Our feeds are filled with hacks, prompts, “cheat sheets” offering things like, “What are key decision maker roles for this….? What are qualifying questions….? What are trends…..? How do I handle objections….?”
I take these hacks, trying them out myself. At best, I get responses that are mediocre and non specific. For example, “CFOs care about these things…..” Well duhhhh! I refine them, suggesting a certain industry or market. The responses are the same, but with the addition, “CFOs in the industrial products sector care about these things….” They are the same, the only change is the addition of the industrial products sector.
I test across different roles, markets, different issues. I’ve become relatively agile in prompt engineering, so I keep tweaking them, trying to find that “Aha” revelation. But I seldom get anything that I didn’t already know or could have made an informed guess. I get frustrated telling ChatGPT, “Give me something I don’t already know, give me something that’s novel and innovative!” And ChatGPT and her sisters eventually throw up their hands saying, “Dave, you don’t understand the limitations to our databases……”
I reflect on my days as a Teaching Assistant for MBA classes, most of the responses I see to these “game changing prompts,” would have evoked a “C” if presented by a student.
But, I realize I may be looking at this incorrectly. These prompts, hints, tips garner huge amounts of interest, comments, and “likes.” There’s something, despite how mediocre the responses are, that are provoking popularity.
Some of the interest is a “shiny object” reaction. We are attracted to new, shiny objects, despite the fact they may not be really different or innovative. And eventually, the shine wears off, we go back to what we always did.
Some of it is the “cool kids syndrome,” but we’ve had ChatGPT and it’s sisters for over a year and a half, everyone is leveraging it in various ways, so it’s no longer just the cool kids.
I ask myself, “What is driving the interest in these ho-hum insights? Why don’t these people already know this?”
After all, these game changing prompts focus on what sellers should already know. We should know the trends, issues, challenges faced by organizations in our ICP. We should know the key metrics, goal/objectives of those organizations. We should know they key people we should be talking to, their typical challenges, their typical responsibilities, how they are measured. We should know who the top performing organizations in our ICP are, what separates them from the others. We should know how to engage our customers in meaningful ways, whether attracting interest or engaging them through the buying process.
Again, the question is, “Why don’t our people know these things?” Why don’t they know things we can easily supply them, that are beyond the capabilities of ChatGPT’s data bases? We can certainly supply detailed market data, comparative analytics, performance and other data these models struggle with.
I start thinking, perhaps we are failing our people in training, supporting, coaching, and reinforcing things they should know to be effective and efficient in doing their jobs. We aren’t helping them understand who our customers are, what they care about, what’s happening to them and their markets. We aren’t helping them connect the dots between their business challenges and how we can help them.
As a huge fan of these tools, I’m constantly wondering, “Why aren’t we driving discussions and ‘prompts’ around things that are best supported by these tools? Why are we spending so much time doing what ChatGPT (and high performing sales people) can do in their sleep?”
I suspect the greatest lesson we might learn from the popularity of these miracle cures is how we are failing in developing our people.
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