🪤 AI Sales Trap
📈 New Client Contacts
🪜 Chutes and Ladders
🪤 AI Sales Trap
My LinkedIn inbox is littered with AI sales messages, ironically selling me AI lead gen. They all revolve around the premise of generating 10 to 25 qualified leads per month.
The services try to convince you that AI can replace salespeople. Just set it and forget it, and the robots will bring you a steady supply of wonderful customers you could never reach on your own.
It’s nonsense. AI sales is a trap. People buy from people. Now, more than ever.
More importantly, the moment an AI tool can act like an outbound salesperson, sales will become exponentially harder. Decision makers’ inboxes will get flooded with requests, and they’ll become even more protected and harder to reach.
The better AI play is to focus on creating space to have quality sales conversations. AI tools can help you compress the sales process in two key areas:
- Pre-Sales Research. Salespeople spend a lot of time researching companies, finding contacts, and understanding their businesses before they send their first email. Better data leads to better sales conversations.
- Sales Engagement. Salespeople need to be at the right place at the right time with the right message to generate an opportunity. Signal tracking and intent detection can pinpoint customers who are receptive to a sales call.
The more AI empowers salespeople to be human, the more opportunities you create.
📈 New Client Contacts
One of the biggest sales challenges for organizations is a loss of customer intimacy. We’ve lost touch with our customers.
To build sales resiliency, we are going back to basics and enforcing meaningful client conversations.
This is a simple KPI and behavior we use at Sticky Branding and many of our clients: Track New Client Contacts, or NCCs.
Give your salespeople, or yourself, a quota to have 5 to 15 meaningful conversations a week with prospects or centers of influence. These are phone or face-to-face meetings with people who fit into your company’s target market.
The difference between these calls and a cold call is the level of intent. To qualify as an NCC, both parties have to be interested in having a conversation.
Measurement is key to this activity. We track NCCs as a lead measure in our CRM. We use a custom field on a Call Log to create a report that shows a rolling 6 week trend of NCCs.
You can usually see a dry spell coming when a salesperson’s NCCs dip for a few weeks.
📊 One Stat to Watch
25.9%
of marketers report “AI Brain Fry,” according to the Harvard Business Review. This is mental fatigue from overdoing AI. Does this make you wonder what your marketers are really doing? 🤔
🪜 Chutes and Ladders
Chutes and Ladders, also called Snakes and Ladders, is a board game of chance. Your objective is to climb up ladders to reach the top of the board, and avoid chutes that send you downwards.
It’s an effective metaphor for how to aim your business development strategies. The people who can refer you are above your services.
For instance, a bookkeeper and a fractional CFO both work with small- and mid-sized companies. Technically, they should refer to each other, but they don’t.
The fractional CFO is the primary referrer for two reasons:
- First, they know the customer’s need first. They have the understanding of the firm and their needs, and can make recommendations to change the accounting department.
- Second, the bookkeeper is a natural referral extension to complement the CFO’s services.
The bookkeeper may see the same gap, but lacks the relationship or visibility to refer up. The referral relationship goes one way.
Developing referral partners with companies below your service threshold is like stepping on a chute. You need to climb the ladder to partners above your scope of influence.
To find referral partners above you, ask one question: Who knows about your customers’ needs first? These are the people to climb towards.
🤔 Thoughts on Today’s Issue?
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