Sales 2.0

Send Your Proposals to the DEA, Part 2

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In my last post I was ranting about how I hate proposals.

My preferred solution to this is not developing proposals at all. I highly recommend not spending your time generating beautiful documents for every person that says, “send me a proposal”. It’s a surefire way to eliminate your prospecting time and have a sick pipeline.

However, if you have situations where you have to generate a proposal, or a part of a proposal, consider the remaining two options from The 4-Hour Workweek: Delegate and Automate.

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Send Your Proposals to the DEA

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In general, I think “proposals suck!”

I was reminded of my (bad) attitude to proposals again a few weeks ago when I was co-opted into developing one. This one was of the typical kind that I have seen over three decades of working in B2B services companies. The kind that takes a salesperson, plus other members of the team, days to develop. The kind that takes a salesperson away from selling for a couple of days and turns them into some kind of Word (or PowerPoint) jockey, trying to find the perfect paragraph spacing or font.

My experience of this proposal development process (at several companies) has been one of colleagues obsessing over producing the perfect document where our business’s credentials shine so brightly and our layout and formatting are so perfect that the prospect will just sign on the dotted line as soon as they’ve read it…and yet, somehow, consistently, they don’t!

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Removing some sales drudgery with AI

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Wharton professor Ethan Mollick describes ChatGPT as an “intern”. This seems like one of the best analogies so far for ChatGPT, especially when you are considering what work to give it, and what work not to give it.

One of the areas of complex sales that I have seen soak up tons of time from entrepreneurs and senior salespeople over my years is writing proposals. And sad to say, not all these beautiful proposal documents ended up closing big deals.

Now that we all have this new “intern” that can help with the proposal writing work. But as with all things AI at the moment there are some caveats. I don’t think AI is at the point yet for large deals where you should just have your “intern” write the whole proposal but used carefully I think ChatGPT can save you time on this task that few people savor.

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Call low

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I used to do it.

I would get to the office extra early and I’d start dialing before 8AM.

I wanted to become a rock star sales dude and I was mentored by my boss that the trick was to call CIOs (Chief Information Officers) early in the morning.

At that time of day, the stressed out CIO would be in the office but his assistant would still be fighting their way through the New York subway.

Ingenious! [Read more…]

AI in Sales: Freeing up sellers to be more human

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This is number 9 in a series of interviews I am conducting with subject matter experts and practitioners in the sales profession. I am examining where we are today with AI in sales and where we are going.

This interview is with Miro Putkonen and Anton Dobrzhanskiy of Epicbrief. Epicbrief’s mission is to make human work in sales more meaningful and valuable. Here’s a summary of our conversation and below this summary is the full transcript of our interview.

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Getting back to our roots

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I believe we are at another inflection point in the evolution of professional selling.

The last decade, or so, has been the era of bringing science to sales, or certainly mathematics. The advent of more powerful computing and the increase in investment in sales technology has produced an ocean of data ready for those of us who love to crunch numbers. Good stuff in my opinion. Things that can measured, get changed, and hence improved. But the side effect of all this technology seems to have been a huge increase in the volume of spammy emails that salespeople have generated and aimed at buyer’s inboxes.

Now AI is upon us and how to use AI is a next big driver in the evolution of professional sales.

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