610: ChatGPT for Sellers: Useful Tool or More Meaningless Buzz?

Podcast Cover Image: ChatGPT for Sellers Featuring George Leith

March 15, 2023

ChatGPT is currently the most popular tool, but what do we know about the state-of-the-art language model, and how can we use it?

On this episode of the Master Sales Series, George Leith explores the latest trend, ChatGPT, an AI language model trained by OpenAI, to explain the latest advancements in natural language processing, its potential impact on society and how sellers can use it to their advantage.

ChatGPT was trained on a substantial amount of text data from the internet, enabling it to understand and generate responses to a wide range of topics and queries. Join us as we explore steps on utilizing it for your business and the risks and benefits of the cutting-edge tool.

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ChatGPT for Sellers: Useful Tool or More Meaningless Buzz?

Introduction

ChatGPT for sellers: Useful tool or more meaningless buzz? Welcome to The Conquer Local podcast. I’m your host, George Leith. In today’s edition of the master sales series, we’re going to be covering the use of ChatGPT in B2B sales. Is it a useful tool for sellers or just another buzzword? ChatGPT, also known as Generative Pre-trained Transformer, is a cutting-edge technology that uses deep learning algorithms to understand and respond to natural language. It’s being used in a variety of industries, including sales, customer service, and marketing. And some experts are touting that ChatGPT has the potential to revolutionize the way businesses interact with their customers. But not everyone is on board with this game-changing vision. Skeptics are saying it’s just a fad, the latest shiny new toy that will eventually die out. In this episode, we’ll be exploring the ins and outs to help you decide if ChatGPT is something you should be investing in for your business. So, let’s dive in!

What is ChatGPT?

The most recent and sophisticated version of ChatGPT was released to the public in November 2022. It uses deep learning algorithms to understand and respond to natural language. It was developed by OpenAI and has been used in a variety of industries. ChatGPT is a machine learning model that has been trained on a massive dataset of text. It uses this training to understand and generate human-like responses to inputs and questions. One of the main benefits is ChatGPT’s ability to generate text. This means that it can be used to write emails, create social media posts, and even write entire articles. It can also be used for natural language processing tasks such as language translation, sentiment analysis and text summarization.

When it comes to sales, ChatGPT can be used to automate repetitive tasks like answering FAQs, scheduling meetings, and crafting sales pitches, freeing up time for sales professionals to focus on more important tasks, like building relationships with clients and closing deals. ChatGPT can also be used in customer service, helping companies respond to customer inquiries more quickly and efficiently. It can also be used to generate automated responses to common customer complaints, which can save time and resources for customer service teams.

ChatGPT is not without its limitations, however. It is only as good as the data it’s been trained on, so it may not be able to understand or respond to certain inquiries. Also important to remember, it’s still a machine. In some cases, it won’t be able to understand the nuances and context of human conversations as well as a human would.

DO’S and DON’TS

So now that we’ve covered what it is, let’s talk about how to use it. We’ve developed some do’s and don’ts for B2B sales professionals looking to leverage ChatGPT at work.

Number one: DO use ChatGPT to automate repetitive tasks like scheduling meetings and answering FAQs. It can free up time for sales professionals to focus on more important tasks like building relationships with clients.

Number two: DON’T rely solely on ChatGPT to handle all of your sales interactions. It’s still a machine at the end of the day, and it may not be able to understand the nuances of human conversations as well as you can. In short, you still have a job.

Number three: DO use ChatGPT to generate automated responses to common customer complaints. This can save time and resources for your support teams.

Number four: DON’T use ChatGPT to generate responses to complex or sensitive customer inquiries. It’s important to have a warm body handle these types of situations. You wouldn’t want to lose one of your biggest accounts because a response generated by ChatGPT just didn’t fit the bill when a partnership was on the line.

Number five: DO use ChatGPT to generate personalized emails and social media posts. If you’re anything like me and you’ve drawn a blank when coming up with a post to go along with an upcoming event or work milestone you’re hoping to share to your audiences. Get the creative juices flowing with suggestions from ChatGPT. It can help increase engagement and conversions from social selling initiatives and email campaigns.

Number six: DO use ChatGPT to improve the efficiency of your sales process. It can help you respond to leads and customer inquiries more quickly saving you much-needed time and manual leg work.

Number seven: DON’T use ChatGPT to generate responses that are not in line with your brand. It’s important to maintain consistency in all of your communications so be sure to watch out for messaging or responses that veer away from your company’s intended tone and brand voice.

Finally at number eight: DON’T use ChatGPT to replace human sales professionals. It’s important to have a balance between human and machine interaction in the sales process. Both have their merits and both are integral to maintaining a scaleable, repeatable, and predictable sales process.

By The Numbers & In The News

Now that we’ve covered the ins and outs of the technology, let’s explore how it really exploded in a short time and what’s ahead for owners of the technology Open AI.

Astonishingly, ChatGPT crossed a record-breaking one million users within a week of its launch. OpenAI expects to generate $200 million in revenue from the technology by the end of 2023. And predictions that they will be able to generate a revenue of $1 billion by the end of 2024. Its been a disruption with enough magnitude that some industries have struggled to respond quickly enough.

Expectedly, it has created quite the situation for post-secondary institutions. Schools are now exploring ways to deal with plagiarism and misuse of the technology to write sophisticated essays complete with a thesis, arguments and evidence without a user needing to do any research at all. While many schools across the globe are considering how to best tackle the problem, some experts are pointing towards integration into the classroom as the only answer. Many in the academic community do acknowledge that AI isn’t going anywhere and it will only grow more sophisticated as time goes on. That suggests professors should embrace its use and adapt their coursework so students can leverage it as a tool rather than ban the use of a technology that could be difficult to detect.

Then of course there’s the job loss talk track. Some analysts credit A.I with the permanent alteration of the employment landscape. Studies estimate as much as 47 percent of U.S. jobs might be at risk. While others have a less sombre view suggesting that the expertise will merely shift. As an example, the work will transition from tasking humans with producing less complex surface writing work, graduating from listicle blogs to a more in-depth journalistic style of writing with unique angles, insights gleaned from interviewing experts, and stories produced using methods that couldn’t be accomplished by current technology stacks.

From the disruptive to the playful – actor Ryan Reynolds has even been featured alongside the technology in a recent mobile company’s holiday advertising campaign. In this video Reynolds shares out an ad script crafted by the technology, describing it as “eerie” and “mildly terrifying.”

Conclusion

Whether you’re camp robots or not, by all accounts this technology is here to stay and it appears it will only get better at its job as time goes on. But until then, businesses, sales professionals and those working in the customer service industry should at least become familiar. Get in there, test it out. See how it might be helpful in your role and use it as the tool that it is.

ChatGPT is a powerful technology that truly does have the potential to revolutionize the way businesses interact with their customers. We need to understand its limitations and use it in the appropriate context, but by using ChatGPT effectively, companies can save time, resources, and improve communication with their clients and that sounds like a win to me. If you’ve enjoyed this episode of the Master Sales Series discussing ChatGPT for sellers: Useful tool or more meaningless buzz? revisit some of our recent ones and check out:

They’re all a part of the Master Sales Training Series. Please subscribe and leave us a review. Thanks for joining us this week on the Conquer Local Podcast. My name is George Leith, I’ll see you when I see you.