CEO of Novus Laurus. Business and transformation strategist. Investor in digital technology, film and food.
Abel Mitja Varela
If you haven’t caught the buzz around ChatGPT yet, you will now. While there are all sorts of ongoing experiments and opinions, using technologies like ChatGPT as a sales bot is a very real possibility for businesses. I asked ChatGPT to sell me a DSLR camera, and it gave me a list of cameras, their specs, price ranges, and even a limited discount. Then I asked about a certain model and asked it to sell it to me with a specific tone. It actually cross-sold and negotiated with me within preset boundaries using Texan phrases. Without any further training from me, ChatGPT knew the camera capabilities, specs, prices and was also able to negotiate and soften the deal.
I found that ChatGPT outperforms an average seller. I’ve written before about what a sales bot can do for your sales and how inevitable this sales revolution will be. And with AI tools, companies will have no trouble training or retaining salespeople. OpenAI has already trained ChatGPT on much of what is available on the web. If there’s any public material about something, ChatGPT already knows about it.
But there are some limitations. For example, it does not give you an opinion about people or does not know any data later 2021. If ChatGPT’s pre-training doesn’t cover your products and services, you can train it with your customer data. To verify and facilitate adoption by the retail, automotive, travel, finance, consumer goods, healthcare, and communications industries, I’ve found that all you need to do is open the tool and chat.
In the meantime, first adopters can enjoy a spike in traffic as both the merely curious and the actual customers try out chat sales on your digital presence. This could be the chance to stay one step ahead of the competition.
Some considerations for business leaders
Whether you let AI sales bots interact with visitors from your search box or on a specific product page, or have them act as brand ambassadors in the voice of your brand, you want to carefully initiate the use of new technology. In OpenAI’s charter, they declare their intent to implement ChatGPT for the benefit of all and to avoid harming humanity, but you’ll want to carefully define what discounts or freebie benefits it can dangle and how it provides information to the visitor ranks.
I particularly recommend using the API to enhance visitor input to ChatGPT with dynamically and contextually added visitor demographics, clickstream/search/purchase history. I easily asked ChatGPT to gauge need, budget and urgency and tailor the response to offer cross-sells and discounts based on those visitor responses.
While ChatGPT can provide links, it’s a good idea to limit it to only links within your domain. It will probably be scary to have technology negotiate prices or other benefits on your behalf, but I’ve found that it can be limited to preset boundaries. While it won’t be easy to feed contextual features and affinities of visitors, it is possible. From there it’s a small step further to enter individual visitor data such as click stream or even sales history to further contextualize the chat.
Even with all this in mind, it’s important to remember that tools like ChatGPT can have that too limitssuch as providing incorrect information, lengthy or formal answers, and information that lacks details.
Predictions
With all this in mind, I think the business world will soon change in the following ways.
• Preference for chatting with bots: Even as bots seem to become more human, I think customers will prefer the unemotional and down-to-earth chat of a bot over dialogue with a human. Some customers expect to be able to negotiate more freely with a bot. This could lead to a dominance of sales bots in many companies.
• Personal negotiation bots: It’s a short jump from sales bots to the emergence of bots dedicated to negotiating on behalf of a customer. Imagine deploying a personal negotiation bot to alert you only when a deal reaches a pre-specified optimal range.
• E-commerce requirements: I think the bandwidth required to have multiple simultaneous customer contacts with sales bots on each product page will dramatically increase. Sales paths that go through sales bots to payment information, order verification and confirmation need to be analysed, improved and secured. However, sales bots will likely allow instant price and discount changes in e-commerce and replace seasonal and other prices that require long-term planning and development.
• Sales Jobs: The uncertainty of hiring, training and nurturing a sales force can be replaced by the consistency of sales bots. All remaining sales jobs may experience a significant reduction in commission rates. In some cases, they can be drastically increased based on the difficulty of the sale. I think there will be more demand for bot trainers and bot prompts than field workers.
• Marketing: I predict that generating collateral for the various stages of the marketing funnel will remain the single marketing task. Sales bots can be used to shorten the path of interested people down through comparison, intent, and purchase stages.
• AI proliferation: As AI technology gets better and sees more applications, it can enable many previously impossible tasks and metrics. Imagine a company that is aware of inventory, production forecasts and customer demand, while being able to respond wholesale or assortment immediately to discrete and individual sales agreements. With promptable sales bots, this is within reach.
With technology like ChatGPT, sales bots are here, and I believe they will revolutionize the business world in the coming years.
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