales, you end up burning through potential leads. Why? Because your salesperson isn't really comfortable yet. It's a huge waste of an opportunity, but it's how you have to play the game.
ChatGPT's voice function changes all that.
If you haven't tried it, take out your phone right now. Press the little headset in the bottom corner of your ChatGPT app. Talk to it about anything.
It's startlingly real - and latency (speed to answer) is getting lower and lower.
Instruct it to take on whatever persona you want - a client of any demographic, any temperament, any context you want. Tell it you're going to role-play a sales call.
Not only does it allow you to experience a realistic sales call, but you're also not burning a potential client.
Better still, you have the transcript of it at the end - take that and ask ChatGPT to analyze it. Ask where you went wrong, what you could have said better, and where you potentially lost the sale.
Rinse, repeat.
2. TAILORED PITCHES
ChatGPT is fantastic at helping you understand what makes different personas tick and then crafting customized pitches, all within minutes.
Want to pitch your product to upper-middle-class moms in Louisiana with young kids? ChatGPT can give you valuable insights into what they're looking for, then it can actually draft the message for you. You just tailor it to make it sound more like you.
Then, once you have your perfect message, you can start including that in your future prompts so ChatGPT understands how you talk - your idioms and style.
Partnering with ChatGPT like that means you have incredible insight into your clients, and you still get to write those scripts out in your own voice.
I've said it before, ChatGPT's greatest skill may well be its ability to take on different personas and give you insight into what they are looking for. Take advantage of it.
3. TRANSCRIPT ANALYSIS
Recording real client calls (with permission, of course) gives you a goldmine of data to work with.
Feed these transcripts to ChatGPT, and it'll highlight areas where you could have taken a different approach, suggest the most effective follow-up strategies, and help you continuously refine your sales technique.
ChatGPT is a wizard with data like that.
Remember that tools like Zoom and Teams have these functions built-in.
Make sure that you're letting the client know that by recording, you can send it to them so they don't have to take notes - most of the time, they'll be really grateful.
4. CUSTOMIZED OUTREACH AT SCALE
What I hear from sales teams all the time is this: We just need our time back. We need time to do what we do best, which is build relationships.
Unfortunately, the reality of business is that there is a ton of other busy stuff to do.
That's why one of the best time savers is creating customized outreach in bulk.
Put your customer information (NOTE: Protect personal info like names or anything else you need to protect for privacy!!) into a spreadsheet, with as much context as you can in every line. Then have ChatGPT create personalized outreach emails.
Remember to tailor these - avoid just taking what AI produces and slapping it into emails.
But these first drafts are huge time savers in getting you started.
5. AI-POWERED RESEARCH
Tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity.ai, Gemini, and You.com are incredibly helpful when it comes to market research. They can process vast amounts of data at speeds no human could match, providing insights and action plans that would take weeks to develop manually.
This allows for more iterations, follow-up questions, and nuanced understanding.
Just remember to always verify the information they provide.
FINALLY
Remember, AI doesn't do sales. YOU do sales.
This augments what you do. So figure out what that is. What you're good at, what you need help with, where you want to save time so you can focus on the important stuff.
Get out there, friends.
AI NEWS OF THE WEEK
SAP, SAP, SAP
Having just sat front row at SAP Sapphire, I’m going to focus all the news there this week - there was so much and it was pretty awesome.
SAP Joule and MS Copilot Integration
SAP is going to integrate its AI assistant Joule with Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365. It means that in one interface, employees can access MS 365 via Joule or they can access their SAP apps with MS Copilot.
2. SAP and AWS join forces
AWS is going to power SAP's new AI initiatives, integrating Amazon Bedrock into SAP's generative AI hub. This partnership allows users to move between AI models to get the best results at the best cost, and SAP will facilitate that through Bedrock.
3. SAP and Nvidia do Digital Twinning
Besides all thing chip-related, SAP is gonna use NVIDIA's Omniverse platform to create "digital twins" of complex products. Customers can see how something works, try out different configurations, and really understand how it would fit into their factory.
Generative AI Tips
ChatGPT is awesome. But if you really want to mimic your voice, you need to try Claude 3. Something about Claude is outstanding about not just mimicking your brand and voice, but also keeping the parts that sound like you.
For example, writing this newsletter, I’ll create a draft that I like, then I’ll run it through Claude, not just to clean it up, but also to help structure a better and more readable framework for readers to follow.
Sometimes I like it, sometimes I prefer mine, but the important part is that it doesn’t turn it into cheesy jargon - it knows if I’m trying to be lighthearted or funny or goofy and it keeps those things intact.
Give it try - it’s fantastic.
