How to lose clients with ChatGPT and how to gain them
With the release of ChatGPT-4, the tech has never been more powerful and businesses are continuing to embrace the possibilities it offers and figure out how best to use it.
As an AI language model, ChatGPT is capable of understanding and generating human-like responses to a variety of queries, however, there are certain things that the tech simply cannot do, and one of those things is replacing the necessary and unique set of skills of salespeople that AI simply cannot replicate.
That sentence above was written by ChatGPT itself when asked what strengths and limitations it has in sales. In fact, it lists several factors on its own strengths and weaknesses:
Strengths:
- Fast and Accurate Information Retrieval: ChatGPT can quickly and accurately retrieve information from vast amounts of data and provide relevant information to salespeople to support their sales efforts.
- Personalization: It can analyze customer data and tailor responses to specific customer needs, providing personalized recommendations and solutions.
- Availability: ChatGPT can operate 24/7, providing customers with immediate support and responses, even outside of traditional business hours.
- Scalability: The AI tool can handle an unlimited number of interactions simultaneously, making it ideal for businesses with large customer bases.
- Cost-Effective: It can help reduce operational costs by automating repetitive tasks, allowing salespeople to focus on more complex sales tasks.
Limitations:
- Lack of Emotional Intelligence: ChatGPT lacks emotional intelligence and cannot read body language or tone of voice, which are essential for building trust and relationships with customers.
- Inability to Build Rapport: The AI tool cannot build rapport with customers in the same way that human salespeople can, which can impact the ability to close deals and build long-term relationships.
- Inflexibility: It operates based on pre-programmed algorithms and cannot adapt to unexpected or unique situations, limiting its ability to provide creative solutions to sales challenges.
- Limited Understanding of Context: ChatGPT cannot fully understand the context of a sales conversation, which can lead to misunderstandings and incorrect responses to customer enquiries.
- Security Risks: It may also pose security risks, as it may store sensitive customer data that could be vulnerable to cyberattacks.
While ChatGPT has several strengths that can support the sales process, it also has several limitations that make it unable to replace human salespeople completely. Businesses need to strike a balance between using AI technology to enhance their sales processes while maintaining a human touch to build trust and relationships with customers.
How businesses have successfully used AI and automation
As mentioned in the list above, some businesses have already started using ChatGPT to make their sales process more efficient. Here are some ways your business can explore utilising this tool:
- Customer service (not sales / leads) and internal chatbots: Chatbots powered by ChatGPT can handle basic customer or employee inquiries and provide automated assistance, freeing up the representatives to handle more complex issues
- Sales support: ChatGPT have been used to assist sales teams by providing product information and handling basic customer inquiries.
- Language translation: For companies that operate globally, the AI tool has been used to translate communications in real-time, making it easier for teams to collaborate and communicate with customers and partners around the world.
- Personal assistants: Some businesses have created virtual personal assistants powered by ChatGPT to help employees manage their schedules, organize their tasks
- Fraud detection: by analyzing large amounts of data, the AI can detect fraudulent activity
- Data analysis: ChatGPT has been used to analyze large amounts of data and generate insights that can inform business decisions and strategies.
- Personalized marketing: By analyzing customer data and preferences, ChatGPT can help businesses create personalized marketing campaigns that may be more likely to resonate with the target audience
When businesses have failed using AI
The most common mistake, or the fundamental error, businesses make when adopting AI is assuming it is the silver bullet or the ‘fix’ for current issues they have.
In a lot of those scenarios I’ve witnessed, businesses who don’t have an actual sales process or understand how to ‘do sales’ have tried to use AI to fill the gap. Some have used ChatGPT to try to write sales scripts or even answer emails, and in extreme cases the move has lost credibility and rapport with their clients but more commonly, the biggest issue is those sales scripts or emails are often not strategically part of a process and try to ‘sell in one go’ and don’t utilise one of the most powerful tools – the human connection. Worse, a few companies have untrained sales teams using these ‘templates’, causing more damage that could take longer to recover from.
Some companies also don’t have strong adoption or utilisation of their CRM and again, attempt to fix that issue with ChatGPT – having it suggest best approaches.
So while ChatGPT will help make parts of a process more efficient, businesses still require 1) a good sales process, 2) actual sales skills and 3) someone within the business to drive and champion sales.
Businesses are always aiming to be more cost-effective and efficient, and the appeal of tools like ChatGPT to help achieve more of that is strong, however businesses need to understand that at least for the near future, those three key requirements cannot and should not be replaced by AI, but enhanced by it.
If you’re considering using some tech for sales, defining a sales process your tech can support, or simply looking at how to better use your CRM, I’d love to have chat!
