Hacking Business Acumen With ChatGPT

Regular readers will know among a number of things, I’m obsessed with ChatGPT and I’m obsessed with business acumen. I decided to test how Chat could help us better understand and connect with our customers.

I’ve mixed feelings about it, but realized my expectations may be unrealistic. For sellers having no or very basic understanding of how businesses work, key business drivers for a role or industry, ChatGPT can be a very quick hack to learning about key issues and challenges.

There are a few few caveats:

1. Most of the responses provided don’t provide deep insights or “aha” moments. They are what one would learn in a basic MBA class about how businesses work.
2. They are very generic, one doesn’t know if it is a specific issue unique to the role, the company, or the industry. I ran queries across a lot of roles (e.g. CRO, CEO, CFO, etc), also across a number of specific companies in the same industry, and across different industries. There were minor, expected differences across industries. Within an industry, I struggled to find differences between companies competing with each other in the industry. Currently, it doesn’t appear that Chat cannot provide performance analyses across companies and industries. (more later). And the role differences are what one would expect to learn in “Business Structures 101.”
3. As mentioned before, it is currently impossible to get any performance data. For example industry, market, company performance. Part of the problem is that Chat’s data bases are about 2 years old. But, it appears that Chat has some artificial limitations on specific performance data. For example, I can google the performance of any market, industry, or company, and get lots of sources of information providing that. Chat doesn’t provide anything.
4. Don’t expect to get any deep insights from Chat, currently it can’t provide you anything that will be novel or unexpected with your customers. Also, be aware that Chat may just be wrong. As you look at the responses, think, “Does this make sense, based on my experience with these types of customers?”

Having said all of this, if you invest 5-10 minutes in some structured queries, you can get some basic understanding of business and challenges your customers may be facing. So if you want to start business focused conversations with your customers, here are some queries you might make of Chat:

1. What are the top 10 questions I want to ask any business executive to understand their responsibilities and key challenges?
2. What are the top 5 business challenges facing companies in [this industry] right now?
3. What are the top 5 business challenges facing executives in [this role] right now?
4. In engaging an executive in an initial conversation, what are the top 5 things that executive is most likely to be interested in discussing? (BTW, however I shifted the phrasing of the question, Chat never said the executive is going to say, “Tell me about your product…..”)

You can adapt each of these questions to a certain industry type or specific role.

One of the things I like to do is determine the 2-3 things I might want to focus on in a conversation. What I do is take Chat’s response and drill down a little deeper. For example, I posed the question, “What are the top 5 things than an executive is most likely to be interested in discussing?” One of the items had to do with their business business objectives and challenges. I then asked chat, “What are the top 5 questions I should ask to learn about their business executives and challenges?” It provided more detail around what how I might engage the customer more deeply.

For extra credit points, you can take these basics and couple them with basic information about a specific customer. For example, you can look at a financial statement, identifying specific issues, strategies, and challenges identified by the executives and combine them with the generic information Chat provides.

If you want to start talking about the things your customer cares about, rather than just pitching your products, ChatGPT can help you get started. It doesn’t come close to the 5 years of experience you might have from working with a certain group of customers. It won’t provide any specific data or insights where the customer responds, “I’d never thought of things that way before,” or “That;s interesting and new to me!” But it gives you a starting point for a business focused conversation. Coupled with a few data points about the market or the customer, you can easily start having a business focused conversation.

Over the space of about 10 minutes, I posed over a dozen questions to Chat about various business issues. If you are struggling to learn more, this is a pretty good starting point.

If you don’t know these things, investing those 10 minutes will help tremendously. And you can use the same insights in engaging similar customers on similar issues.