Sales in the Age of ChatGPT: Adapt or Face Extinction
I worked on a book called "Sales Start-Up" for a couple of years. The first draft was written, and I was editing it for publication. Then, I tried ChatGPT. In less than 15 minutes, I recognized my labor of love was out-of-date and was in dire need of substantial revision.
This jarring discovery knocked me back a few steps. It dawned on me that the sales expertise I had painstakingly acquired over many years might not hold the same value in an era where AI tools are readily available.
Do you struggle to write prospecting emails? Would you like to quickly research the challenges your prospect faces when preparing for a meeting? Or maybe you need a meeting agenda or want to clean up your meeting notes so you can share them with your client. AI makes all of these easier.
Need a presentation? Or want to turn a customer success story into a case study? Maybe you want to improve your profile on LinkedIn. AI gets it done.
Do you wish you had better closing skills or could get input about solving a sales problem? Perhaps you wish you had someone to critique the email you plan to send after a client meeting. AI could be the solution.
So, back to my book — the one that went from dynamic to dinosaur. It needed a complete overhaul — but I didn’t know anything about using AI.
I decided to learn how ChatGPT worked by writing a “how-to” book for salespeople using AI tools. The book is called "The ChatGPT Sales Playbook: Revolutionizing Sales with AI" and creating it was a mind-blowing experience. The more I used AI tools, the more they convinced me they would change how we sell forever — and that AI would be an ace-up-your-sleeve strategy for sales pros who embraced it.
I have already sold through other major selling shifts, like the rise of the Internet, smartphones, and social selling, but AI is bigger. Why? Because it levels the sales playing field in a way that was once inconceivable. Now, the most inexperienced salesperson on your team has easy access to the kind of knowledge and skills it used to take sales pros years to obtain.
In this new era where AI redefines the boundaries of sales expertise, we have reached another learn-or-lag fork in the road. The best-in-class will adapt. If you read this article, I bet one of those adapters will be you.
Good learning. Good selling.
- Categories:
- Business Management - Marketing/Sales
Linda Bishop is the founder and president of Thought Transformation, a national sales and marketing consulting group helping printers and other companies achieve top-line growth through a combination of strategies, tools, training and tactics.
Her expertise includes all aspects of outbound selling and account acquisition, account retention and development, solution selling, marketing, and aligning sales processes with marketing strategies. Most recently, she published The ChatGPT Sales Playbook: Revolutionizing Sales with AI and believes AI will offer sales pros new tools for achieving revenue goals.
Before starting Thought Transformation in 2004, Linda sold commercial printing for seventeen years, working as a commission salesperson for the Atlanta division of RR Donnelley Company. She was one of the top performers in the Atlanta marketplace and had annual sales exceeding $9 million.
Linda has a BS degree in accounting from Purdue University and an MBA in marketing from Georgia State. She has written several books on sales topics, speaks nationally on sales and marketing, and has published many articles.
