Greg's Right FIT #538 – This week: Walking, AI Selling, Engagements

Quick notes to help you find new business in less time with less effort. . . sometime next week.

In this issue: 

• Thoughts on Walking
• Being Human
• Random Stuff
• Back In The Day

Thoughts on Walking

• In ancient times, a round trip on the Silk Road from Rome to China took up to two years. If, like the quantum physicists say, we're all connected at the sub-atomic level, part of us made that journey on the Silk Road. I take this to mean we need to go for a long walk next week. It's in our DNA.
• If you feel stress or anxiety, take a walk. Research tells us the best walks are in parks, without distractions, surrounded by trees. Something about that back and forth motion of walking and looking at nature clears our brains and relieves stress.
• Want to get more out of your lunch meeting? Leave your phone in the car. Once we get over the initial anxiety of being out of touch for an hour, our brains lock in on the lunch conversation and we get more from it.
• I just reminded a client it's ok to take a mental health day. Leave the to-do list behind, turn off social media, and turn up some music. Pet the dog, take a walk, show up at the movie theater and pick a movie you might not otherwise see. It's ok to leave the optimizing behind and wander around through life for a bit.

Being Human – AI and my sales grid

My sales grid:

It's been a while since I've walked you through my "best approach to sell" grid. I made this about 15 years ago to draw some distinctions between sales approaches I saw at the time. The point I made was in response to people who said all sales positions would soon disappear to the internet/ecommerce. For example, if you sell a product that your buyer thinks isn't terribly sophisticated, and it's well within their budget, the way to sell is to "Make it easy" as the grid instructs. Like, put it on Amazon. The buyer doesn't want to talk to a salesperson for that kind of purchase. that job is threatened to disappear. Interesting talk in 2011.

Today, I am wondering what AI LLMs are doing to my "best way to sell "grid. Let's explore for a minute.

First, a quick orientation. Product Sophistication is how the buyer perceives your product. Do they think it's easy to use, no instructions, like a stapler? Or do they think it's complex, like an enterprise software system? That's the X axis, going from simple on the left to complex on the right.

Buyer Budget Prioritization is not only about how much the buyer is authorized to spend on a product, but whether or not they can prioritize that budget. At the bottom is a buyer with a strict budget cap. At the top is a buyer who can take budget from other areas and apply it to a new one if they think it's better. That's the Y axis. Each quadrant has my shorthand for how to approach buyers. Low budget auth, simple product = focus on making the purchase easy. High budget authority, complex product = focus on enlightening the buyer as to what's possible to get budget re-allocated to this new idea.

What does the introduction of LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude do to my grid? Let's walk through them.

• Make it Easy. To make purchasing easy we need to be thinking of AI Agents doing the shopping for the buyer. For your ecommerce to work, more information about your product needs to get to the AI Agents. Think about re-structuring data for LLMs.
• Teach Me. This may be the area that LLMs touch the hardest. More like a punch than a touch, you might say. Product sophistication is rooted in the buyer's perception. If they think it's complicated, it is. Like Quickbooks. I think it's complicated. An accountant doesn't. I used to say, focus on education to sell a product in this space. Now I think, focus on educating the LLMs. Users of LLMs move through the day thinking the tool can do it all. Make sure you're training the tool to do what they want it to do.
• Prove it to Me. My example in this quadrant is to imagine selling an HR payroll reporting tool to a multi-national company. They know how the tools work, so they are more concerned with the wrong report going to the wrong person or having the wrong information. You have to prove it will address their concerns. With LLMs, you still have to prove it.
• Enlighten Me. In this quadrant, it's still high touch and very educational. While it's possible the senior exec buyers are using LLMs, it's more likely they are still approaching these strategic kinds of purchases after being enlightened. I think LLM subscriptions are being sold this way. The message, "Did you know your people can be 25% more productive for less than $2500 a year?" isn't being discovered through an executive's use of an LLM.

These new tools are changing selling. More at the lower budget controlled levels than sales made to the C-suite. So, if you sell SaaS subscriptions to SMBs (teach it to me) you have a lot more buyers that think your product isn't as sophisticated as it used to be, threatening long term adoption of the tools.

If you want to brainstorm about how LLMs might impact how you sell, give me a call.

Random Stuff

"I would not wish any companion in the world but you." – William Shakespeare, a real guy who wrote a lot of poems and plays a long time ago

Cada cabeza es un mundo, goes the saying. Inside every head is a world, is my rough translation. I take it to mean we simply don't know what's happening inside other people's heads, no matter how well we know them.

My lovely bride and I are out celebrating and sharing memories when she springs a new one on me. A memory about the day we brought our eldest child back to our little apartment on Tamarac street. I have no memory of her story, but suffice it to say I did something insensitive. My lovely bride said it made her think, "uh-oh, he's not happy about this and doesn't like us." Momma bear was ready to raise her cub on her own. Yikes!

She claims it only took me twelve hours to redeem myself. I listen to the story and think, wait, was there ever a doubt? I didn't even know it happened. What else don't I know? What other mysteries are floating in that little head of hers?

That tiny, tiny baby we brought home in her little car seat, up three flights of stairs into our one bedroom apartment, is now engaged to be married. We're thrilled and are big fans of her fiancé. He's from Spain and got a great job in Barcelona, so one of the first adventures this couple is embarking on is moving from L.A. to Barcelona in the fall.

A long way from that little apartment in Denver.

We're planning a summer of festivities to send them on their way. We're looking forward to visiting Barcelona this fall. I've never been. Send recommendations if you have some.

Congrats to them on the engagement! Very exciting.

(Another thing I am looking forward to is my soon to be son-in-law is a native Spanish speaker. As such, I look forward to him telling me what cada cabeza es un mundo and other favorite proverbs really mean.)

Back in the Day

What I was thinking about last year, five years ago, and ten years ago.

• Last Year: Right FIT #486 – Last year's theme was prioritization. A constant topic of conversation with clients. "Should we be doing THIS right NOW?" Our most precious resource isn't people and isn't money. It's time. Picking the right tasks and staying on them takes practice.
• Five Years Ago: Right FIT #277 – One thing jumped out: "Deciding the right way to market a new product or service is a challenge. It requires a lot of pivots and backtracking. For this reason, having the right people in this role is imperative. Look for curiosity and abundant patience." I'm helping a startup right now and this is exactly where we're at. The abundant patience part is the hardest to interview for.
• Ten Years Ago: Right FIT #15 – An old website goes brand new and I featured my FIT self-assessment. I should drag this thing back out because when the clients actually finished it, we knew right where to start our work. The issue was getting them to take it. Maybe now I can make a tool instead of that old fashioned paper!