The Potential of AI in Sales: Ethical Use, Risks, and Strategies

Discover how to use the power of AI in sales without ethical problems and avoiding common pitfalls.

You may not have recognized that you and I are the first salespeople and sales leaders with access to artificial intelligence. No earlier generation had access to something like a Large Language Model. The implication is that you and I are going to figure out what and how we will use it. As we use AI, you can expect that some will use AI in ways that do more harm than good.

You know what IQ means. You also know what EQ means. But what you may not know is that you and I also have MQ (Moral Quotient). While you and I pursue this new and powerful tool, we will follow some version of the Hippocratic Oath: First, do no harm.

Others with an exceedingly low MQ will have no trouble using AI to do things that are harmful to their results. But much of what our sisters and brothers in sales do will make it more difficult for all of us. If the damage was limited to the person that used AI poorly, we would have no reason to be concerned. There are a number of ways that can cause real problems now and in the future.

Within a few days of GPT, one low MQ salesperson decided to scrape profiles from LinkedIn and used GPT to create something personal and automated the emails that would cause the recipient to believe the person was interested. I watched as this person did a webinar to help others do the same.

AI Ethics in a Post-Truth Era

I tend to stay away from politics. It makes people negative, and I prefer to be positive. That said, with the propaganda, deep fakes, and other things that make it difficult to know who or what to trust. In our chosen profession, trust is critical. Your clients and mine need to know that we can be trusted with their relationships and their business. What follows here is a list of ways AI may harm you and the community of salespeople.

1. Using AI to do your writing without editing it before sending: In AI Edge, you find a list of words that AI uses that ensure your client knows they are reading something a robot penned. Lazy. Poor writer. Lack of care. This will harm the sender, but as more sales reps practice this approach, the more your communications and mine will be ignored.
2. Responding to emails with AI content: Some of our platforms are now including a way to respond with something AI wrote. This may be okay if you worked on the text. But if you are letting your AI respond for you, you may have a difficult time building relationships. Nothing says "I care enough about you" like deciding to have my AI respond to you.
3. Gathering customer data: Gathering data without the person’s awareness or their consent. There are laws about this practice, and there will need to be more to keep the low MQ folks who look for every shortcut that might allow them to make money, with no regard for the people whose data they stole.
4. Automated outreach: A long time ago, the marketing platforms were turned into sales platforms. This allowed low MQ sales leaders to automate cold outreach by building a sequence of emails. The first email is followed with a second email with the first email pasted below to ensure the contact knows they already attempted to reach them.

This sequence will have as many as seven of these emails, the last being a childish breakup email. Your contacts and mine are already overrun with cold outreach that they delete on first glance. If you don’t do a lot of cold outreach using the phone, you may not yet know that everyone’s voicemails are full, and they are keeping them this way.

1. Spamming social media: Recently, a person said they could help me with what the industry calls reach. They promised that they could help me by making thousands of images and short videos. The generative AI we have can create all kinds of content. For over fourteen years, I have written my content myself. I prefer human hands and human brains over a robotic encyclopedia that lacks context.
2. Over-reliance on AI when making a decision: Recently, I read an article about how we are using AI. Once I read the article, I changed how I use AI. The article said we should stop prompting AI. Instead, we should ask AI to ask us questions. If you use AI for analyzing data, this approach can help you to identify patterns. While AI can illuminate trends, you still need to make sense of the data.

If you want to use AI in sales, Jeb Blount and I wrote a book titled AI Edge: Sales Strategies for Unleashing the Power of AI to Save Time, Sell More, and Crush the Competition. This book will help you use AI in ways that will improve your sales results without harming your results or making it difficult for the community of salespeople to do the work we do. You can find the book here.

We will update this book, as AI is growing fast. We will keep you updated on the new sales strategies for using AI in B2B sales. If you are using AI now, this list will keep you on the high Moral Quotient side of the ledger.

Do good work!