Teaching AI How To (Properly) Sell
Most of us have some element or other of AI in our selling routines by now.
Even if it's from a starter pack of writing a particular piece of collateral or generating imagery, parsing info or scraping output.
All when and good where it lets us, to drop a tricolon, connect-convince-close.
Yet beyond, our new bot buddy can take quite the amount of 'training'.
I myself have been down this rabbit hole.
By way of example, I sought an illumination to summarise my own thinking on the knotty issue of selling new product.
Hoping deus machina could proffer a different slant with insight that might be presented with 'better' language as it saw fit in ever more prospect-catching manner.
My first exchange duly disabused me of such notion.
I attach text from its 15-slide deck produced below. Beginning with the title slide prose in its entirety.
I estimate the split of quality to slop at best around 50/50. And when there's slop, it veers towards that of the prison cell morning bucket routine.
Yet even in this exercise, powerful threads for further ideas emerge.
Despite pretty much being far from my own 'voice' - and perhaps compounding the trap of AI's own bias which can mean we are all doomed to suffer from a fatally sounding 'similarity' with everyone else - there were a couple of gems.
'The most persuasive pitch outlines a problem the customer is experiencing but has not yet put a name to' strikes a chord but can apply to any solution sell, not just a new product.
'If we build it, they will sell it' as management assumption alarm is great.
'If Marketing builds the launch, it fails' is so often true it's scary.
I've blogged (and long ago now) on how AI is not a decent copywriter. As this small sample proves. Yet even in this kind of case, the fresh light it gives are fuel for our own better thought.
Rescuing the Enterprise B2B Product Launch
A contrarian playbook for preventing write-downs, overcoming buyer neophobia, and engineering sustainable enterprise adoption.
Enterprise buyers do not worship the sparkle of your momentum-propelling utopia. To stand still is their default.
Targeted "Damp Launches" [as in: Ditch the Big Bang for the Damp Launch]
A launch is not a marketing event. It is a strategically engineered sales ecosystem.
If Marketing builds the launch, it fails. Sales must own the launch mechanics.
Stop pitching to the 84% who fear change. Target the 'Larval Buyers' and 'Plastic Prospects' who urgently feel the overarching threat.
In similarity lies decay. You must accentuate the weird-factor factor - the disruptive difference that baffles the status quo.
Pitch the Overarching Threat, Not the Product
The most persuasive pitch outlines a problem the customer is experiencing but has not yet put a name to.
Management assumes 'If we build it, they will sell it.'
This is the deadliest assumption in enterprise sales.
Without genuine belief, reps become "shills" peddling a fiction.
You must engineer internal conviction before external communication.
We do not await a magical whirlwind to assemble your sales motion.
We engineer the exact behavioral strands required to replicate enterprise success.
In similarity, only obsolescence.
In difference lie the seeds of disruption.