AI and how it can help you sell to a network.

I read a document written by someone who has developed a series of AI prompts to help them prospect using LinkedIn. We were discussing this on a team call…whether this is something we should be investigating and potentially teaching our clients to do.

So, I immersed myself in this thinking to try and get to the bottom of it.

Let’s first establish some ground rules.

The first thing to consider is this. People buy enterprise software products and candy bars in a different way. If you have a low value/complexity/risk or tactical product to sell then the traditional thinking of advertising/marketing/outreach is perfectly valid and the quality of targeting/creative/copywriting is vital to the success of these initiatives or campaigns.

If however you sell a high value/complexity/risk product, something that is strategic and might sink the business if it goes wrong, people DO NOT make decision based on adverts or cold outreach and here’s why.

Let’s assume that you don’t know who I am (you don’t know me from Adam you might say) and I send a communication to you asking for some of your time because I have a fantastic solution to a problem that, from my research, I suspect that you have. Because everyone is trying this method you will have many of these communications every week and because you don’t know me the words that I send you have no more impact than anyone else’s.

They are just words. People and companies do not always tell the truth and they do not always have your best interests at heart (think about dieselgate, PPE claims, and every miss-selling scandal that emerges) so the mere fact that you say you are the best and say you can help solve my problem doesn’t make it so and even if it is true to doesn’t mean I will believe you.

Our Ai tool will provide you with a constant stream of quality leads...

Even without the aid of AI this is the biggest problem that sales functions face in the modern world. The buyer has become desensitised to messaging and, often, to facts because everyone is doing the same thing and in a world where everyone looks the same and offers the same, buyers simple choose the cheapest.

So how can AI help you tackle this conundrum. How can AI help you prospect and sell more effectively.

Now, clearly, everyone has a different product/sales cycle/target market/usp so some of what I’m saying might well need to be tweaked for your business or industry.

There is no doubt that AI will be able to help us in all aspects of our lives including prospecting and selling…the place that people are going to fall down though is in understanding “how” it’s going to help us.

AI is perfectly well suited to researching (not to “provide you with a constant stream of ideal customers” but), finding insights in to markets and territories that you might otherwise miss. AI is great for writing summaries (let’s be honest you probably haven’t got the time, or the inclination, to read a 90 page report on market conditions in Belgium…but AI has. Ai can look for parallels between your market and mine and your region and mine. Perfect.

What AI cannot do though is reach out too me and strike-up a conversation. What it can’t do is listen and empathise, what it can’t do is be human.

But most of all what it can’t do is your work for you.

You will still need to do the meetings, the messaging, the conversations and the closing. Fact.

As is so often the way, people (particularly salespeople) try to find a “cheat code” for doing things.

"just bouncing this back to the top of your in box"

How often are you sent a standard script from one of the prospecting tools that says “just bouncing this back to the top of your in box” or “just sending a follow-up in case you missed my last email”…these are supposed to be “best practice” templates that should be personalised…but often people don’t bother.

So, the thing to recognise is that AI will not do your work for you. It won’t provide you with a constant series of leads and meetings and it won’t make up for that fact that you are not putting any of your personality in to your messages. It won't build a network for you and it won't engage those people you want to talk to. It might though take some of the drudgery out of what you need to do.

#learning #salestraining #sales #socialselling #digitalselling?