Will AI Replace Your Sales Team? with Ellza Malok

I think we're gonna shift further into things that come just naturally to us as humans, in terms of community, in terms of that peer-to-peer trust.

And we already see some of that happening, right? Like we see places like, and I'm part of actually this community, places like Visting, which is a peer-to-peer community, and they have hubs that are both local and global that they can go to.

We have your, to your point, like I go to this particular mechanic, and m- that mechanic is the person that I trust with my car, whichever car I have, et cetera.

We are gonna start to see that, and I think it's gonna make not only the sales process much harder, but it's gonna create this cognitive load where everything else is like fade.

Everything else is just white noise in the background that people ignore and, and, or at least try to.

And that, what does that mean from a, from a bottom line perspective? That means your cost per customer acquisition is going to increase.

That means your ad spend has to increase.

Potentially, you may decide to re-completely re-strategize how that is.

I really liked what you said around your ICP in relation to the mechanisms that you're using when it comes to AI.

If your ICP doesn't care about the experience, probably looking for cheapest thing on the market, and that may not be the most ideal for every type of organization that it's trying to sell a good or service.

So it is matching those two in, in terms of what experience they're gonna go.

And I kinda say, I'm like, a little empathy goes a long way.

'Cause if you sit in the buyer's experience, you, you make yourself live through their, your buying process in their shoes, it reveals a lot about how much you really care about your clients, how easy it is to buy from you.

And I say that specifically because I think the buying-- I think whenever someone, a team creates a selling process, they think of it from their efficiency standpoint.

But if you sit from a buyer experience process, and then you work through, okay, what are the elements that I can mimic to build that trust, to build that relationship, automatically becomes way more efficient than whatever you were coming up with because you're taught that it looks-- it has to look like this process, and it has to look like a funnel, et cetera, especially when more and more research is saying that over eighty-five percent of buyers already have a preferred partner before they even reach out to a salesperson or any type of website ecosystem.

So what does a buyer actually experience when they're on the other end, when they're on the buying end of an automated sales process? How much has that changed with AI, whether it's chatbots or AI phone calls or what other components? How much does it change the buyer experience?

I think it makes the assumption that information is cheap.

If I have a chatbot, I can ask the chatbot pretty much anything.

But if I have more complex situations, chatbot may or may not have that answer, but it cheapens the sales process and therefore potentially cheapens the product that you're selling as well in many instances because you're saying this information may or may not be privileged.

To customize it to your world, if I'm sitting in a chatbot, and I, I have a, an amazing colleague who actually does a ton of research on chatbots specifically, and it, it does provide the speed that you need, but it doesn't provide the emotional building because you've cheapened the knowledge that you are going into.

It's not like a knowledge base that you are able to look for and kind of put some effort into.

We know that effort is a mechanism to drive trust.

In many instances, there is kind of a rage quit model that you have to, you have to make sure you're safe around.

Like, it can't be so hard to find that it's basically impossible and I'm off this website.

But it's gotta be to a point where, like, I'm looking for something specific and, and enough in a way, rather than getting a lot of technical talk that may-- I may or may not understand if I'm, if I'm initially looking at this.