Meet Chat:
Chad is a Believer, Husband, Father of two teenagers, and lifelong rebel and rule-breaker. He empowers sales professionals to become the best version of themselves by focusing on their mindset, skillset, and toolkit. Before launching ScaleX.ai and Salesclass.ai, Chad believed that sales were fundamentally “a numbers” game. Although he still believes frequency matters, he is now convinced that Revenue = Frequency X Competency. Chad is passionate about creating systems that empower people from all walks of life and these days you’ll find him hosting the AI for Sales Webinar and Podcast on The Sales Experts Channel and C-Suite Radio.
Let's talk about sales a little bit, specifically AI for sales. What is it and how does it help or hurt that relationship when it comes to conducting business?
Yeah, it's an accelerator. So AI for sales stands for artificial intelligence. I, in fact, wrote the book called AI For Sales, How Artificial Intelligence is Changing Sales. I put that out at the end of 2019 and there have already been more than 5000 copies sold. So it's a hot topic, as you know, as people use their Alexa device to order food and groceries. Then all kinds of AI are coming out. I think a lot of people don't realize they're using AI in a lot of cases, but it's becoming more and more prevalent. So it can help or hurt your relationships, I'll give you an example: If you use an AI bot, let's say to connect with people on LinkedIn and social media if you program that bot to be extremely cheesy, non-heartfelt, and all you care about is yourself and let's say you move from five or six requests a day to connect with people up to 50 a day. Well, now you're at 10x the amount of insincerity. Whereas if you're someone like Nick Kabuto, who I've partnered with, on the marketing side, he sends out a message that starts with a clapping emoji and it says, "Hey, I've looked at your profile, you look like a really interesting person. I'd love to truly and sincerely get to know you." And that's it. Then when he gets a reply, he'll go in on his LinkedIn, and he'll do a video and go, "Hey, I'm Nick, I'm sitting at the fire pit," or, "I'm up in the mountains skiing," or whatever it is he's doing, he'll reply back. So it can accelerate trust and social capital, or it can completely rip it apart. You just have to be careful and learn from other people who use the technology in an effective and efficient way.
What are some ways that you use AI to connect more deeply with others?
Well, revenue equals frequency times competency is what a mentor of mine taught me 20 years ago, Skip Miller, who's been training sales and sales leaders for so long. So the frequency part is easy: Do More. More emails, more voicemails, more calls, etc. The competency part takes a while. So for me early in my sales career 25 years ago, I didn't have the competency yet. I'd never been through any sales training and so AI can accelerate the pace at which you connect with people through all the different channels. It's important that as you go, that you're investing an equal amount of time in understanding what it is you're saying and how you're connecting with people. So I think what happens is that AI puts more stress on the human to human relationship, then has typically been there from a sales capacity perspective. So interesting times that we're entering in today's day and age.
So the automated connections on LinkedIn, at least the ones that I can tell, I find really annoying. But what you're saying really is you have to have a strong message that's extremely personal, or at least looks like it.
Big time. It's at the end of the day, whether I physically type a message one to one, or I do one too many, it's still a string of zeros and ones, right? It's an email, it's a LinkedIn connection request, it's a LinkedIn follow up. If...
