There’s no doubt about it. Generative AI has changed the game in sales. Increasingly, sales teams use it to personalize content, enhance sales training, improve onboarding, conduct competitive analysis, streamline sales communication, and more.

The ways in which people use the technology are so impressive that one might think genAI will soon replace sales reps. Not so fast, says AI expert Sam Richter. The results you get from genAI are only as good as the information you put into it.

“This technology acts like a personal assistant for each person, not as a replacement for a human,” he told me during a recent episode of The Adapter’s Advantage podcast. “The challenge is when you use this type of tool, it acts like a human and it’s very confident in its result.”

So, you must make sure you train the AI—input all the information and resources necessary for the tool to generate accurate results. Even then, though, you should not use the responses as is, especially when communicating with prospects and customers, warned Richter. You must humanize your communication.

Generative AI “tools are amazing, but they don’t have the experience we have. A great salesperson knows how to ask the question that their customer or prospect doesn’t even know ought to be asked. GPT can’t do that, at least not yet. It can’t think, it doesn’t have empathy, it doesn’t have understanding, it doesn’t have values, it still has bias. [The tools] can’t replace the value that an experienced human can provide,” he said.

Scroll down to learn more from Richter, who will be sharing inside secrets on how to use genAI for sales at the 2024 Allego Sales Success Summit in Boston. Listen to the interview or read the Q&A.

Episode 63: Generative AI and Its Impact on Sales and Technology | Sam Richter

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From This Episode:

Deniz Olcay: Welcome to the Adapters Advantage podcast. I’m Deniz Olcay, vice president of marketing at Allego, stepping in for your regular host, Mark Magnacca. Today, I’m joined by Sam Richter, bestselling author of Take the Cold Out of Calling; technology entrepreneur; founder of Intel Engine; and an award-winning speaker. Sam, can you share a bit about what you do?

Sam Richter: Certainly. I’m a Hall of Fame speaker, so I deliver about 100 programs around the globe, including keynote presentations and occasional workshops. I’ve also developed a couple of technologies using AI and generative AI that really power or enable attendees of my conferences to easily implement what I talk about. It’s a mix of speaking and technology, and it’s a bit of a crazy life because these technologies are changing so fast.

Let’s discuss generative AI and how it has transformed the world and selling.

Richter: It’s almost like we’re moving from a human-configured box or rules engine, which is really limited by how much information we can feed it, to the black box, which is self-intelligent, adaptive, and can personalize the content of the response based on each individual user and their interaction with it. So, I think that’s the transformation we’re seeing here, where this technology acts as a personal assistant for each person, not as a replacement for a human. The challenge is when you use this type of tool, it acts like a human and it’s very confident in its result.

What’s really happening is it’s a case of predictability and probability. This fancy robot, if you will, goes out there and based on the question—the exact question, in the context of the words related to that question—it’s going to look into our trained database to make a guess on what the next word might be. You have to put good information into a generative AI system because if you don’t tell it exactly what to do, it will guess and you might not be happy with the result. It’s the transition from us looking for content or information to a system generating bespoke, personalized, highly relevant content for us. That change in dynamic is quite fascinating. And I think it’s going to change the game in sales.

You have to put good information into a generative AI system because if you don’t tell it exactly what to do, it will guess and you might not be happy with the result.

You mentioned the keyword: person.

Richter: If you really want to have great success with generative AI, you have to almost treat it like a new employee. When a new employee comes in, we don’t just say, “Go write a sales proposal. It’s due tomorrow.” Right? We discuss what our goals are, what kind of proposal we are looking to write, what their role in writing the proposal is. We allow them to ask questions, we tell them who the intended audience is, we tell them how we want the proposal written. And again, it’s a very iterative approach. Then there’s the other part, which is what’s called giving your new employee a persona.

What are some of the generative AI use cases that you’ve come across, specifically within the realm of sales readiness and coaching? Does anything stick out in terms of how sales organizations are leveraging this technology today?

Richter: Well, for example, you can create custom chatbots, and there are many third-party software tools that do that. You can also build what’s called a custom GPT from an enablement standpoint. Imagine if you took all the customer service queries you’ve had over the years, all of your manuals, all of your proposals, all of your emails and put them into a custom GPT. You create your own library of content.

And then you allow people to start asking questions. Do that for a couple of months, and you get a really powerful, trained system. Now, when you onboard a new salesperson, you can have that salesperson go in and sell to the GPT. And you can say, GPT, you are ‘X’, give it the persona of one of your best customers. Allow your salesperson to go in and sell to this virtual program and get responses. And then you as the manager can review those responses with the salesperson. And it probably puts it at, I don’t know how much faster, but a factor of 10x, maybe 100x in terms of the speed of getting a new employee onboard because they can practice in real time.

Something that previously might have taken a salesperson a day to … create now can be done in a second.

You can also use it to do a competitive analysis. I can go to my competitor’s website, scrape the data, or some of the GPT systems will read the internet. If you scrape the data, basically you copy it, go into GPT, and paste it. Here’s company X’s product, here’s our product, paste the two in and tell it to create a competitive analysis, and it will create a competitive analysis for you in seconds. That’s something that previously might have taken a salesperson a day or a marketing person a couple of days to create. And now, I can now do it in a second.

Another example: You could give the GPT information about your products, then give it your prospect’s website or paste in what they’re looking for, and ask it to align your offering with what they care about. So, I can prepare relevant sales communication versus sales communication that just talks about me.

Those are some of the strategies that all good salespeople have known for years. Sometimes we don’t do it because we don’t have the time. Well, now there’s no excuse. Again, rewind the clock 10 years, just sort of step back to try to see the evolution here. When software as a service first came into our technology stacks, it was all about automation and scale, right? But what we were automating and scaling wasn’t really highly personalized just yet. And I feel now the pendulum has swung so much to the efficiency and scale side that it’s really got to be about authenticity. Are people gonna lose trust in this? Because if everyone’s doing it, now it’s like, OK, did you use some automation here? Or is this really you speaking?

What is the evolution of this? What’s going to be the next frontier and challenge?

Richter: It’s authenticity. Because I’ve used generative AI so much, I can absolutely tell when a LinkedIn comment or an email has been created by generative AI.

I have a tool that I’ve developed. It’s called GPT Follow-Up. It allows you to paste in an article or research report, select the type of message you want to send, and enter your prospect’s name or customer’s name, and it crafts a message for you. What it doesn’t do is allow you to send that message directly. And what I coach people on is you’re using this to get you 90% of the way there or 80% of the way there. So, you take what GPT Follow-Up gives you and paste it into your LinkedIn message or Outlook—or whatever email system you use—and you modify it.

[Generative AI] tools are amazing, but they don’t have the experience we have. A great salesperson knows how to ask the question that their customer or prospect doesn’t even know ought to be asked. GPT can’t do that, at least not yet. It can’t think, it doesn’t have empathy, it doesn’t have understanding, it doesn’t have values, it still has bias. [The tools] can’t replace the value that an experienced human can provide.

[Generative AI tools] can’t replace the value that an experienced human can provide.

Often people say AI and technology are going to replace humans. And I always encourage people to think about tech as an assistant or a teammate that enhances your effectiveness. It’s never going to replace humans, especially in the field of sales because selling is a very human thing.

Richter: I think you have to be careful of that because it depends what your definition of salesperson is. Some people call themselves salespeople, but they’re really glorified order takers. They sit, they wait for their phone to ring and, oh, the client wants another widget 3000. We go into our system, we order the widget 3000. That’s going to be automated quite easily. The salesperson who thinks they’re providing value because they’re really good at going into the database and pulling up manuals and saying, no, you need this one versus that one. That’s going to be replaced. What GPT really can’t do, however, is ask those additional questions of that developer. What’s going to make this special? What is really important to the customer? What’s important to the prospect?

No, absolutely. I’ll use another example of life sciences or a medical device sales rep or a pharmaceutical sales rep who needs to build that credibility, that gravitas, that presence in front of the doctor or healthcare professional. And they use this technology to build confidence before the live interaction.

Richter: I love the example you gave. If you said, Sam, next week, I need you to go start selling heart valves to heart surgeons at the Mayo Clinic. I wouldn’t even—what are you talking about? I’ve got no experience in that. I could never do it. But based on what we were talking about earlier, in sales enablement training, we can use these tools. And my guess is within 30 days, I can get trained very rapidly on the product. I can get well trained quickly on what the objections are and what the use cases are.

Let’s think about the hiring process. With the hiring process in the future for, say, a medical sales rep. You might be hiring less based on previous experience and more on the ability for someone to listen, someone to ask a good question, someone to genuinely care. … The soft skills might become much more important.

With generative AI, we’re still at what’s called narrow intelligence. This is still in its infancy. It’s inconceivable to me to even think about what this is going to be five years from now. Because remember, everything we’re talking about right now did not exist 18 months ago. The analogy I’ll use in my Sales Success Summit presentation is the: imagine you were in person in Ohio when the Wright brothers launched their airplane. It’s probably 50 years between that and the jet airplane. With Chat GPT, it came out in November of 2022 and we thought, “This is cool.” Well, by February of 2023, just a few months later, and it’s like we’re witnessing the jet airplane. It was probably 50 years between the Wright brothers and the jet airplane. For us and ChatGPT, it was 50 days. And then by October of 2023, it’s like we had landed a person on the moon. And by the time the S3 conference comes around, we’re going to be exploring the solar system.

That’s the metaphor of the speed of change that we’re all experiencing. And so I think it’s impossible to predict what this is going to be three years from now, five years from now, as these tools seem to take away some of the tasks we did as humans. The value we will actually be able to provide is our humanity, our ability to listen, think, share, laugh, ask, love.

Use experience. And like I said earlier, ask the questions that people don’t even know how to be asked.

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