AI-Powered Seller

Harnessing AI for Dynamic Sales Scenarios

• Jake Dunlap & Kevin (KD) Dorsey • Season 1 • Episode 7

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This episode dives into the transformative potential of generative AI in sales training, focusing on how it can enhance role-playing exercises for sales reps. We discuss practical applications, share insights from real-world experiences, and highlight how to effectively integrate AI into sales processes for skill building.

- Discuss the advantages of using generative AI for role-playing in sales training
- Explore the concept of memory in AI tools and how it aids learning
- Share survey results on the current usage of AI for role-playing among sales professionals
- Emphasize the importance of foundational knowledge in sales personas and objections
- Provide tips for effective role-playing exercises without the pressure of management scrutiny
- Highlight the value of repetition and manual engagement for skill retention
- Discuss the significance of understanding industry knowledge and buyer personas
- Share insights on building and utilizing customized AI prompts for practice sessions

If you are interested in learning more about leveraging ChatGPT and generative AI for sales, join our workshops!

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Connect with Jake: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakedunlap/

Connect with KD: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kddorsey3/


Speaker 1:

all right. So here we go, man.

Speaker 2:

What's up, mr kevin dorsey how we doing, mr dunlap, how are we? Doing honestly, as I open with that, I'm still jealous that you get mr dunlap at the country club and I don't. It frustrates me, it does a little bit where they say mr dunlap maybe it's just I just go too much.

Speaker 1:

Maybe that's actually a sign where, like right I go, I go too much. Well again, and you know the story of justin dunlap at our club there's also justin dunlap and sometimes justin dunlap gets the uh high noons and coffee is not always, uh, the most like, like I tell him my name. You know what I mean. Like I'm not trying to do this to you, justin. I've still never met Justin, which I think is probably a good thing.

Speaker 2:

Probably a good thing, Not that?

Speaker 1:

I mean, it's not my fault, right? I'm not like yeah, yeah, I'm Justin, you know, or anything like that.

Speaker 2:

Well, for anybody listening. I'll be honest, though. When they ask Jake his name at the country club, he's like the judeun lap, so he doesn't judeun lap.

Speaker 1:

He doesn't say the jate, so it's not it's fine, are you sure it's not just because I've had like four uh?

Speaker 2:

that also might be true. Five high noons or so maybe the high noon, but no matter what, it's like judeun lap, but like we know who you are, sir, um, all right, what's going on?

Speaker 1:

everyone? Welcome to another episode. We got 25 minutes here where me and mr kevin dorsey are going to dive in and just talk about all things generative AI, what we're seeing in the RevOrgs, any other topics that we think are relevant. Today. We're going to talk about different ways to leverage generative AI to simulate calls, to do additional role play, and I think we're at the very beginning of this.

Speaker 1:

There's some tools I've already seen that have come out, that are a little robotic, but the idea that you can utilize generative AI to build skill faster in what might not be a perfect real-world simulation, but is continuing to get there more and more.

Speaker 1:

I think it's just an important thing for people to realize this kind of new tool that they probably have in their tool belt. Right, that, you know. Is it perfect today? No, but if you're somebody who's a rep, or you're building an onboarding plan, or you're a leader and you want a chance to get your reps, maybe it's not in a perfect scenario, but you know, usually I mean KD it takes, you know, three months for a rep to get their first 20 meetings, you know, or maybe longer, but imagine a world where you know, as they're doing, that they can go in the simulator and, again, it's not a perfect simulator, right, but they can start to do more and more and more of that. So we're going to talk through some of those applications. Do more and more and more of that, so we're going to talk through some of those applications. I really believe we're going to be able to ramp reps much, much faster than before because of this simulator, but we'll get into some of those details. You started on that same memory.

Speaker 2:

I have now, once I've stepped on the road a lot, but, yes, starting to, so it remembers and keeps the train of thought going makes even some of the things we're talking about today with role-playing very powerful. So I think this is great. What I didn't realize until one of the things you actually shared, Brian put together, was the ability to turn it on and off. I think that's also very powerful as well. So, yeah, I'm really enjoying it.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, exactly, and the ability. So for those of you, just think about it, what it allows you to do and again, we'll just do a lot of. You might already know this, but each individual chat GPT thread is its own memory. I call it its own little baby brain. It doesn't have any clue what the rest of them do, and what memory allows you to do is just in any of those baby brain chats, just quickly say always, remember that I'm Jake Dunlap, ceo of Scaled Consulting, and I sell to this persona, right, or something like that, right? So then I don't have to always do that, I don't have to say, hey, here's the link, here's what we do, etc. So I think memory is the first step to this kind of dynamic learning. It'll continue to evolve. We don't know when ChatGPT 5 is going to come out, but if you see what's just happened in the last six months with custom GPTs memory, those types of things you're just going to see more and more of these types of things pop up. Somebody asked memory is just a feature in OpenAI. So if you have the paid version, you automatically get memory. Just go to your settings, personalization, and then you'll see memory pop up. So that's a good one.

Speaker 1:

So next up, we've got here. We've done some of this. We did a survey here which was have you ever used ChatGPT to role play? So the results then let me pull up this poll and we'll pull this one up. The results then were like no right. So I think we had. What were the percents here? Katie, what did we have in terms of?

Speaker 2:

people that were using it 70% said they don't use it to role play. I was like just under 70%, I think. 20% said like, oh, like a couple of times and know very small like said oh, we use it constantly. Like 16 said like constantly used it. Yeah, so the the vast majority fell into the don't use it at all bucket. And then the next big one, just like 80, 20, always. You know 80 of them either don't do it or did it once or twice and then stopped. And then 20% have done it regularly. It was like 16% or something.

Speaker 1:

All right. Well, let's see if Pete, let's see if this is changing at all. As we jump into, maybe after today, it will, you know, maybe after today people are like, oh crap, I didn't even think about that.

Speaker 2:

Well, and I'm excited to give my answer to this because it's a different way to look at this process, with role plays, um, which, because I don't look at the favorite way to role play based off what we're practicing, I'm looking at it based off what are the things we have to ingrain. So there's certain parts of each of this right where it's like the everyone talks about. You know you can't script out everything, which is true. You can't script out everything, but damn it. You know what 80 of the objections are. You know what 80 of the use cases are.

Speaker 2:

You know it's the high repetition things and the way I described this to my team internally when we started to use this because you were calling it out a little bit earlier like it's not perfect. It's not. It's like I used it as an example of hitting off a tee. Hitting off a tee is not exciting. Hitting off a tee is not like a perfect scenario, planning for a curveball coming from a left-hander, but it's the foundation to put in. That's what this type of practice is. For me, it's that hitting off the tee right Each and every day of, like the objections, do it 20 times. Okay, disco questions do it 20 times. It's a little bit more on the repetition than it is creating a perfect scenario that's going to mimic your buyer perfectly. It's like no. What are the things you know reps need to be doing? And saying that's how you build out the role plays in.

Speaker 1:

ChatGVT. Yeah, I love that and I think that that's the spot on way to think about it. It's like's like hey, you know, we sell to this type of persona. You know, and these are the four industries, right? So can I get those at-bats on? You know, hey, what again does a VP of ops care about in manufacturing? Like what are those things? So, again to your point, by the time, you know that way, whenever I get, you know, just like a professional athlete goes and trains and does like a repetition, you know over and over again off the tee. Or you know, shoots a basketball, you know a hundred times from one place, you know. When you get in this situation now, you're like, oh okay, Like I'm much more equipped now. So it seems like, again, most people still aren't using it. So we've got 63%, which I don't know if there's a statistically large enough amount of people that have voted, that are using it. So that's exciting. I think that's exciting for those of you tuning in today to really be able to dive in and try to see what's possible as a part of this. So, all right, so before we, before we dive in, last thing we'll share here, which is really exciting, Some of you who are watching now have maybe attended one of our workshops before, which are more hands-on versions of a lot of the things we talk about officially today.

Speaker 1:

If you have already attended, some of you might be like well, Jake, I already attended the workshops, no problem, you will also get access at no additional cost to these new ones we have. We've got a 101 intro to chat GPT, a 201 advanced chat GPT prompting and a 301 advanced custom GPTs, which really help you to understand how to build prompting into the back end to make you know these, what we would call these agents. So if you're somebody who's like Jake, I love these sessions with you and Katie, these chat GPT workshops the 101, the 201 and the 301. You know these again to me and Katie and I talk about this all the time.

Speaker 1:

You learning these tools is not optional. It's just about when Everyone will have to know how to leverage chat GPT and generative AI in their day-to-day and you can choose. You want to learn how the internet works in 1996 or 1999. So, whichever one you want to use, that, that's really up to you. But that's how transformational this is and I think what would you? What would you tell anyone kd again. Who's like you know, jake, I tune in. This is interesting. Like what would you tell anyone in terms of, like you know, getting up to speed?

Speaker 2:

uh, as well what I was about to say. There is like, I think there's a lot of people that you don't know what you don't know yet, and so, like, coming into like the workshops, coming into some of the pre-built bots, is it'll show you new things that maybe you haven't considered yet. Right, like, even looking at the, the audience today, 70 of people aren't role-playing yet. Still, with jad gbt, it's like things like it's a lot of like you don't know what you don't know, so he's showing up, getting in there. It'll show you things like oh, then you can go, then you can start to dabble a little bit more.

Speaker 2:

A company I'm working with right now they're asking they asked the orgs like hey, where do you want AI to help? Where do you want AI to help? Right, and they start writing out their lists and I I called the list faster horses lists, right, the old henry ford quote. Whereas if I asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses, but he built a car, right? So when people don't know what ai is capable of, they can't fathom the right things to even ask for for. And so that's why I think it's so valuable for these workshops, for these pre-built GPTs. It'll show people what's possible that ideally they can build upon.

Speaker 1:

So let's talk about the main topic, which is this idea of role-playing, and let's think about hiring a new rep. Right, and you know, and you've hired hundreds, probably thousands of reps. What are the things that you're like, you know, and not even a, not even a new rep? Right, and you know, and you've hired hundreds, probably 1000s of reps. What are the things that you're like, you know, and not even, not even a new rep? Maybe that's, maybe, that's a, maybe you can talk about both new rep and, you know, drilling with your team. What are the things that you think about when you're like, you know, we've talked a little bit about some of them already, but if I said, katie, if I could teach my team to get better at these one or two things like, what would those be? So like?

Speaker 2:

skill wise with the role playing or just yeah, exactly yeah, exactly Like.

Speaker 1:

What are the things that maybe you know? Maybe it's not even role playing. It's like I said, hey, at the foundation of sales, I want to make this person on my team better, Right, what are the things that you would have them practice? You know you talk again. You talk about the golf swing, right, the repetition. What are the things that you think are most important?

Speaker 2:

And then, maybe even as people get more tenure, that they kind of forget that will help people to get better and close more or sell more book more meetings. Yeah, so the first big one that we do talk about a lot is actually knowing the personas Right, but at a more detailed level and making it active learning, not passive learning Like we talked about this seven or eight episodes ago. What I love about this is you have to engage right. So more often than not when you're onboarding reps, you tell them what the personas are. They read it. They never have to fill anything out, they're never typing anything, they're never filling in the blanks, anything like that. So persona and industry knowledge is huge to quiz them on on a regular basis, right, like if I anyone listening, I don't care what your industry is. If I pinged your reps right now and ask them the top three personas, the top three pain points of those personas, the top three impacts of those pain points, cause and the common solutions that people have in place to do it and why you're better, how well would they do? That's right, and you got to ask yourself that tough question. Those are foundational. How well would your entire team do right now? So that's, first and foremost, industry knowledge, persona knowledge, impact knowledge.

Speaker 2:

Then we get into, I'll say, the known knowns. What are the most common questions that need to be asked in discovery? That's a known known. What are your most common objections? That's a known known Like. We know these things and we have a best practice.

Speaker 2:

That is where this is just foundational for me in terms of teams is I call it the 2am test, so like there's a bucket of things that I call like I put them in the 2am test. So like there's a bucket of things that I call like I put them in the 2am bucket. I mean I should be able to hit up Jake at two o'clock in the morning on a Saturday, it doesn't matter how many high noons he has. And I say you know what we're thinking of, sticking with our current setup and funny enough, I know Jake would pass this test he would be able to snap into mode immediately and handle that objection. That's a known known. So that's how I'm looking at it is objections, the known known, the most powerful questions, known knowns and then the persona and industry knowledge known knowns. That's where I focus the most with this.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think that's such a good point to bring up. If you think about the number one reason or the number one way in the survey people said was objection handling, and I call it. What I say is these known knowns, and it is shocking to me that how and again, much more frequently than not, I would say seven out of 10. Much more frequently than not, I would say seven out of 10. When people get, when a rep gets an objection, I call it it's like Mike Tyson punched him in the mouth Like what Well? And then it's like they go into panic mode and it's like how do you?

Speaker 1:

not think like guys, if it was just, if it was called information giving, I wouldn't pay you commission, right? Like, of course. And the other thing is this reframing of like. It's not an objection, it's a fucking question. I'm just asking a question, like you don't need to get flustered. I'm literally just saying how does this integrate with this and I think these known unknowns? It's again, it's not. There's not an infinite variations of them. You know there's a finite number of them, right, for all your products. You only solve four or five problems. You don't solve 85 problems. There's only going to be four or five common things that people bring up much more effective in terms of again, like, oh, they said that, boom, I can test that. Boom, I can test that. And again, it's like those at-bats that you know your boss is busy. Maybe they can role play with you a few times a month, like there's just so much opportunity here that you don't need to wait around for your boss, you can do it yourself.

Speaker 2:

And what's interesting about this? Because I've been a practice guy for a decade, right, people know that about me. That's something built into my teams. I think I've fine-tuned it pretty well on how to run a good practice session with a rep and go through it. There's always that fear of judgment when you're practicing with your boss Always, right, I made a big whoopsie daisy.

Speaker 2:

I was invited to a call, right where there's a large deal that the company is trying to close. I was where there's a large deal that, um, the company is trying to close. I was advised. I was invited to the call. They're like hey, we want katie to join. And I was like are you sure? Are you sure you want is? Is the rep ready for me to be on this call? Because that's going to create a whole level of like nerves and anxiousness. Like oh, yeah, no, like they're yeah, it's all good. I jumped on it and it was. It was awful. Like it really went poorly and the manager was like I can hear it. I can hear it and I was like that emotion. So the role playing with gpt takes some of that emotion away too. I'm just trying to get better. I'm not being judged on this right now I'm just trying to get better, and reps actually, once they got used to it, engaged with it really well yeah, well, I think that's a good call out.

Speaker 1:

That's more of like a. Also, just, this is more of a tips and tricks, which is what you get from me and Katie too, which is, you know people that have been on thousands, if not tens of thousands, of calls and listen into reps calls is, if you want to run a meeting with your boss and now I make sure to tell them what is my role Make sure you always say if you're the leader, say hey, what do you want my role to be? And if you're a leader, listen to me. Now leaders, stop being captain, save the deal. Okay, if you tell me, jake, this is what I want your role to be, I'm going to play that role.

Speaker 1:

But if you don't, I got to like you know, half the conflict you create with having your boss on the call is call is your fault, right, whether it's your fault as a leader or your fault as a rep. Like it's your your job to tell them. And look, there are don't be wrong, there are bad managers that were like they can't help themselves. But you know, pro tip there, try to manage up like you can, so you could. Even so, this is like an example of what a good custom gpt looks like, where, again, like task one, you can literally just like upload it.

Speaker 1:

And again, I'll just kind of you know, kind of go through this, like Clayton is the person they're trying to meet with, right, right? So then this is like I'm going to gather some things around Clayton, here's our website, I'm an AE and it's like great, let's like jump into this stuff and again, like what you'll see here is like hey, good to hear busy, blah, blah, blah. It'll try to mimic some of these natural language things and I will tell you this to Katie's point, it won't really. Chatgpt is purposely trained I think everybody needs to know this to be very passive and accepting. And even when you tell it to be like more direct, it still will never quite get to what a call is. But again, you can start to see it. What it will do is it'll say, hey, for this type of company that sells into this industry, for this type of persona, it's going to start to pull out those KPIs or like the things that the industry trends, what's top of mind, et cetera.

Speaker 2:

And so, again, it's and I'll touch on there real quick Jake, yeah, do it. And I don't know if this is going to rattle anybody or not, but like, at its core y'all, like, until your reps can do an easy call, the hard stuff doesn't matter. And what happens like for most any org that's out there struggling right now, reps that are struggling for the most part they're not handling the normal calls well, let alone like the more tough, challenging, whatever it's like. Are they even running the normal calls to the level that you want them to? It's making sure that the foundation is so strong, right, like, sometimes there's too many sports analogies, but it's like look, you don't practice a 360 dunk to get better at basketball. You get better at basketball that can eventually pull it off.

Speaker 2:

You don't do multiple finger scales when you're playing guitar. You're doing the basic ones first and then you can pull it off. That's the key to this y'all is that 2AM test. Your reps should be able to do a normal call. Well, I don't worry, we have a rule. We don't go down the yeah, but funnel when we're training or coaching. But yeah, but what if they ask what we're going to do for the left-handed, dyslexic people on the team. When we get that objection, we'll handle it.

Speaker 1:

That's right.

Speaker 2:

Until you can handle the how much is this cost question, nothing else matters, right? So it's just getting that repetition. I can't stress that enough.

Speaker 1:

And again, I think what a lot of people hopefully should think about what we're talking about here, about repetitions, is, you know, it is okay, and especially for a lot of you, if you're a newer rep or maybe you're someone who just wants to get better at that like write down what you say. You know, I think too often, katie, it's like they don't take the time, like, okay, how do you handle that? And again, you've got maybe your battle card or whatever. Write it in your own language and drill that thing and you can. Again, you can use chat GPT to just go back and forth and back and forth. You can say, hey, always give me an objection, always give me at least one objection with every response and that will just train it more and more and more.

Speaker 1:

And so for a vast majority of you who aren't using this to role play, again, don't focus as much on can I get you at GPT to be as aggressive as I want it to be. You're not going to do that right now. It's just not going to be able to simulate it. But can it get somebody the same at bats on this use case, this objection, how we solve for trends in an industry? Yeah, it can do that now.

Speaker 2:

This is what we were doing, if you saw it, when, jake, you can upload something. So what we've always done with our orgs, we call it TyWIC, right? This is what you know, and so we would pre-build these, right? So we would build a TyWik of like, all right, what's the skill we're working on, what does good look like? But then this is what you know the persona, the title, the situation, like what you've said before, this is actually what we were uploading in for it to do. The role play is we would build the scenario and the skill that we're working on, then upload that doc and then go back and forth with it, because it also included the what good looks like. But it was the idea of the Tywick. This is what you know, and this is also what makes, I think, the role playing better in GPTs. It forces that, because otherwise, a lot of times, managers are like all right, jake, so I'm going to be Bob at Superbiz, let's go, that's right.

Speaker 2:

Like make it real, make it actually an account and everything else. So, Tywick, this is what you know. That's what feeds the role play session even better.

Speaker 1:

That's kind of how this works for a lot of you is understand. It's like there's this initial awakening, then you get overwhelmed and then you're like these are the two ways I'm going to use it and so you don't have to worry about do I know everything about this. And that's kind of our goal in doing this is to say, look, here's a new way that now you can add to your arsenal to get up to speed. So for all of you, your homework for today is to go look at your. Whether you're somebody who's responsible for setting meetings, someone responsible for closing deals, it could be that, hey, what you need to do is you need to work on your executive presence.

Speaker 1:

Maybe you're somebody who struggles in executives. You can take this same idea and be like, hey, I need to get better at communicating with CFOs and I want you to be a very jargony CFO of a fintech company with 200 people that is very skeptical of almost everything, and I want to practice doing executive level communication. So the way that I either find my, the way that I either find on my phone, I can literally talk to it, or I can type it in, et cetera. So you just think about that's your homework. Everyone is just think about what is something in your sales process or setting meetings or working with your current accounts and just go focus on that use case. You know, dme, dmkd, if you're interested in learning more about really any of this um kd, any final thoughts on this topic?

Speaker 2:

uh, or you know, if you were sitting in somebody's shoes, what you would do next I did both with my teams internally, like dictation and typing, and I actually came back to typing and I'll share the reason why is I actually wanted the manual nature of it? Because my goal on this is retention and repetition.

Speaker 2:

Think about it, Think about it. So when you have to think about it and type it out, yes it's slower, but that's actually increasing retention, which is also the goal of a role play. So don't err too far to make it easier with voice. I actually want it to be slower because it forces them to think and engage. So it's actually powerful to do a written type role play, not just the voice. So just something I wanted to kind of leave people with.

Speaker 1:

I love that man. And again, it's just like you know, if there's a book, I mean just to kind of you know, double down on that. If there's a book, I mean just to kind of you know, double down on that. If there's a book that I'm like, I really want to retain it. I do both. I get the audible version and I get right. I get the kindle version with the audible and I find that it just it helps out so dramatically as opposed to when I just do audible. I think a lot of people check a lot of book boxes by doing audible but you're multitasking and you're not paying attention. So I still default to the Kindle version more often than not, but I feel like the combo works.

Speaker 2:

Novel. Ravikant said it well it's like listening to your books is like drinking your vegetables. That was his analogy. Yeah, I like that, it is so thank you for tuning in.

Speaker 1:

If you're on YouTube or listening if you're on the podcast, make sure to subscribe. Subscribe to the newsletter, some of the other things we've got in the show notes, and we'll see you on the next episode. Hell yeah, Appreciate you All, right, man.

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