Tag Archives: Relationships

Can Salespeople Be Replaced by AI?

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“Can salespeople be replaced by AI in five years?”  That was the topic of the poll on LinkedIn.  My instinctive reaction was probably the same as yours – “Of course not.”  Then, I did a little thinking before I answered.  And I realized that, yes, a lot of salespeople could be replaced by AI – not in five years, but RIGHT NOW.  That’s because their skills aren’t really any better than your basic chatbot – and therein lies a problem for those of us who care deeply about the role of the professional salesperson.

In 2011, Selling Power Magazine interviewed me as part of a cover story on the future of selling.  I’ve always thought of myself as a very forward-looking person when it comes to our profession – but boy, was my crystal ball broken when I gave my responses to their questions, and I realized this when I looked back at the article.  If you click, you’re going to read a pretty long article, but if you care at all about the sales profession and your role in it, you’d better click.  I’ve written over 600 articles on selling and this might be the most important.

Here’s what I said.  In response to a question about what the future of the sales profession looked like, I said, “Midline salespeople of tomorrow will be displaying the same level of expertise ten to fifteen years from now that the superstars display today, and the superstars will be on a whole new level.  Staying on top will require a higher level of mental commitment.”

I was wrong, but I should have been right.  I’ve written about this before, but if anything, the aggregate level of sales ability has declined somewhat in the twelve years since I made those comments.  That’s because most salespeople of today spend less time and energy developing their skills.  They find a level and stick to it.  Midline salespeople are, at best, no better than they were in 2011.  Some of the responsibility for this rests on the salespeople themselves, and much of it rests on CEOS and sales managers who don’t foster a culture of continual sales skill development. Are there exceptions?  Yes.  Absolutely – I’ve encountered some remarkable salespeople (although I don’t think that “whole new level” has happened).  But they are exceptions.  By and large, the aggregate sales skills at each level have remained constant.

When I was asked how the Internet is changing the game, I said, “The Internet can take orders and distribute content [thus taking up functions once designated to salespeople], but what it can’t do it discover customer needs.  It can’t build relationships, and it can’t prospect on its own.”  Well, I was wrong about that one, too.  AI bots can do a rudimentary job of discovering customer needs at present, and that will only get better as time and technology marches on.

What about the other two components of what I said – relationship building and prospecting?  Obviously, AI cannot build a true, interpersonal, face to face relationship.  However, AI can do an excellent job of REMEMBERING what was said and has transpired (because it can feed directly into CRM systems) and from a business perspective, it can make excellent use of a customer’s time.  That’s a threat to, but not a replacement for, traditional sales relationship building.

Can AI prospect?  That’s a tantalizing thought, isn’t it?  Most salespeople dislike prospecting (full disclosure – I’ve never been in love with it myself).  I can envision a time when an AI bot is able to prospect through email, LinkedIn, and even the telephone.  In fact, the technology for email and social media is already here, and I’m willing to bet that if the phone prospecting tech doesn’t exist yet, it will shortly.  Imagine an AI bot that dials a prospect, engages in a voice to voice conversation using prospecting and sales best practices, and even sets appointments.  Heck, take it a step further and imagine it doing so in the same voice as the real salesperson who would handle the live appointment.  Or how about an AI bot that sets Zoom sales appointments and then carries them out in a hologram?  This kind of thing would have been science fiction five years ago – now it’s a coming reality.

Don’t misunderstand me – I still think that a well-trained, skilled, passionate, and engaged salespeople can do all of those things BETTER – but too many salespeople are not well-trained, skilled, passionate, and engaged.

Now that I’ve told you two areas where I was wrong, allow me to tell you one area where I was right – or will be soon.  When asked, “How do salespeople keep social media from being the tail that wags the dog?” I responded, “Social networking is a strategy for marketing promotions and relationship management.  It is not a prospecting tool [OK, I was a little wrong about that]. A lot of those functions are going to slide down to the lowest-paid person who is competent to do them.”  Given the level to which AI apps like ChatGPT write social media posts, I was right on target – ChatGPT is definitely cheaper than even an administrative person.

Where I went wrong, I went wrong for two reasons.  First, I anticipated a higher level of sales skill development on the part of the average salesperson.  Second, I didn’t see AI coming.  Shame on me.  Apps like ChatGPT have the capability of being game-changers, and they also have the capability of being harnessed (by skilled salespeople and managers) to increase the effectiveness of a company’s sales force.

How to avoid being replaced by AI

So if the answer to “Can salespeople be replaced by AI?” is “yes, it’s very possible,” then the question for we human salespeople is, “How can we avoid being replaced by AI?”  Here’s where the wicket gets sticky, because this requires some serious engagement and effort on our part.  Here’s a three-point plan.

  1. Get better at your job. The key for salespeople in this environment is to constantly learn, develop, add new skills, and shed old techniques that aren’t working anymore.  Unfortunately, few salespeople do this.  When I interview salespeople on behalf of my clients, I always ask, “What’s the most recent sales book you’ve read?”  Ten years ago, I got a good answer more than half the time.  Today, it’s rare that I get one at all – in fact, about half of the salespeople I interview have never read a book on selling.  When I ask a follow up question about how they develop their skills, they answer that they really don’t.  Sales is a profession of constant change and constant development, and if you don’t care enough about your profession to get better at it, you are replaceable.  Don’t be that guy or gal.  Invest in yourself.  Read books.  Read articles.  Watch YouTube videos.  Attend training programs.  And then practice, practice, practice.  Next week we’ll talk about what it really means to practice and learn sales techniques. Get better and do better.
  2. Embrace technology. Yes, this article is partially telling you how to combat a new technology, but those who do not embrace it will find themselves steamrolled by it.  I’m constantly amazed when I see salespeople (and worse, sales trainers) fighting the use of tech like CRM.  I have actually seen a “sales trainer” recommending that salespeople ditch the CRM and instead use paper note cards.  The 1990s called, and they would like their mentality back!  Today, salespeople must embrace and use tech of all types.  CRM, social media, video conferencing, and IM’s are all tech that salespeople should not only be conversant with, but competent in.  Not only that, you should be ready and anticipating the next trend.  There’s a reason that I refer to “AI” in this article for the most part, and not “ChatGPT.”  ChatGPT is but one AI app, and who knows whether it will be the most prominent in five years?  Remember MySpace?
  3. Flip the script. We always like to think about the “Sales process,” and what we want from the process and what activities we will be performing to get there. I want to challenge you, and I’m taking this challenge myself.  Stop thinking about “Sales processes” and instead think of the “buyer’s journey.”  Think about the act of selling from the perspective of the person buying, evaluate the steps from the buyer’s point of view, and work to help them achieve what they want.  It’s a change in thought and terminology, and as 2023 progresses, I’ll be helping you get there with articles, videos, and even training.

Make no mistake about my outlook.  A great salesperson will always be better than AI.  A good salesperson will always be at least as good as great AI.  I’m a 100% passionate advocate for personal selling by human beings to human customers.  If I sound pessimistic in this article, it’s because I’m concerned.  But as I said, I’m here to help, and I’ll be doing so through the Navigator and through my YouTube channel.  If you’re a salesperson, start reading, watching, and practicing.  In the coming weeks, we’ll talk about how to practice and about how to view sales from the perspective of the buyer.

And if you’re a business owner or sales manager, I can help you, too.  In addition to the free resources above, I can train your salespeople to be irreplaceable.  I can help you hire great salespeople.  And I can coach you to manage the very best sales team in your market.

The future might look spooky, but it doesn’t have to be.  This is another challenge to our profession, and we can and will overcome it and be better and more valuable to our customers than ever before.

The Four Decisions Every Buyer Makes

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Sometimes I think we make selling entirely too complicated – and by “we,” I mean my profession of sales authors and trainers.  Sure, selling can be difficult.  That’s why they pay us the big bucks.  We’re dealing with people and trying to persuade them, and that’s always a challenge.  Still, why make the sale more complicated and cumbersome than it has to be?

The truth is that, boiled down to its elements, every sale consists of a prospective or current customer making four decisions.  The trick is that there’s no gray area – every decision must be in your favor, or you won’t win the sale.  Here they are:

Decision One:  The decision to engage with you.  Yep, the first decision that your customer makes is the decision to talk to you – or to engage with you, if you prefer that terminology (and I do; “engagement” implies a two-way street).  If you can’t get an audience with your customer, you can’t sell them.  Yes, you can receive an order from someone who doesn’t talk to you (technology these days is wonderful), but you won’t have an opportunity to persuade or affect the outcome of that decision.  This means that your approach to them MUST communicate the value of a conversation with you.  In fact, in most cases, that’s all you should be shooting for; by trying to sell more than the simple value of the conversation, you can get neither.

Decision Two:  The decision that you can solve their need(s).  Every customer has needs.  Your ability to discover their needs, and then solve them, is the key to getting a “yes” at this stage of the sales process.  That means that, first and foremost, you must ask copious amounts of questions.  Even if you THINK you know what the buyer needs, you don’t KNOW until you ask them.  Ultimately, you must know how the BUYER will define a successful purchase.  Not how you define it, not how most of your other customers define it, not how your boss says it’s defined, but how the buyer defines it.  Without knowing how the buyer will define a successful work, everything else is just guesswork – and guesswork rarely wins sales.

Once you know their needs and how they define success, two burdens are placed upon you.  The first burden is this – if your offerings do not and cannot solve the buyer’s needs, and meet their definition of success, you must bow out.  This is the only way to retain your (and your company’s) professional credibility.  Yes, I know, there’s nothing more painful than walking away from potential dollars – but would you rather collect the dollars by hammering someone into a bad purchase, and then live with the failure?  Walking away early means that you live to sell another day when your solution fits; making a bad sale means that you are forever disqualified.   Even pushing a solution when your buyer knows it’s not a solution can forever disqualify you.

The second burden is that, if your solution does meet the buyer’s needs and definition of success, your presentation must be specifically and intimately tailored to those exact needs and definition.  This is harder than it sounds, as sometimes (many times) you have to develop a presentation on the spot.  Salespeople can get into the “sell sheet” or “slide deck” mentality that says, “I have all this great information, and I have to get it all out,” even when the customer doesn’t care about all the information.  If I go to the doctor for a sore shoulder and he gives me a pill that will fix it (I know that’s not a real thing, but work with me here), I don’t care that it will also solve a sore throat because I don’t HAVE a sore throat.  When presenting, present specifically to the customer’s needs.  Hit the points hard and often that are meaningful and leave out information that is meaningless.  If you execute these steps correctly, your buyer will make the second critical decision – that you can solve needs – and move you to the next step of the process.

Decision Three:  The decision that your solution represents good value.  If your buyer is interested, he/she is probably going to say, “Okay, how much?”  At this point (or as soon after as you can), you offer a proposal with price and terms.  Your buyer is then going to evaluate your offering and basically ask themselves whether it’s a good spend of money, time, and resources, or not, and make their third decision.  If you’ve asked enough questions about priorities, needs, and the impact of solving those needs, you should already be 80% toward the answer to this question. Still, we sell to human beings, and those human beings can be somewhat unpredictable.

Decision Four:  The decision to buy from you.  “But wait, Troy, isn’t the decision that you represent good value also a decision to buy?” Nope.  Not in the slightest.  This is where variables outside of your control come into play.  Sometimes your solution is a good spend for the department you’re selling to – but corporate priorities dictate that resources go in a different direction.  Or, the timing just isn’t right (maybe they have other projects going on that require the attention and resources that would otherwise be devoted to yours).  In any case, you can have the greatest solution to a big problem, priced right, and still not win the sale because some externality is blocking you.  Your best strategy here is, back when you’re doing the questioning, to ask questions about overall company priorities, ongoing projects, etc.  Sometimes you can sell against those priorities if you know about them – but final decision time is too late to ask or sell against it.

Here’s what you need to know.  All of these decisions MUST go in your favor, and each one qualifies you to move to the next step.  Fail any one and you will not win the sale, even if your buyer “allows” you to keep selling (by offering a price that won’t result in a sale, for instance).

How to Turn Networking into Selling

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One of my least favorite sales techniques is “Trojan Horse Selling,” where the salesperson schedules a sales call under some pretense other than “I want to talk about selling you something,” and then it becomes a sales call.  Integrity is our stock in trade, and if we lose that, we have nothing left.

This type of selling has its root in a lack of confidence in the value of what the salesperson is selling, and it doesn’t have to be that way.  We have all had that moment where we were in a networking situation and we realized that there was a sales opportunity; doing it wrong can trash a relationship, but doing it right can result in a sale and a very happy customer. Here’s how to turn networking into selling – the right way.

How to Onboard Salespeople in 3 Steps

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How to Onboard Salespeople in 3 Steps

Onboarding salespeople is one of those activities where “act in haste; repent in leisure” certainly applies.  There’s a big difference between “doing it” and “doing it right.” If you rush onboarding now to get them out in the field quickly, you’ll probably regret it later.  This also goes, by the way, for industry experience hires, as I explain in this video.

In this video, I explain how to build a 90-day, three-step process for successfully onboarding salespeople so that they succeed now and later.  Make no mistake – a great onboarding process results in more successful salespeople AND greater sales longevity.

Want my help? I can help you build a great onboarding program as part of one of my Hiring Assistance programs.

How Salespeople Can Maximize Their Time And Relationships During Covid-19

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How Salespeople Can Maximize Their Time And Relationships During Covid-19

If you’re like most salespeople, you’re working as hard as you can to get a good path forward going during the Covid-19 crisis. Maybe you’re having more trouble getting ahold of prospects, or maybe you’re struggling with in-house interactions.  And, if you’re like me, you’re getting very tired of two popular video types that I’ve seen:  The “Sunshine and Roses” video, or the “Get off your butt and just sell” video.

I think it’s time to get real.  Let’s get serious about where we are in the sales profession, what’s available to us right now, and how we can best use our time and talents to recover from Covid-19 as best we can.  In this video, I explain my thoughts.

Four Easy Steps to Great Customer Service

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When I talk to business owners about taking good care of their customers, and about maximizing their relationships, some of them seem to think that satisfying the customer’s requirements and providing great service requires Herculean efforts on the part of themselves and their staffs. The truth is that, most of the time, giving customers a service experience that will keep them coming back isn’t hard at all; in fact, I’m convinced that sometimes, it’s harder to provide bad service than good.

Case in point – I was recently at one of the popular “casual dining” restaurants for dinner. The name isn’t important; most of the things I’m about to talk about are interchangeable. Now, when I’m eating at one of these places, I don’t expect to be dazzled. Just bring me my burger/fajitas/salad/pasta/etc., keep the drink glasses full, and I’m a pretty happy guy. As, I’m guessing, are most of you when you eat at these restaurants. Unfortunately, that was too much to ask on this night.

The waiter managed our chips and salsa and drink orders OK. Then he took our food orders, and as is the custom in entirely too many of these places, he did so by memory, without writing anything down. Apparently, he was a mite too busy for his memory to be really effective, because 10 minutes later, he came back, verified my wife’s order, and asked, “uh, what did you have?” I restated my order, and he apologized profusely and explained that he was “very busy with all the people coming in.” Yep, that would be called the “dinner rush.”

Once upon a time, when waiters came to take your order, they used a little pad and pen, and WROTE THINGS DOWN. Amazingly, when waiters write things down, my orders come out correctly more often than not. When not, it appears to be something of a crapshoot. The problem isn’t limited to restaurants, though; in my career, when I’ve seen customer service screw-ups, they are more often than not caused by faulty memory (with a lack of data recording) rather than by too much data recording.

Think about your own business. How many people are involved in the fulfillment of each order? How much of your order fulfillment process is communicated on paper, and how much is verbal? We’ve all seen the exercise where one person whispers a phrase to someone, who repeats it to the next person, and by about the fifth person, the phrase is completely different. If you rely too much on memory and verbal communication, that’s your order process.

It’s worse in selling and relationship development. The average salesperson will interact with anywhere from 10 to 50 customers per week. If that salesperson is making face to face calls on a customer once per month, he will have had anywhere between 40 and 200 sales calls between calls on that one particular customer; if he relies strictly on memory for important details about the relationship, he’d better have a Guinness World Record level memory.

As a customer, I can tell you that few things are as frustrating as having to backtrack and cover old ground with salespeople who are forever one step behind in relationship development. Frankly, those salespeople usually find themselves on the outside looking in. So you won’t be one of those people, here are some quick techniques to help you excel in service and relationship development:

  1. Take good notes on every customer interaction. It all begins here. First of all, studies show that we are more likely to remember that which we write down, and secondly, once written down, it’s captured for posterity – details and all.
  2. Have a database and use it.       The most important details should be recorded in a database format – programs like ACT and Goldmine are cheap enough now that there’s no excuse for NOT using them.
  3. When details change, communicate – IN WRITING or data – to everyone who affects the customer.       Knowing that your customer will now only accept shipments on Tuesday is great; if the shipping clerk doesn’t know, it’s a problem. And as I noted, don’t just communicate verbally – take the time to send an e-mail, write a memo, etc.
  4. Archive your notes. I discovered a long time ago that if I attempted to retype every note from every sales call into my own database, I’d do little else (I’m a prodigious note-taker). However, I can scan those pages to a document, place that document in an archive folder, and link it to the customer’s record – with a note or two in the database about what is in the note pages.       That preserves them for all time, and it’s a lot handier than the “pile of old legal pads” filing system that a lot of us have used.

If this column seems a bit elementary, I’m fine with that; providing great customer service is often elementary. That doesn’t mean it happens often enough. If you resemble this remark, maybe it’s time to revise some things.

The Most Valuable Commodity You Can Market

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From time to time, I enjoy engaging practiced salespeople and sales managers in conversation about selling on a deeper level. One such conversation that happened this week centered around the question, “what is the most valuable quality salespeople can bring to the table?” Answers ranged from “product knowledge” to “likeability” to “good communication,” and on into “expert questioning” before one of the salespeople hit the correct answer – the answer that trumps all of the above.

That answer is trustworthiness. The reason it is the trump card is simple; if the customer doesn’t believe what you say, it doesn’t matter how well you know your subject matter, and if the customer doesn’t trust you, they won’t answer questions honestly. Trust, then, is a prerequisite for all activities that center on communication – selling in particular. In that spirit, this week I’ll share a few methods for building trust with customers, but first I have to share one of the most outrageous stories of a salesperson ruining his customer’s trust in him. It’s too good a story not to share.

It seems that this salesperson was employed by a cleaning company that was providing janitorial services to a group of hospitals. The hospital management liked him a lot, and liked the service provided. They believed in him and the quality and integrity of his company. Then came a charity golf tournament.

As a friend of mine (who happened to be in the same fivesome as this salesperson) explained, “It was a typical five-man scramble; one guy would hit into the sand, one into the woods, one way into the rough, one guy would dunk a ball and one would get stuck in a tree somewhere (sounds like my own lack of a golf game wouldn’t have been out of place – but I digress). The salesman would hit first on each hole, then drive the cart down the fairway to ‘spot’ for the team. When the rest of the group had hit and went down the fairway, a ball would have magically appeared in the middle of the fairway with the salesman explaining that one of the shots ‘kicked’ into the fairway.” Yep – he was cheating in a charity golf tournament. But wait – it gets better.

It seems that the key decision maker for the hospital account was also in this same fivesome, and what was happening wasn’t escaping him. In fact, immediately after the 18th hole, the manager left in disgust, skipping the post-tournament party. Slick Salesman wasn’t done, however. He did the same thing a month later – at a tournament sponsored by the hospital. After getting a feel for this guy’s character, the hospital management began watching everything that the janitorial company did, and lo and behold, they found bad billing, cleaning that was supposed to be done that wasn’t, and other problems. Long story short, the salesman is no longer employed by the company, and the company no longer has the account. The moral of the story? Some salespeople believe that trust is solely generated by work habits and activities; the truth is that anything you do that shows a lack of integrity can ruin your trust. In that spirit, here are some ways that you can build trust with your customers:

Do what you say, and say what you will do: This is so painfully obvious that I hate to even say it, but I encounter salespeople on a daily basis who think nothing of not fulfilling promises in a timely fashion. When you make a promise to a customer, they remember it. When you fail to fulfill that promise, they remember it FOREVER. It’s not that tough; only promise what you can actually do, then DO IT.

Do the right thing, even when you think no one is looking: Someone once said that this was the very definition of integrity. Sometimes, you’ll be tempted to behave in ways that you would never think of doing if you knew a customer was watching; guess what? They might be. Several years ago, I was in Minneapolis making calls with a salesperson as a favor to a branch manager of the company I worked for. On our second call, the customer got a look at my salesman and immediately threw us out. It turns out that, the night before, the salesman had been out at a bar, got a few drinks in him, and started a conflict with another patron over a particular seat at the bar. Huge stuff, right? Well, it turned out to be. The other patron turned out to be the person he wanted to sell to the next morning. Behave like a jackass in public at your own peril; you never know who is watching.

Keep your big yap shut when it needs to be: These days, customer confidentiality is huge. Salespeople are regularly trusted with company secrets of their customers. Unfortunately, many salespeople are “Instant babbler, just add beer.” I’ve seen salespeople who think nothing of telling me incredibly confidential details about their customers – stuff that their customers would probably have a heart attack if they knew the salesperson was repeating indiscriminately. If you want to continue to have your customers confide in you, you must respect and value that confidence by keeping it.

Respect your customer’s boundaries: Sometimes, there are pieces of information that your customer doesn’t want to give, or places they are unwilling to take you. If that’s the case, consider it a measure of the increasing bond of trust when your customer eventually gives you those pieces of information or takes you those places. Continue pressing immediately for them and your customer will back off.

Of course, because trust is such a huge subject, there are many more ways to build it. However, this has hopefully given you some things to look for in conducting yourself and building trust in your customer base.