I know many of you are using AI to help you with your sales efforts; I also know that many, MANY of you are not. I’d like to share some of the benefits and efficiencies that I’ve discovered during my recent immersion into ChatGPT (though this also applies to other tools out there). Salespeople can derive a LOT of benefits from AI tools such as ChatGPT in their sales efforts. This is not only based on the many articles I’ve read on the topic, but also on my personal experiences experimenting with sales-specific prompt engineering for translation buyer profiles and needs.
There are so many ways to leverage AI for sales! For now, I’ll focus on a couple that I’ve spent a lot of time exploring: researching translation buyer industries, companies and roles (i.e. marketing, legal, etc.) and creating client-specific communications such as emails and phone scripts.
Industry, company and buyer research can be particularly time-consuming for translation salespeople, since we serve virtually all industries and a wide variety of buyers within them. One area I’ve found particularly useful is understanding the needs of various translation buyers within complex organizations and companies. We serve a huge variety of people who, yes, need translation services, but their personal objectives and the drivers for translation can be vastly different. Since clients expect us to understand their exact needs and uses for translations before we ever speak with them, speeding up the research process enables translation salespeople to have a larger variety, solution-oriented and more timely conversations with a greater number of translation buyers than ever before (and possibly ahead of their competitors). In my experience (even before websites were ubiquitous) doing manual research on each client’s needs could be a very time-consuming process.
My experiments have been across a broad range of industries, companies and roles within them, with surprisingly good results. In many cases ChatGPT came up with compelling information, client pain points and ideas I’d never thought of, but that I confirmed were reasonable. Confirmed? Given my experience with ChatGPT hallucinations on more than one occasion, I do spend time to validate its output. But that’s almost no time at all compared to manually doing the same research, particularly for industries in which I’m less familiar.
Prompt Engineering: The quality of output relies heavily on the quality of your input. There’s a bit of art and science to writing prompts that get the best out of ChatGPT. For example, a long and complex request generally produces quite generic output. In many cases I found it necessary to prompt ChatGPT in stages while referring back to previous prompts and/or information delivered or ask it to refine its output. Other times I was compelled to ask for alternative approaches to client problems or ask ChatGPT to fact check itself! There are many, many ways to get great information about your sales leads and clients out of ChatGPT. I’ll be keeping up with the ongoing enhancements to this technology, how best to leverage it in our sales activities and communicating this information with you.
Validate, Validate, Validate: We’ve all heard the stories about AI making up legal cases that lawyers referenced in court. My query asking for a book recommendation about AI in Sales resulted in a made-up title, though listing well-known sales gurus as its authors. It pays to do some validation of the output AI tools deliver. It still takes far less time to do this than to do all the original research!
Industry, client and buyer research is only the tip of the iceberg for leveraging AI tools such as ChatGPT for sales. I’ll explore more of these in subsequent posts.
In the meantime, invest time in learning how to “talk” to AI tools and leverage the information and insights it can deliver. This technology is moving so quickly: it’s already an essential tool for salespeople and will no doubt become even more so!
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