Imagine receiving a very well crafted prospecting outreach. It is well written. It is specific to issues that companies in your industry face, it is specific to the issues people in your role (in your industry) face. And the email started with:
Two years ago, the issues most critical to people like you in [name an industry] were these……
And the letter went on to talk about how the sender could help. If you got that far in reading the outreach.
How would you respond?
We know the answer to that, the world has changed.
Two years ago, we were in the height of dealing with Covid. Everyone was struggling with what that meant, how we worked, how we engaged each other. Software companies saw huge uplift because organizations were helping them solve the problem of work from anywhere.
The economy was robust, we had low interest rates and cheap money. We were seeing challenges with supply chain issues. Companies were hiring like crazy, finding talent and getting them productive was a huge challenge. Some sectors struggled, like travel/hospitality. Some were growing faster than ever experienced. SMBs faced huge challenges, particularly those involved in virtually every aspect of retail. Energy/fuel was cheap.
So the issues impacting every business were driven by those issues and more.
Fast forward to today. We see a completely different set of conditions. We are in a global economic crisis. Depending on who you listen to, we are in a recession or on the cusp of one. Interest rates are skyrocketing, money is available, but not as cheaply, investors are much more cautious. While Covid isn’t gone, we;’ve become skilled in managing the impact. With rising inflation, energy costs and all sorts of other costs are skyrocketing. The war in the Ukraine and other global disruptions are impacting supply chains, but in very different ways. Technology companies, previously growing crazily, are laying off 10’s of thousands. Terms like the great resignation, quiet quitting, work-life balance, while always important seem to dominate our thinking as business leaders.
In short, things have changed profoundly in two years. And, in reality, if we look back in history, particularly the last 20 years, we have seen complexity, disruption, innovation drive constantly high rates of change. When we look within our organizations, our industries and markets, VUCA has become a by word.
So with this as background, let me move to ChatGPT. This tool has, according to too many marketers, gurus, and content specialists and lazy sellers, become the future of how we engage customers. We see claims of “Generate 1000 personalized emails in 15 minutes.” Others are showing how to research companies to help identify the issues they face in embedding them in these 1000s of emails.
And, we’ve all seen volumes in our inboxes skyrocket.
But there is a problem. And ChatGPT is constantly telling us, “Be careful, my data bases haven’t been updated since 2021!”
All the insights driven by Chat are based on data that is at least 2 years old!
And marketers, content gurus are leveraging this as fast ways to generated 1000s of insights and increased relevance, based on stuff that happened at least two years ago. They teach us how to refine prompts be me more specific and targeted, to leverage these tools in very powerful ways talking to customers about what was important to them 2 years ago, but not necessarily now!
And, when they use Chat to get those insights, Chat always cautions them, “Be careful my data bases haven’t been updated since 2021. You might want to look at more current sources!” (Kudo’s to OpenAI for helping us use these powerful tools more effectively).
I’m a huge fan of ChatGPT and similar tools. I should be, I co-founded a successful AI company in 2002. I know the power of these tools. I use ChatGPT everyday (at least when I can get signed on).
ChatGPT helps me explore new ideas, ask different questions, helps me think about issues differently. It helps me identify blind spots in my thinking–not giving me answers but helping me identify areas where I need to do more research–on current data–or talk to people differently.
It does take some time to do that, one has to constantly refine prompts, deep dive into responses with different prompts. But 30 minutes with Chat helps me think, What issues might I be looking for, how might I look for them, am I missing something in my thinking, should I consider a different perspective, should I be asking me different questions.
Chat’s power, to me, is not the answers it gives, but the questions it helps me generate.
I learned this back in 2022 with the company I cofounded. We were applying AI tools to, among other areas, manufacturing process control and analysis. While our tools were crude by today’s standards, they enabled our customers to analyze 100s and 1000s of variables across millions of records. It helped us generate patterns of what was happening in very complex, high value manufacturing processes. It could help them identify things that worked, things that didn’t work.
What we learned, with our customers, is the value of the tool was not the answers, but the way it enabled them to look at choices, tradeoffs, opportunities. Or they way it made them realize problems they didn’t know they had. Ultimately, the value of the tool was less in the answers but more in how it increased their awareness causing them to make better choices and improve their manufacturing processes.
While current AI technologies are very powerful in giving some answers, for much of our sales and marketing engagements, I think the real hidden power is helping us think differently, and through that helping our customers think differently.
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