Recently, in speaking with a colleague, he was showing me a series of AI prompts to help sellers do deep research on customers, their markets, issues, and so forth. What might have taken someone a couple of hours to do, AI enabled it to be completed in about 2 seconds. And the quality of the output was pretty good.
We have all sorts of tools that free us up from doing the boring and tedious work. Work that is uninspiring, we just have to grind it out. Work that. often, takes time away from higher return efforts like meeting with customers, working with our people.
These tools do all the research, they to the analysis, and they give us the answers. “What are the three most important issues CFOs in the healthcare industry face?” Boom! I’ve got a response that’s pretty good.
If I’m clever, I might ask, “How do I integrate these issues into a conversation with a CFO of a medium size medical device manufacturer?” (While too few sellers even think of this, lets’ imagine they did.) Boom! I’ve got tips on how to do that. We’re now already for the call.
We go on the call, we have the issues, we can now raise them in the conversation with the CFO….
The CFO answers them, but in a manner that’s very contextually relevant to her specific company and their challenges. We’re stumped, what’s the next question we ask, where do we go in the conversation? How do we go deeper and more specific to learn more about what she and her company face?
If we’re doing the meeting virtually, we might open a ChatGPT window on a second screen and say, “Help me, what’s the follow up question?!?!??” And even if the CFO is quiet while we get the answer, the answer will not be contextually relevant because ChatGPT doesn’t know what’s on the CFO’s mind right now. It doesn’t know about the challenge that was put in front of the CFO just prior to the meeting.
But even if we could struggle with the second question, how do we deal with the response? How do we engage this CFO in a high impact two way conversation?
Alternatively, when the CFO answers our questions, we don’t understand what the answer means. We might ask, “Can you repeat that in single syllable words, with out using numbers and figures, and avoid acronyms like ROI, EBITDA and so forth?”
The problem with having tools that do the boring work, is the thinking that’s required helps us learn about what things mean, how things work, how everything comes together to produce the answer. And in that learning, we improve our ability to have high impact conversations with our customers. We develop a better ability to understand what their answers mean. We have the knowledge to ask the most important follow up question, or to drill down into the responses. We have the ability to say, “That’s really interesting, I’ve never seen that before, why is that happening with you,” and the ability to understand and, perhaps, challenge the response.
The act of doing the boring work helps prepare us to do the important, high impact work. Offloading this boring work to technology and tools robs us of the ability to learn and absorb those things. It robs us of the ability to ask a meaningful follow up question, or to drill down into an issue. or to bridge from a generalization to a situationally contextual conversation.
Now there’s a balance to what boring work we can offload. Getting the data and gathering the information is something you probably don’t learn a lot from (though there have been some interesting data gathering journeys). I offload as much as I can. I can pull financial trends, specific data, market trends and all sorts of things with a few prompts. I have tools that can help speed up the analysis. I don’t need a lot of practice in understanding how to add a column of numbers.
But while the tools might tell me, “Here are the issues,” I don’t pay much attention. I look at the analysis myself, I may tweak it a little, I may look at YoY trends, I may draw in comparative data from a competitor, or tweak the market data. The act of doing the boring mundane stuff that ChatGPT can do for me, helps me better think about what might be going on. It helps me think about what the issues might mean and prepare other questions or avenues of discussion.
Or in the conversation, when she brings up certain issues, my experience of doing the boring work helps me think of how to respond, what to ask next, perhaps an insight I might share, perhaps a different data point I stumbled on, or perhaps something that didn’t make sense in the data.
I would not be able to do that, even with all my years of experience in talking to 100s of CFO, without having done some of the boring work. Granted my years of experience help me do the boring work faster and enables me to focus on what is most important. But I still have to do the boring work to be equipped to have a high impact conversation with a customer.
I don’t know the line of demarcation. What boring work can we offload to the technology and tools? What do we have to keep to our selves, or at least have some involvement in? Right now, I think most of the data gathering can be offloaded, as long as we are directing the technology to get it from credible resources. I think much of the analysis can be offloaded, but not all of it. And I have to confess, sometimes staring at an Excel worksheet that has 50 columns and 100s of row, patterns start popping out at me. I may see something I’ve never seen before or something is very different. And while I leverage lots of technologies to do analysis for me, they would have missed it, because I would not have trained it to look for this.
Boring work stands in the way of our doing the big things, the fun things, the things that move us forward. We tend to think it reduces our efficiency. But, more often than we would like to think, doing some of the boring work profoundly increases our understanding, consequently it magnifies our impact and effectiveness. The trick is in finding the balance.
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