How to Bridge the AI Gap: From Artificial to Authentic

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Good morning and welcome to selling power 3.0. I'm Sheri Levitin and I'm going to be talking today about how to bridge the AI gap. But first and foremost, I want to thank Gerhardt and selling Power 3.0 for putting together such an amazing high caliber list of speakers. I'm honored to be among them. I, I just got back from both Dreamforce and Saster and of course all anyone's talking about today is how to bridge the AI gap. So that's the talk of my keynote today.

Artificial intelligence. Here we are, we're focused and there's a race, a veritable race that passes anything we saw in the Olympics. It's a sprint towards AI. It's the gold rush of 2024 and beyond. Everyone is racing to get to this magical place. Artificial intelligence, look it up. I did. I looked up the word artificial in the dictionary and here's what I got. Lacking in natural or spontaneous quality, imitation, scam, contrived, not genuine, unnatural and bogus. And then I looked up the opposite or the antonym. What's the opposite of artificial? Well, it's genuine, it's natural, it's honest, it's sincere, it's true, and it's heartfelt.

So as we enter this race called artificial intelligence, let's be really clear on what we might be racing away from. Let's combine both heartfelt connection and all of the benefits of artificial intelligence. So here's the big secret that's hiding in plain sight. Our customers are screaming for a person, not a bot, for more connection, not more content. As Anthony Inarino says, for a soul, not a goal. In fact, research from Gartner tells us that increasingly our customers don't even want to talk to a human. They actually prefer to talking to a bot. And it's interesting because it's really dependent on generation. So what we know is that 54% of millennials would rather not talk to a human in a B2B sales buying interaction. 43% of Gen X and only 29% of Baby Boomers. Baby boomers still like chatting. Now, how about the biggest generation of buyers coming up? Gen Z? Well, I have a Gen Z son and I can assure you they don't want to ever talk to anyone, let alone buy a product. So what does this study reveal? It says that by 2030, a significant portion of buyers will avoid human interaction altogether, favoring AI driven solutions, chatbots and automated tools. But the price. The problem is they also tell us that buyers that don't interact With a human have much higher regret. So here's the question we all need to answer. My friend Brent Adamson, author of the Challenger Sales, says it best. How do we become the type of seller that our buyers want to talk to? Well, I believe there's a magical formula. That's what we're going to be focusing on in my short time with you today, and that is this. Our success as leaders and sellers is quite simply a function of AI plus human connection plus time. What are we going to do with all that extra time? The great AI tools that everyone's going to be talking about today are afford us. We are going to have more time. In the past, sellers only spent 33% of their time actually talking to a human. Think how much more time we'll have to connect and do what we do best to do just that. If we embrace the 10 Cs we need in the age of AI, I believe there are 10 skills or 10 virtues. They're coming out in my next book that we all need as salespeople and sales leaders to. To make it and to survive and thrive in a time of AI. Now, for time purposes, we're only going to have an opportunity to look at three of those today. In my mind, they're three of the most important. We're also going to give you actual case studies and tools. So leaders, you can take these back to your teams and sellers, you can engage with them so that you can get more deals and connect better with your customers. So let's go ahead and look at the 10 skills needed. And again, we are going to highlight three today. These are the 10 Cs or skills needed in a time of a. The end. In the time of AI, we need to be creative connectors. Understand that our future relies in being able to do everything ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, and Claude can't do. Only a human can really connect creatively. We need to double down on our curiosity. AI is going to give us a lot of tools. It's going to give us a lot of shortcuts. But are we curious enough to dig deeper with the actual consumer? And then finally today we're going to talk about how to be compelling. Oh my God. AI bots. They're efficient, but I don't know about you, they're a little boring. They lack emotion, they lack excitement. So let's go ahead and talk about those three and begin with creative connector. Now, what do I mean when I say creative connector? Well, let's face it, breaking through to inboxes Today, writing emails, networking, talking about who we are, what we do, even once we've booked the first call. And we're trying to keep people interested. We've got to be creative about how we connect. We can't connect the way we used to. And yet a lot of salespeople are still old school connectors and they're not very creative. They're just sending out automations now. To illustrate this, I want to share a story with you of a great salesperson named Sean. He was such a creative connector. He sold me a car during the pandemic. I made a video about it and it went a little viral. Over 15 million views. So I think it really struck a chord with people about what it means today to be a creative connector. And then I'm going to show you how to bring this concept into your sales teams. But let's go ahead and look at that video now called the Pandemic Porsche.

So some people bought Pandemic puppies, decided to buy a Pandemic Porsche. I'm in park city and there's two Porsche dealerships in town. There's one that's 45 minutes away, the other is two hours away. So I do what everybody does. I start out and I get on the website and I look at the different cars. I call the guy 45 minutes away. I said, hey, can you send me some information on these three cars that are in your lot? He says, oh, you got to come down and test drive it. I said, I'm not coming down. We're in the middle of a pandemic. Can you just send me the information? He's giving me all this crap and says I got to come in. So I don't. So then I call the second dealership. I get this guy Sean. I said, hey, Sean, can you send me some information on these three cars? Well, he not only sends me all the information, then he says, why don't we get on a zoom call and you know, we can design the exact car and color you want in case we don't have that in the shop. I thought, okay, because I was looking for white with beige interior, very unusual. So we go online and we're doing it together on a zoom call, right? I put together all the options I want and everything. And he says, ooh, that's a tough car. But I'm on it. Two days later, he connects with me on LinkedIn, starts sharing my videos. So all of these multi channels of communication, right? And then I kind of go dark because like, I'm not that Intent on buying a car, I kid you not. A few days later, I get a video text to my phone of the exact car coming off the trailer. The car trailer wrapped up like a present. And he, like, starts videotaping, and he's like, oh, look at this, look at that. And he's like, you know, if you want to come in today, we're serving chili down there. Bought the car. But here's the lesson. Too many salespeople think about the sales process instead of the buying process. And today, customers don't buy linearly. It's not like the old days. We gotta meet them where they are and use as many channels of communication we can. That's what Sean did. I got this beautiful new car, and I drove it through the lot.

So that was several years ago. And here's why this is so important. Shawn likely used predictive analytics, prospect scoring, and knew what web pages I had looked at. He had all the AI. He knew how old my car was. But here's what's more important. He had the creativity to imbue my experience with empathy and compassion. That's a creative connector. If you look here at this customer journey map, this shows you very, very clearly that, yes, he had all of the AI, but he was smart enough again to imbue my experience as a customer with human connection. What did he do? He picked up the phone and we talked on zoom, he human interaction. He got to know me, learned a little bit about my dog, right? Then he sent me a video, a personalized video. That's what eventually clinched the deal, that personal human connection. We did this exact exercise where we looked at customer journey with a little company called Microsoft, and we call it Magic moments in the Buyer's Journey. And I'm going to show you how to do it as well. Get your sales and marketing teams together and look at all of the automation that you have in your customer experience. What does it look like? Sure, you've got webinars, you've got automated emails going out, but you've got to ask yourself a really important question, and that is, where can I put the human inside the buyer's journey? Because we all know that the greatest differentiator today isn't necessarily what you do, but how we make our customers feel. So go ahead and look at that, and I'm actually going to give you an ebook so that managers, you can do this exact buyer's journey experience where you're looking at all of the touch points from the buyer's point of view that are going on and then you can work with your sales team and say, well, where can I add a magic moment of human connection? We have one customer. They're a B2C client. They do kitchens, they do kitchen improvements. And one of the things that they do is after they have a demo, they literally send their customers some oranges. It's just this human moment of connection, and it matters today. And it's what's going to differentiate you. I'll tell you another thing you can do. So many salespeople follow up and say, hey, what? We want you to come to this webinar. Or did you see the webinar? What if you gave context to the content and say, hey, earlier you shared with me that one of your challenges was this. Look at the 14 minute and 32nd part of the webinar. I think it'll really resonate with you. Again, we've got to add human connection to the entire buyer's journey. Curiosity. Only a human can show genuine curiosity. Now, curiosity has always been critical in sales. Good salespeople send a ton of emails, make cold calls, and have a very disciplined approach. But what better salespeople do is they segment their leads into tiers and realize that the higher the quality of the lead, the more personalization and relevance we need. And AI can really help us do just that. But first, let's look at the definition of curiosity, because I really love this. And this came from a famous psychologist, George Lowenstein. He says it's the cognitive and emotional state that arises when there's a gap between what we know and what we want to know. It's the feeling of deprivation or an itch to resolve uncertainty when people become aware of information they don't have but desire. Are we sellers that are truly curious, that want to know more about our customers before we ever engage on a demo with them or before we ever send an email? Well, I should hope so. You see, what happens is this becomes a key differentiator. And when we're truly curious, this helps us to dig deeper and build greater connection with our customers. Now, it used to take me hours to research clients and craft relevant emails and engage in thoughtful conversations. I always say to be a trusted advisor, you need two things, trust and advice. But it's not easy to get any of those without doing your homework first and amassing some knowledge about the person, not just the Persona. So how do we do that today? Well, first off, we need to definitely research all of the stakeholders. Now, I have a simple formula for that that I used to have to pull off of LinkedIn or LinkedIn Navigator. And now we can use prompts. And I'm just going to tell you, I call it the five levels of intimacy that we can use to research our clients. First and foremost, we want to research.

Anything that the customer has authored. So if they are active on LinkedIn and they've authored an article or perhaps been on a podcast, oh, God, you bring that up, you've got instant rapport. Because now we show that we put into effort to know who they are and what they value. Number two, we want to look at relevant connections. Hey, if I know Sally and you know Sally, we must be good. That gives me instant credibility. We want to look at articles that they've liked or engaged in. Again, we need to do our homework, and we've always needed to do that. And then number four, we want to look at what they say about themselves on their LinkedIn profile. And number five, and again, these are in order, is we want to look at maybe things like where they went to school, what football team they like. But there is an order of intimacy. And the greater the effort, naturally, researching what they care about and who their connections are, the greater that we're going to gain trust. Now, we can do that with prompts on ChatGPT makes it a lot quicker. But how about researching the company? This is where ChatGPT or Claude or any of those tools can make a huge difference. And I just want to share with you some of my favorite prompts so we can get really, really tactical here. Recently, we got an engagement with a biotech company. Now, I got to tell you, I don't know a whole lot about biotech. Now, it used to, in the old days, it would have taken me maybe three hours to learn about biotech, to learn about trends, to do all the research. I'm going to give you three quick prompts that I swear to you are going to change your life. And they're great for sellers and again, great for managers in order to train. So number one, I'm going to ask again. You can use ChatGPT, you can use Claude. There's a bunch of tools out there. But what I'm going to do is say, and the prompts are important. Okay, crap in, crap out. I'm going to say list three trends and corresponding stats affecting biotech today. I might even start with what is biotech? But that's the first thing I wanted to know. Now, I got all kinds of crazy answers that were really exciting. I got answers about advances in gene editing and CRISPR AI and machine learning, sustainability and green biotechnology. See what's happening? I'm going to look smarter and smarter when I finally engage with my customers. Then I'm going to say what challenges do these tens do these trends create for biotech companies? Bang. I'm gonna get all of the generic pain points again. When I get on the call and do discovery, I'm gonna dig a lot deeper and then I'm gonna even ask it. But I wanna check what are five discovery questions I should ask being that I'm a training company to uncover challenges that my company can solve. Oh my God. Did I get some very specific answers now again you want to check them. So but this is going to help us really expedite our pre call planning process. But here's what really great sellers do, really great curious sellers, once they get that information, they get on a phone with their customer and they say, hey, I learned such and such about biotech. I'm curious, how is that affecting you? You want to dig deeper and deeper and deeper. We have a proprietary framework at Leviton Group that I want to share with you and we tell salespeople to ask what I call skin, bone, heart and connective tissue questions. And I'm going to go ahead and give you access to that ebook. Right now. Between this ebook and the prompts I've just given you, your salespeople, or if you're a seller, are going to dig much deeper and have much better discovery calls and, and much greater ability to pre call plan. In fact, we're also giving you the Buyer's journey ebook so you can do that exercise with your teams. My goal is to help you bridge the AI gap.

Now that we're a curious connector, now that we've used our curiosity to dig deeper, to have better discovery conversations and to show our expertise, how do we become compelling? How do we show value? How do we differentiate our offer? How do we do demos so that we're keeping the attention and creating urgency for our customers? Remember, ChatGPT and AI can't in and of itself really be compelling. We're going to get a lot of stats, we're going to get a lot of data, we're going to get a lot of charts. But what we do with that data and with that chart matters. And the best way to be compelling is knowing what that data means and how to put it into a powerful story. Now there's framework sellers need to learn and marketing departments in order to tell compelling stories. So let me start with a story about a gentleman here named Aaron Now, I had a chance several years back to appear as a sales coach on a reality show. Think Shark Tank with heart. My job was to coach the entrepreneurs to do their pitches effectively. Now, this here is one of the contestants, Aaron, who had built an amazing app to fight opioid addiction. And in fact, he already had a lot of customers and had some interesting charts and graphs on how it really helped fight opioid addiction by using an app and not having to go to a school or a class in person. Problem was, he wasn't able to get funding. And that's when I said to him, aaron, I just need to know why. Why did you leave your good engineering job to build this app? And he said, well, I'll tell you. My grandfather was an addict. And on his deathbed, he asked my father, a doctor, if he would do one thing for him. Donate 80% of his practice to helping his brothers and sisters in NA and AA to fight opioid addiction. Aaron said, and so he did.

And then his whole demeanor changed and he said, and then two years ago, my own brother, my father's son, died of an overdose. And that's when I decided I was going to dedicate my entire life to fighting opioid addiction.

I looked at Aaron and I said, erin, I need you to tell that story to the sharks. Well, before you ever show them the data and the statistics, he says, but I have all these facts and figures and charts. I said, aaron, I need you to trust me. Well, 20 minutes later, he went in front of the sharks, and for the first time ever, the biggest shark, the negative one, said, I'm in a quarter million. And everybody else followed suit. There was not a dry eye in the house. In fact, the cameramen were teary eyed. Why? Because here's the deal. Aaron had a great product, he had a great business model, he even had a great presentation. But what he didn't have was a powerful story. And the story got him the funding. And so I tell you this because we're going to be able to get great data. But are we telling stories with that data to bring our customers in? Because here's the hard truth, ladies and gentlemen, we are in a time of fake facts. We are in a time of low trust, particularly in a time of AI. And what we know is 92% of buyers prefer to hear about brands through a story. But here's the really compelling statistic. 67% of buyers trust customers success stories more than product specifications or data.

Are we telling powerful stories or are we just claiming ROIs that may feel like fake news. We know people believe stories more than facts, and to tell a good story, first and foremost, sellers need to be compelling.

So as we wrap up and talk about three of the 10 Cs that sellers of the future need, let's go ahead really quickly and look at some quick do's and don'ts for bridging the AI gap. Number one, I'm going to invite you to experiment with AI. Continuously test and iterate on how you use AI. It's takes a while. You're going to have to play with the prompts. You're going to have to experiment with different applications and pretty soon you'll get more and more fluid. Here's the most important thing I've found. Integrate AI into your daily workflow. Think about what are you already doing. Whether it's writing emails, doing research, doing a discovery. I can tell you as a training company, I use it to prepare use cases and to create very customized training. Integrate it into your workflow. It's going to take a little longer at first, but it's going to save you a lot of time in the long run. It's pretty amazing. Leverage AI for creative problem solving. Not just for routine tasks, but for brainstorming. Ask it. Give me five to seven crazy ideas about this. Most importantly, combine AI with human expertise. I've had many situations where I relied on AI entirely without looking at the response. And we need to always keep the human involved and stay open to learning and refinement. AI is constantly evolving and you should too. You should try new tools. Keep learning and adjusting your approach as new AI capabilities emerge. Now let's look at some really quick don'ts. Please don't input poor quality data. Ensure your data is clean and relevant. Remember, garbage in, garbage out. Don't give up after one try. Experiment with different prompts. I'm sure you're going to learn a lot from a lot of the speakers about different prompts that you can use. Organizations Please don't automate inefficient processes. All that's going to do is expedite inefficiencies. So you got to make sure that your sales processes and your marketing processes are sound and and that they work well before automating them or using AI. And then finally I'm going to say it again. Don't neglect human AI. Don't neglect human connection. AI can streamline tasks. Building real relationships and trust is really something only a human can do. And that's what we need to spend our time doing. So as we wrap up and talk about those skills that only humans possess, the ability to creatively connect, to be truly curious and dig deeper, and of course, to be compelling, to tell compelling stories. I want to end with this story. I live in Park City, Utah. It's a small resort town. And once a year, it gets huge because we have a little thing called the Sundance Film festival here, where 40 to 60,000 people descend on our tiny town. And one evening during the festival, I saw a line of over 100 people outside of my favorite restaurant called Firewood. Well, I asked the mater d who's a friend of mine, I said, mona, I'm just curious. How in the world are you going to serve all of these people? You've only got one chef, Pierre. She said, oh, that's easy. During high volume times, we just bring in more sous chefs. Well, at that moment, I had a big insight that I want to share with you. You see, sous chefs are a little like AI. They do repetitive tasks. They chop the onions, they cut the carrots. They save a lot of time. But you see only Pierre, only Pierre, the master chef can come out to our table, ask me how my aging parents are doing, inquire about my son's college. Only Pierre can be the opposite of artificial. Only Pierre can be a human.

Only a master chef can put the love in the food. I am looking out at virtually a group of master chefs. You're going to be able to save time, do work faster, more efficiently, do work better. You're going to have your time back. What's more important? We can always make more money, but we can't make more time. But what you do with that time matters. Make good use of it. Thank you.