The hot area of focus for many of the new AI based tools is how it frees up seller time. We can get these tools to write our emails, to help write proposals, to do the research and prep for meetings, to eliminate many of the administrative tasks, CRM updating and all sorts of things that take seller time.
The promise of these tools in freeing up seller time is stunning.
But something is missing from the conversation. Once we free up the time, how should sellers be using it? What should they be doing?
And, more importantly, Are they really capable of doing those things? Do they want to be doing those things?
I suspect one of the key goals is to have sellers spend more time actually talking to and working with customers. But are they actually spending their time doing these things we hoped they would do with that time?
Too often, I see behavior and time allocations not changing. AI enables us to do more outreach, but too many sellers are using this time to do even more outreach. And the pattern continues. People are investing their freed up time in doing more of that very thing.
I think much of the reason underlying this is that people don’t really know what to do with that time, or they lack the confidence/ability to use that time well.
Imagine, freeing up the time so we can spend more time talking to customers. What do we talk to them about? We can pitch them about our products, but we’ve already done that, what else do we talk to them about? And they don’t like to hear us pitching, what do we talk to them about?
Or what too many face, we free up that time to talk to customers, but they don’t want to talk to us!
AI offers us huge opportunities to make us more efficient, to free up time that we can use more productively. But are we preparing our people to use that time in the most productive way possible. Are we building their confidence in their ability to use that time well?
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