Wednesday, November 30, 2022. ChatGPT hit the mainstream, and the world went crazy. Again.
“I felt a tingling sensation in my chest—the kind you get when you realize you’re witnessing a major historical event. It is not just a chatbot. It is a portal to a future where we no longer have to do the ‘boring’ work of thinking.” — Kevin Roose (The New York Times, December 5, 2022)
The fear of COVID had faded, but the power struggle between leadership and a remote workforce was in full swing. For the knowledge workers, the ones who used to stand in front of our photocopiers, the office was now a commute away. In this chaos, AI arrived. It wasn’t just fuel for the fire; for the salesperson, it was the most significant tool to arrive since Act! customer relationship management platform in 1987.
As a matter of fact, it is this writer’s opinion that the role best positioned to benefit the most from the large learning model (LLM) is the salesperson. Notice I didn’t say sales manager, team, or company. The LLM is perfect for the individual selling professional regardless of experience, product, or service.
The LLM is a type of AI that works best with language. Without getting too technical, something AI experts and consultants excel at doing, the LLM predicts words, understands context, and generates text.
The second ‘L’ stands for Language. That is our arena. We don’t move boxes; we move people with words. We use language to stir imagination and call for action. If you are in sales, you are already a ‘Language Model.’ The AI just gives you an “engine.”
How do I start using the large language model? Three steps:
- Buy it.
- Use it.
- Double down. Use it for everything.
Buy it. Spend the 20 bucks.
Forgo the Starbucks, Dunkin, that In-N-Out, four by four Animal Style, or Micky D’s breakfast egg thing and sign up for an LLM (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude). Today. Now.
Think about it like this: It comes to five bucks a week for a 24/7 assistant. After 30 days of using one, you will know.
My personal recommendation (and I’ve used an LLM since December 1, 2022), for the consummate selling professional, is ChatGPT. If you want one recommendation to stay away from, it would be Microsoft’s Copilot, which can feel like a neutered corporate version of an LLM. Point of interest: I asked each of the current big LLMs (OpenAi, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini) for a recommendation on the best fit for salespeople, and each one picked ChatGPT. So there’s that.
Controversial tip. Don’t engage any free versions, especially the ones that come with your company’s software stack, unless you’re dictated to use it. The free ones are worth what you pay for, and mandates are restrictive.
Use it. Learn the LLM.
This is where it gets good. Really good.
An LLM is learned, not taught. In this world, the way you talk to the machine is called a prompt. Don’t let the tech-speak intimidate you. A prompt is simply an instruction. Think of it as the brief you give a junior assistant before they start a task. If the brief is lazy, the work is lazy.
When you first get in, one shift in your thinking is you are not searching with the LLM, you are asking the LLM for help, like a teacher. After a few conversations, you start teaching the LLM how to work for you, like an assistant.
A simple way to begin is to stop treating the first prompt like a sacred event. Open the LLM and tell it who you are.
“I’m a sales rep for an office technology company in Michigan. I’ve been doing this for six years. We sell copiers, print services, and workflow tools. I have a monthly quota. I want help preparing for calls, cleaning up my notes, writing follow-up emails, and getting better at discovery. Show me five ways you can help me this week.”
This is how to start. Here are a few quick suggestions and one-line entries to take some friction out of the day:
- A cleaner follow-up email.
- Level 1: “Just had a meeting with ABC. Here are my meeting notes and a draft follow-up email. Help me write a great email.”
- A better summary of a rambling meeting.
- Level 1: “Here are the notes/transcripts from the meeting with ABC I just held. Summarize and outline action items.”
- A fast role-play before a sales call.
- Level 1: “I’m meeting the president of ABC at 1:00. What should I cover? Let’s role play. I’ll be the president.”
Enough of these small saves, and more time magically appears. But this is just the beginning.
Double down. Ask More.
This is the real power of a fully operational, AI-enabled selling professional: Use the greatest selling tool in history, not as a vending machine, but as an experience-maker. Ask more questions.
Keep going. Go deeper. Treat the LLM like a prospect and keep asking questions to get to the second level. From the LLM as a tool to your operating system
The second level isn’t about better grammar; it’s about better intelligence. Here are the beginning-level conversation starters, with turbocharged, next-level enhancements:
- A cleaner follow-up email.
- Level 1: “Just had a meeting with ABC. Here are my meeting notes and a draft follow-up email. Help me write a great email.”
- Level 2: “Based on these notes, identify the one ’emotional hook’ the prospect mentioned. Use that to lead the email. Then, rewrite the draft to remove all ‘vendor-speak.’ Make it sound like a peer-to-peer memo, not a sales pitch.”
- A better summary of a rambling meeting.
- Level 1: “Here are the notes/transcripts from the meeting with ABC I just held. Summarize and outline action items.”
- Level 2 (The Strategy): “Review the transcript for hidden objections—times where the prospect hesitated or went quiet. List the action items, but also list three questions I forgot to ask that I need to address in the next call to keep the deal moving.”
- A fast role-play before a sales call.
- Level 1: “I’m meeting the president of ABC at 1:00. What should I cover? Let’s role-play. I’ll be the president.”
- Level 2 (The Strategy): “You are the president of ABC. You are notoriously protective of your time and skeptical of long-term contracts. Start the role-play by telling me you only have five minutes and asking why this shouldn’t just be handled by your procurement manager. Push back hard on my ROI claims.”
In sales, the most expensive thing you can own is a shallow conversation. The same is true for AI. When your prompts are basic, your strategy will be basic. When you prompt deeper, you aren’t just getting better text, you’re getting a better version of your own sales intuition.
Sidebar: Three Words About Security
Use common sense.
Do not paste in payroll files, bank information, medical records, confidential contracts, customer pricing sheets, or anything else that would ruin your week if it leaked. If your employer has a policy, know it. If you are on company systems, follow it. If a piece of information would make you sweat if it showed up on the wrong screen, keep it out.
A lot of the security talk gets goofy fast. Asking an LLM to clean up an email draft is not the same thing as handing over the nuclear codes. Most people know the difference. The Postcard Rule applies: Don’t put anything into a prompt that you wouldn’t be comfortable writing on the back of a postcard and sending through the mail.
Back to the phrase itself, “AI expert.”
Maybe this title will mean something in a few years. Right now, it is loose. Most of what passes for expertise today is marketing, fear mongering, curiosity, experimentation, and confidence, sometimes in a useful order, sometimes not.
The people getting the most out of LLMs are not the loudest ones. It is the ones who use LLMs every day for the boring stuff. They find out where the tool helps, where it falls on its face, and how to ask a better question tomorrow than they asked today—on their own.
P.S. Super-fantastic Pro-Tip: Transferable skills
If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it twice: “If you can sell copiers, you can sell everything.”
Working with an LLM will teach you to clarify what you mean. It teaches you to notice vagueness. It teaches you that the quality of the answer is tied, more often than not, to the quality of the question. That habit carries into sales, your next job, writing, parenting, planning, learning, and nearly every other part of adult life, where the real struggle is figuring out what you are actually trying to say.
So no, there are no real AI experts yet. There are only power users. Which one are you going to be?
AI Columnist Greg Walters
About the columnist: Greg Walters is a writer, analyst, speaker, and longtime technology operator who has led managed print and IT initiatives for several organizations. He is a founding member (and past president) of the Managed Print Services Association (MPSA) and creator of The Death of the Copier blog. Walters also co-founded the Cricket Continuum, which works to convert office technology dealers into robotics resellers and service partners. Future columns will continue to focus on artificial intelligence in the copier dealer community. If you have curiosity about the subject, drop us a line, and we’ll see if we can come up with something.
