The good bad and ugly of AI in sales

Ian Altman 0:02

Ian, welcome to the same side. Selling podcast, I am your host. Ian Altman, welcome to the same side. Selling podcast, I am your host. Ian Altman, let's talk about artificial intelligence or AI in sales, I want to cover the good, the bad and the ugly when it comes to using AI in sales. Now it's easy to get excited about AI in sales. It provides a tremendous amount of opportunity, but just remember that artificial intelligence is no substitute for real stupidity. Much like autopilot on a vehicle, you need to keep your hands on the wheel so that you don't crash. You need to stay alert. So here are some of the things that I find that people do where it doesn't work so well. So I'll start with the bad and the bad is that some people, what they do is they look at AI and say, hey, I want AI to create a letter or an email that I can send to a prospect. So you create a good prompt, it gets a response. You copy and paste and press send bad where you can use AI effectively is you could say, create a draft, and then you take that and edit it and modify it. So when we've tested this internally, we'll say, send an email, or draft an email to an executive for this type of offering that will pique their interest. And when you read it back, you think, Wow, that's pretty good. But then what you have to do is put yourself in your customer shoes, and you say, okay, so if I was my customer, would I actually respond to this email? And the answer is no, there's no way I'd respond to it. So it creates something that passes the smell test in terms of, yeah, that's not a bad message that it crafted, but it really isn't effective yet, because it's not putting itself in the shoes of the customer. So we need to make sure that we're not using AI as a replacement, but instead, we're using it to make life a little bit easier. If you want to get top results for your team, take a look at the same side selling Academy. Just visit same sideselling.com to learn more. So using it as a draft, great. Using it to actually create something that you send without editing, not good. Now also, don't use AI to handle your outreach or your intake. People will use this in bots and things like that. And the problem with this is that if you're trying to convey that it's a real person, once people realize it isn't, they kind of get frustrated. I recently had someone reach out to me and said, Oh, my assistant will contact you to schedule a meeting, instead of using something like Calendly, where I could pick a time, they have an AI driven tool that sets times. So the AI tool said, hey, when will work for you? And I said, Well, I'm available Eastern Time, between 9am and 5pm on these dates. And okay, great. And then it came back, and it kept trying to schedule us for like, 230 in the morning and three o'clock in the morning. And then I could tell it was AI, so I was trying to work with it, and eventually I just said to the person, hey, if you want to reach out, here's my Calendly link. Pick a time I can't deal with this. So it's a perfect example of where, with the best of intentions, AI should do this really well, but it didn't actually do a good job. So we want to make sure that we're not using AI as a replacement, but instead use it as a tool to allow you to better engage with your customers. So if you can use it to better engage, if you can use it to be more efficient, all the better. So where do we use it? We use otter.ai. There's no affiliate link or anything like that. I just like the tool we use otter, and otter allows us to record any of our zoom meetings, even phone calls, and then it will summarize the meeting for us, and we can tell it specifically, like, for example, this podcast episode has show notes, and the show notes say, here are the biggest pitfalls, and here are the best practices on what to do. Those were generated using otters AI tool, and in most cases, we do zero editing. Afterwards, we look and go, Wow, it's pretty much spot on. So we train it in order to identify what we're looking for. It summarizes it. Then we're pretty confident that it's going to do a good job, but we still take the time to look at it. Once we've looked at it, we go, Nope, it's got it spot on. And then we use it. So it saves us the time of having to go back through, transcribe everything, summarize it, come up with meeting notes. So it used to be that we would do show notes for every episode manually. Now. We use AI to do to do that for us. So it's really good at analyzing speech or analyzing a pattern and then summarizing it afterwards. That's a great use of AI. Now, over time, AI will continue to improve. So I can see us using AI as a role play tool, where it's playing the customer engage in real role play, where I've seen it used to this point, it's a little bit underwhelming, where it's just not very realistic, but it will get better. Similar to self driving in vehicles, initially, it was scary, and now I kind of feel like the self driving in a lot of vehicles is better than I would drive as a person. Now, it doesn't mean that we're still not uncomfortable with it. It doesn't mean that we still don't want to have our hands on the wheel. It's just more often than not, it's making better choices than we might make, and that's where AI tends to go. So what I want you to remember is this, don't use AI as a substitute instead. Use it as a tool to help you better engage with your customers. Use it as a tool to draft, not as a replacement for your own creativity. Use it as a tool to be better informed and better prepared. Maybe use it to do research on your behalf so you're better prepared to help your customer. Rather than using it as a tool to replace your interaction with that client. If you use AI intelligently, you can actually improve the connection with your clients, provide better outcomes in a shorter time frame and actually generate better outcomes with less effort. There are topics you'd like me to cover. Just drop me a note to Ian at Ian altman.com and of course, I will see you on the next episode of the same side selling podcast. So long you

Transcribed by https://otter.ai