From Westworld to WALL-E and all the movies in between, humans have always had… let’s say, a healthy fear of technology taking over. But over the years, we have seen that technology can really make life easier in a lot of ways. And the robots are not running the world (at least, not yet).
One area where tech is really ramping up is in sales, particularly with the intro of AI in the last few years. While there is a lot of good that can come from this new tool, remembering that it is just that, a tool, is key. It’s all about finding the balance of learning how to work with it while avoiding the temptation of entirely handing off tasks.
We wanted to show in this month’s blog how you can use AI in our Five Step Formula for sales. This can help you shorten your sales cycle and make more money in the process.
Planning and training your AI tool
Start thinking of AI as a junior rep who needs your guidance. It learns from the information you feed it. Investing in AI does take time, so know that you get out of it what you put into it. Think of it like this—you probably spend $25/month on lattes, right? What if you invested that into AI for your business? It can act as your assistant who would help research granular information on leads and competitor information.
But it is important to vet AI services and platforms. With the swift explosion of AI apps into the market, there are pros and cons to each one. Some are innovative and helpful, while sadly, others are scams and data grabs, so it’s vital to choose the one that meets your needs and is safe. Heck, you can even use a free service like ChatGPT to do this research for you. Just be sure to do your due diligence.
Once you have decided on a platform, you can use it to help you craft your strategy and goals for your business and even compare against prior years’ performance.
Opportunities in AI
AI can surface new leads from social media, websites, and CRMs in real time. It can even watch trends in the industry and alert you when to reach out to clients and prospects (remember when we had Google alerts set up for this?). It’s all about protecting your time. Automating follow-ups, meeting schedules, call summaries, reminders, and even the messages themselves. By taking advantage of these administrative tasks, you win back time to focus on the higher ROI (return on investment) activities like client interactions, personal development, or even rest.
AI can be a powerful tool for skill development and training. If you train it correctly, you can even use it for feedback and role-playing with AI playing the role of the prospect. You can feed it scenarios and give it information on your potential offerings as a vendor, and request an optimal purchase and implementation plan based on those factors. Practice makes progress!
Trust/Listen
The use of AI can even help you gain more trust with your clients. By listening to meetings, it can pull out what is really important, helping you take more thoughtful and strategic actions to help meet their needs. Because AI can also track customer interactions, it will remember behaviors, allowing you to show up more informed at every touchpoint. With the automated scheduling and reminders, nothing will fall through the cracks.
Ask
AI continuously learns from successful and unsuccessful interactions. Besides helping tailor your wording to align with each customer’s goals, challenges, and personality, it can suggest formats, phrases, and approaches based on your most successful meetings. It can even give advice on how to handle objections.
Follow up
Lastly, AI tools can be used to help you follow up and stay relevant. It can map out drip campaigns like a welcome series for new subscribers, post-event emails, abandoned carts, or even schedule happy birthday emails. Use it to understand the right time for outreach based on the interaction and help craft the message, too.
You’re already using AI more than you know. Google Maps, spell check, social media algorithms, and online shopping suggestions are now the comfortable norm. AI can work for you, but please be wary of allowing it to do work for you.
Can you spot the difference? Your clients will be able to.
AI is helpful, but it’s far from perfect. Your messages still need to sound like you, and you want to read and edit for any errors before hitting send. By leveraging the tools available with AI, you can gain an advantage over the competition and really differentiate yourself from them.