If anything captured the tone of a discussion during a MANAchat devoted to artificial intelligence and ChatGPT it’s probably the words of one rep who’s just begun using these technological tools who maintained, “I feel like I’m the guy who just discovered fire.”
Those words perfectly describe the experiences of many who are fairly new to the possibilities, benefits, pitfalls, and dangers of this new technology.
For those uninitiated to the subject of this MANAchat conducted over three days early this fall, the subjects are well defined as follows by Barbara McQuade in her book Attack from Within: “The artifical intelligence (AI) chatbot, available to anyone on the internet, allows people to ask a question or provide a prompt and receive a human-like response based on its ‘training’ from an enormous amount of data. Issues relating to AI and ChatGPT (the ‘GPT’ stands for ‘generative pretrained transformer’) are still emerging and highly controversial.”
That definition is all well and good, but the MANA discussion dug a bit deeper as participants described their experiences becoming acquainted with and implementing what they hope will be valuable tools.
Kicking off the conversation, one rep stated simply that “We’ve been spending a good deal of time just trying to figure out AI and ChatGPT and how it can benefit us. One way we’ve successfully used it is when we’re walking a number of trade shows. We’ve found that by making use of the exhibitor attendance list and loading it onto GPT, it can tell us in five lines or less exactly what a company does and why they’re in attendance. This process allows us to scroll effortlessly through hundreds of names and we wind up with a summary that we can download onto an Excel spreadsheet. It certainly saves us time because it lets us know whether we should stop by a booth or not.”
Keeping things simple, another rep noted, “I’m 73 years old and don’t know why I didn’t start using AI sooner. It’s a great tool — just like social media — and it’s up to us to learn how to use it to our best advantage. What AI can do is to get you out of the brain process that you’re in. It takes you where you should be going. I’ve found that it’s great for prospecting and fine-tuning lists.”
Another example of a rep using AI to his advantage was heard from one rep who explained, “In working with one principal I’ve used AI to really expand my knowledge base. I’ve entered a wealth of notes on the subject this principal deals with. Then, when I’m making a pitch or simply having a phone conversation with him, I don’t have to consult all my notes to show him I’m knowledgeable. I can simply query my knowledge base and ask questions, and it provides all the information that I need. I use this method frequently when discussing marketing matters.
Limitless Applications
Echoing those words another rep offered, “The applications for AI are limitless. It’s really scary smart. And, in sales specifically whatever product you’re selling, it’s all about efficiency. The more we can automate something, the better off we are. We have a fairly robust CRM entity and use it to run our whole agency, but what AI can do is mindboggling and this takes things to a whole different level.
A fourth rep took a look to the future when he said, “I’ve been in the rep business for more than 45 years. Based on my experience it’s safe to say that it’s important for reps to stay ahead of the curve. If we don’t, we’re going to have our knees cut off. When a principal or customer comes to us and says we expect you to be doing this or that, we have to let them know that we bring real value, and we can show our value by once again staying ahead of the curve. This simply enhances our value to not only our principals but also to the customers that we sell to. Remember that AI is not going to replace us, but your job may be replaced by someone who knows AI a lot better than you do. You never want to be the leader in making use of trailing-edge technology. If you show up at a knife fight, you had better be well prepared.”
A good deal of the discussion devoted time to how AI can help when it comes to writing emails and a variety of reports to principals and customers. According to one rep, “I’ve made use of AI to get over writer’s block. I generally always have an idea of what I want to say, but find it difficult sometimes to get over the hump. This is a great tool to get me started. But, once started, you’ve got to be sure to humanize your message and make sure it doesn’t sound like some sort of automaton has written it. You’ve got to train the tool to communicate your own words.”
Techno Tools
In the course of the MANAchat, participants cited their personal experience and described some of the sources they found worthwhile.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator — Assists users in targeting the right buyers and companies, understanding what buyers value, and engaging buyers with personalized outreach.
TextCortex — Learns and adapts to your unique writing style and knowledge, making it easier for you to write high-quality and personalized content.
Perplexity — An AI-powered research and conversational search engine that answers queries using natural language predictive text. Launched in 2022, Perplexity generates answers using sources from the web and cites links within the text response.
Gamma AI — An AI-powered platform for creating presentations, documents, and websites without any design or coding skills required.
Fathom AI Notetaker — A free app that records, transcribes, and summarizes Zoom, Google Meet or Microsoft Teams calls allowing users to focus on the conversation instead of taking notes.
Smart Brevity — Brevity is confidence. Length is fear. This is the guiding principle of Smart Brevity, a book outlining a communication formula built by Axios journalists to prioritize essential news and information, explain its impact, and deliver it in a concise and visual format.
According to a MANA member, the information contained in this book was especially valuable when it comes to keeping emails concise, especially when communicating with busy executives. “Keeping in mind that people really only read the first two lines of an email, it’s important to be brief and stay on point. The book guides you when it comes to the importance of highlighting certain words. Too often salespeople tend to over explain things. We’ve been able to avoid that practice. We’ve had any number of our principals’ key executives tell us how they appreciate the way we write our emails. They tell us that our reports are among the easiest to read and allow them to take action in the areas that are needed.”
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