Grinding It Out….

ChatGPT and its colleagues are, too often, a debilitating cheat for sellers who don’t want to put in the work. There, I said it, I got it off my chest.

Don’t get me wrong, these tools are very powerful and helpful. I leverage them constantly through my day, but for very different purposes than the majority of sellers. My feeds are filled with tricks and hacks. Most focused on efficiency, few focused on impact, differentiation, and value.

There are prompts for “researching and understanding” any role you might be selling to. Or any market or industry. Hacks for structuring and measuring an entire sales organization. Hacks for any type of prospecting outreach and for producing “personalized” emails by the thousands. There are hacks piled on top of other hacks–I suppose helping us become even more efficient.

Out of curiosity, I cut and paste the prompts into ChatGPT. And 100% of the time, I get answers that are, at best, mediocre. I try some prompt engineering beyond what’s recommended (I’ve gotten pretty good at that) and the result is MEH. Undistinguished, absent of any insight, blah…..

In fairness, these tools tell us this. They tell us the limitations of their data bases. We know how they work and shouldn’t have an expectation of much more–at least used in these ways.

My reaction to the majority responses these hacks produce is, “Nothing new, OK not great…” It’s stuff, if we work to master our profession, we should have known without needing ChatGPT.

If we understand our ICPs, we already should understand:  (If you don’t, reassess your sales enablement strategies.)

• The key industry and market drivers.
• The key metrics, financial and otherwise.
• The key problems we address, why they are important within our ICP, how to determine if these are issues for our customers.
• The key reasons that would drive a customer to change.  The questions they are or should be asking themselves, the information most important to them in addressing these issues.
• Who is typically involved, why they are involved, and how they are likely to be impacted by the issue.
• For those roles, we understand the responsibilities of their jobs, how they are measured, etc. (refer to Brock Questionert)
• We understand the challenges they face in driving these changes, the risks they have to assess, the implementation issues.

Our playbooks and tools are already focused on helping us understand these things.

So many of the “hacks,” can only tell us very aspecific things that we should already know, if we are to be credible in engaging our customers impactfully.

And when I try to use these hacks, doing some prompt engineering beyond the specific hack, I get gross generalizations that are meaningless.  Stated differently, when used with the customer, they demonstrate our lack of understanding of their business and the fact we have not done our homework.

Try it yourself.  Try a prompt:  “What are the top 3 challenges [X role] faces,”  or “What are the top 3 critical metrics for people in [X role].”  The roles can be any role you deal with.  Then try the same for a role in a very large company, or a start up, or in a certain industry, or in a certain geo. 

When you start doing this, there is very little difference in the responses.  I tried it for a number of roles in differing industries, market.  For example CROs, CMOs, CFOs in general, industrial products, financial services, healthcare, professional services, process based, technology, SaaS, large enterprises, small businesses, start ups.  

While one would expect important nuances in each role based on industry, size, etc.; the responses were remarkably un-nuanced.  Usually, it was virtually the same with the substitution of the role, “CROs face these issues…., CROs in industrial products face these issues…., CROs in technology face these issues…”

So these efficiency hack don’t give us anything that we shouldn’t already know.

And then we know we have to do the additional work, because the tools aren’t helpful, “Compare the performance of Customer X to it’s peers in the industry….  How has company X performed relative to these competitors…  What has been the performance trend of  Customer X in the past 3 years…  Have there been any changes impacting Customer X recently.

And we have to do the same thing for each individual we want to reach.

The hacks and tricks we are presented with, which everyone starts using, present us with less than what we should know, if we are doing the work to really understand our markets and customers.  They are undistinguished, they demonstrate our lack of understanding or unwillingness to do the work.

AI offers us tremendous power if we use it well.  But using it well means doing the work.   In means challenging yourself and the tool, it requires careful prompt engineering, it requires astute skepticism.

Executing any job is tough.  The top performers use every tool available to help improve efficiency, they understand their solutions and their customers deeply.  And they know there are no short cuts, they have to grind it out.