Standing Out When All Sellers Sound The Same

A recent University of Southern California study suggests AI is making us all sound - and think - the same.

A different type of 'flattening' to that blogged on earlier this year, but emanates from the same source of super-promptness.

What does a buyer do when faced with homogenisation of sales collateral, pitches and answers to their sales queries?

No, not an abstract thought experiment, but what researchers have found is happening right now.

I have seen this, IRL. A (non-client) salesperson showed me their latest email to a prospect. It obviously was not them. It simply was not their voice. It was transparently AI generated. Yet happy to send in their name.

How happy were their prospect to receive it?

I'll never know. But I do know the percentage chance. And such odds suggest that AI-written repping would weaken deal likelihood.

Surely right now any potential buyer runs their own Turing-type Test across inbound messaging. Whether conscious or not, they grant only those 'human' passage through the filter.

Solution selling was never really about information transfer. Information is now free, instant, and identical across every seller they meet.

Remember what it was actually always about. Which person's judgement they were willing to rent for the duration of the deal. Who emerged as their Trusted Advisor. With authenticity they could buy in to.

Layer judgement on top of whatever the machine drafts. Otherwise you're just the human proofreader of your own irrelevance.

So how to stand out?

Go 'hyper-local'.

A few years back, I was glad to hear a local radio phone-in competition. Answers You Can't Google. It was a hoot. How many customers so far that day for some particular dish at a cafe. Location a sound clip was made at. Colour of a certain dodgy-parked car right now.

When everyone is scraping LinkedIn posts or parsing someone's vaguely related multiple online mentions, we too can home in like that.

Reference actual spoken tidbits.

Get into the habit of cultivating them.

Go richer.

Lather on examples of your judgement and experience that can only come from sources also not available online.

Such as where a previous customer had a decision to make. What they juggled. How it since went.

Also move away from the transactional. My hunch is that AI sales slop commoditises output. Don't just answer. Add value. What else can make them smarter. Future-proof the impending decision of theirs?

Something that will show to their colleagues or make them feel they themselves have gone deeper. Could be with extra breadth around the edges. Even tangentially.

Go long-term.

Best of all, get them thinking past the sale itself. How this looks over the horizon. What they'll be able to say to their own boss, or the person who inherits the decision. Legacy thinking. The one thing no AI-drafted prose is built to do, because it has no stake in how anything turns out.

In a deluge of competent AI output, the winners will be those who prove they have a real Sales pulse. Can you?