Jason M. Lemkin explains how to train AI as a sales rep: start with a script that already works with real customers, feed it live CRM data from Salesforce or HubSpot, then monitor and refine daily for a month. AI can't sell what you can't sell yourself.
Chapters
And the real way, if I just summarize it, and we'll talk a lot about it at this event, here's the other mistake folks make. If you want— and Amelia makes this a lot of times on our live webinars, our AI Workshop Wednesday on Wednesday— here's the captain obvious thing for any AI SDR, BDR, even AEs as we do more of them, CSMs. First, you gotta have it work in the real world with humans, then you tell the AI what worked. There's no magical prompt, okay? The prompt is, here's the script that I use with a customer that I closed, then you iterate that prompt and then you hook it up to data like Salesforce or HubSpot or other sources of data or Snowflake, and then you have it ingest the data to keep working with that prompt to make it better. It's not that complicated. Okay. So many folks are like, oh, well, SaaSers' AI works because you have inbound leads. I'm like, well, everyone has some inbound leads or it's just you, you've got the only— as long as you closed any customers, You can train the AI to be almost as good as you and work 24/7. It's that simple. I have no inbound leads. I've never done outbound, but I'm going to buy a tool and turn it on. I'm going to make millions. Like, how the eff would that work? And like, so you just figure out what works in the real world and then train the AI to just do it again and again and again with more and more and more data. And then read every email it sends, read every response it ingests. And you do it every day for about a month, and then the mistakes start to go away and they become recurring and it gets trained on better, more and more. It's not that complicated, but it's— you've got to sell it just like anything. Going back to being a disaster, if you can't sell it yourself, the AI can't sell it for you. It's that simple.
