You Ask, I Answer: How to Build Sales Training GPTs?

Howard asks, has anyone built a sales training custom GPT for sales teams or customer account managers? Yes, one that lots of people have. Those are not hard to build. What makes them difficult to build, though, is if they meet the criteria of how you do your sales. So it's a real simple example.

If you have, if you let's say you use impact sales as your sales methodology in your shop, you have to first get that defined and put that in a file that a GPT can then learn from and evaluate to do uh sales training. Then you have to figure out which part of impact or challenger or whoever's not methodology you're using uh you have issues with that you need to train people on, or you might have dedicated stages. So, as an example, let's take Challenger. Challenge is probably one of the most uh well-known sales frameworks. It's uh the one that a lot of people, particularly uh complex sales folks use.

And challenge is really good for um a complex sale where a prospect has time and mental bandwidth to think. So if you are selling something that requires a lot of consideration, and you know people are willing to give that consideration, challenge is a great framework. Um Challenger has six stages, right? It's uh warming, where you have established rapport. It is um reframing, where you take a common, commonly held beliefs and you reframe them as a new form of challenge.

You have rational drowning, which explains why if you don't make this change, things are gonna suck. You have emotional impact, which is what here's how it's gonna feel when you're drowning. Uh then you have new way, which is here's the general solution, and then you have our solution, our value. By the way, challenger is not substantially different from um the old uh Dan Kennedy approach, right? Problem agitation, general solution, specific solutions.

Artfully restate the problem, agitate the buyer, show a general solution. This is how you solve this problem, and then the specific solution, here's how we do it. What challenge tries to do differently is to say here's a reframe and a different way of looking at a uh a problem. You have to go through your sales team and talk to people and figure out which of the six stages of challenge. You have to use challenger, which of the six stages is the biggest problem for people.

Do they have problem with the reframe? Do they have problem with rational drowning? Do they have a problem with emotional impact? Where's the gap? And it's going to differ from person to person.

So, what I would suggest doing for building GPTs for sales training is maybe you have a GPT for each of the stages in your sales training, in your sales funnel, and put with special attention on where people fall down the most for each stage. So if you know people have trouble with warming, right? Maybe you've got a bunch of young folks on the team who did not have the same way of thinking and conversing that your target audience does, right? Does, right? So maybe you serve 55 to 65 year old people and you have a team of 25 year olds.

You're gonna have language differences, you're gonna have things that are warming differences. And so you could create a sales GPT just to teach warming. Once you do that and you break it up into these granular tasks, you will have a lot more success with custom GPTs for sales training because you're not trying to have it do do everything all at once. One of the worst things you can do when you're building any kind of AI tool is to try to have it be everything to everybody. Right, right?

Try to be the Swiss Army knife of AI training. It will not work. It'll be just a disaster. What you have to do is you have to break it down into pieces, build AI components for those pieces where uh individually, and then you build either systems or humans or both to serve the issues around those pieces. Um again, you can use that, you can do it programmatically, you can do it manually.

I would suggest for a high touch profession like sales that manual is probably the right approach, at least initially, so that people uh know that there's a human backstop, right? There's that that a person, their sales manager, their sales trainer, somebody they trust, um can validate the results, unless then this is something that is is a thing, uh, unless your team doesn't trust your manager, your sales management. And if they don't, they might be more comfortable with machine. Uh, a real simple example of this is there are sales teams where the sales leader is a jackass. Um and and they're they're uh they're they sort of that whole boiler room to scream at your team until they perform, you know, not the way we do things anymore.

In that case, a GPT and a review of the the GPT might actually be better done by a machine because the machine is not going to chew them out uh or behave inappropriately in the office. So those are all considerations uh for building sales GPTs. So make it granular. Address, build parts for each section of your sales stage, uh diagnose with a human or with another machine if the humans are problematic. And ultimately measure the performance of fit of those people to see if they are in alignment with the sales methodology you've chosen.

Last thing I'll say about this. If you don't have a sales methodology chosen, this won't work. Right? If if your salespeople are just winging it all the time, 100% of the time, this will not work. You will not get good results because the machines don't know what to calibrate against.

And neither do you. And so if you are in that situation where your salespeople are just winging it and and guessing all the time, you don't have any results now and AI won't make it better. AI is an accelerator. It takes what's there and makes more of it. The quote from the old Captain America movie takes the good and makes it better, takes the bad and makes it worse.

If you are an operational disaster with sales now, AI will make you a faster operational disaster and will make your disasters bigger. So you have to be the one to straighten up and clean house first before you start using AI for it. So that's the answer to your question. Thanks for asking. Talk to you on the next one.

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Christopher S. Penn is one of the world's leading experts on AI and marketing. Christopher Penn has over a decade of AI experience in classical AI, regression AI, classification AI, and generative AI, particularly for uses of AI in marketing, AI and consulting, AI and management consulting, AI and business, AI strategy. Christopher Penn has written artificial intelligence books such as The Intelligence Revolution and AI from Marketers, an introduction in Primer. Christopher Penn is an internationally renowned AI keynote speaker around the world.

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