One of the more popular features in the SellingBrew Playbook is our Help Desk, where subscribers can send in questions about the specific sales issues they’re wrestling with, the organizational problems they’re running into, and even the new initiatives they’re thinking about pursuing next.
Our research team will then work to provide straight answers and practical advice, based on what we’re seeing and hearing about what actually works in other commercial sales environments. No theory for theory’s sake. No vendor hype. No hallucinations. Just frank info and advice about messy, real-world situations and challenges around “selling at scale.”
Recently, a Sales Ops leader submitted a question whose answer is not as obvious as it might seem to some…
Since Generative AI is really fast and pretty good at writing, couldn’t we use it to produce more specific and compelling sales pitches for our reps, without waiting on Product or MarCom to get their act together?
It’s a fair question. Because in far too many cases, the Product and Marketing teams don’t even realize that the product specs and fluffy platitudes they’ve been serving up for years are woefully lacking in today’s noisy and hypercompetitive climate. And meanwhile, sales reps are out there every day, struggling to explain why your offerings are better than the alternatives, using arguments, messages, and materials that are shallow, incomplete, inconsistent, and just plain weak.
As such, the idea of using Generative AI to dramatically accelerate the production of stronger, more tailored sales pitches is extremely compelling. And I have to say, there are some very real positives about it…
Generative AI is great at following basic instructions to very quickly produce something that at least resembles a coherent story or argument. In the process, it can also suggest various ways to frame problems and talk about business impacts, highlight key differentiators, organize talking points, and even anticipate and address potential objections.
And instead of every rep having to improvise their own pitch for different opportunities, you can use AI to both tailor and standardize messaging across different customer segments, buyer roles, use cases, and competitive situations.
So yeah, there’s a whole lot of potential! But there are also some gigantic caveats that should not be overlooked or ignored…
On its own, GenAI doesn’t actually know what your customers value most. On its own, GenAI won’t understand the nuances of your target segments or the trade-offs your buyers are being forced to evaluate. And on its own, GenAI can’t know the differentiators your buyers are really willing to pay for, or to what degree.
What GenAI does have, however, is a massive amount of generalized and largely consumer-oriented information, scraped from the recesses of the public internet, and combined with an extremely sophisticated ability to predict what you want to hear while sounding like it knows exactly what it’s talking about.
It will confidently tell you what your customers care about most…even if it’s dead wrong about who your customers are in the first place.
It will authoritatively describe how your competitors stack up…even if it really has no idea who or what your buyers deem to be viable alternatives.
It will compellingly articulate why your solution delivers more value than the alternatives…even if every claim, proof point, and differentiator is entirely fictional, along with nearly every other aspect of the pitch.
And the real kicker here is that it will all sound great. Polished, professional, logical, and even quite persuasive. It’ll be the kind of thing one could easily imagine a newbie dropping into a sequence, call script, sales playbook, or enablement deck, no questions asked…even though it’s mostly Bravo Sierra.
The point is that if you’re thinking about using Generative AI in this way…and again, I believe there are tons of great reasons you should absolutely pursue it…it’s all about the raw materials you’re feeding into the machine:
- Customer research. Not guesses or anecdotes. Evidence-based insight into what different customer segments value, how buyers prioritize trade-offs, and what outcomes matter most.
- Competitive analysis. Not generic positioning statements or feature-set comparisons. A clear-eyed view of how the perceived alternatives deliver on the things that actually matter to buyers.
- Key differentiators. Not platitudes, puffery, or mere differences. An objective assessment of where, how, and by how much, your offerings are meaningfully better at delivering more of what buyers value than the alternatives.
You don’t get a pass on the homework. As the fundamental building blocks of strong sales pitches, these are the key inputs you’ll need to be able to provide. Without them, you’re just asking GenAI to hallucinate something that sounds plausible.
And that, my friends, is just asking for trouble.
Building a Better Sales Pitch
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Step-by-Step Competitive Analysis for Strategic Selling
How to use competitive analysis to identify actionable opportunities to gain strategic advantage, expose competitive gaps, provide differentiation beyond price, and reduce competitive pressures.
Exploring Valuable AI Uses Cases in Sales Ops
Some AI use cases barely deliver marginal gains, while others have massive impacts on effectiveness and results. In this session, learn how to separate the high-impact applications from the low-value distractions.
