AI sales training is mostly not about AI

I spent twenty five years in food and FMCG sales. National account manager up to managing director, and then running a family butchery business until it closed at the start of this year.

So when somebody asks me about AI for their sales team, I am not coming at it as a technologist who has read about selling.

Here is the thing I got wrong, and it is embarrassing because I was doing this for a living at the time.

I started adding two lines to the end of every prompt. What is missing from this prompt. And what should I delegate here, and what should I keep.

The answers were consistently things I had not thought of. I had assumed I was good at this. I came away feeling like a bit of an idiot.

What that has to do with sales

A sales team is the part of a business most likely to already be using AI, and least likely to have been shown how.

Somebody is writing follow up emails with it. Somebody else is using it to research an account before a meeting. Nobody has compared notes, nobody has agreed what good looks like, and nobody has told them what not to put into it.

So you get a team where one person is getting genuine value and three are getting slightly worse versions of what they would have written themselves.

The gap between those people is not the tool. They have the same tool.

The study that shows the size of the gap

Dell'Acqua and colleagues ran a controlled study with 758 consultants at BCG, published later in Organization Science. It is worth reading in full and worth quoting in full, because most people quote half of it.

The half everyone quotes: consultants using GPT-4 completed 12.2 per cent more tasks, 25.1 per cent faster, with over 40 per cent higher quality. The below average performers gained 43 per cent. The above average performers gained 17 per cent.

The half nobody quotes: on a task that sat outside what the tool could actually do, the people using it scored 19 points worse than the people who were not.

Note that the study ran with BCG's involvement and BCG co authors, it was spring 2023, and the models have moved on twice since. Take the shape of the result rather than the exact numbers.

The shape is this. The tool lifts the weaker performer a long way, lifts the stronger performer a bit, and actively harms anyone who does not know where its edges are.

Knowing where the edges are is the entire content of good training.

What sales specific training actually covers

Not prompt templates. Templates go stale and people stop using them by week three.

The useful version is closer to: here is what to give it and what to keep. Here is how to tell when it has made something up about an account, which it will. Here is what never goes into it, because your customer list is your customer list and some of these tools train on what they are given unless you have turned that off.

And then the bit that matters most for salespeople specifically. It writes plausible things. Plausible is dangerous in sales, because a confident wrong sentence about a customer's business gets sent, and you find out in the meeting.

The person who knows the account is the one who can spot that. Which means the experienced salesperson got more valuable, not less.

What you could do on Monday

Get whoever on your team is already using it to show the rest of you, for twenty minutes, on a real account.

Not a training session. Somebody's actual screen, on a real thing they did last week.

You will learn more about where your team is than any assessment would tell you, and you will find out whether anybody has been pasting things in that should not have been pasted in.

The honest limit

Training does not survive on its own.

If nobody uses it for a month, it goes. The skill fades faster than people expect, and the confidence fades faster than the skill.

So whatever you do, it needs something that keeps it alive afterwards. A standing ten minutes in the weekly sales meeting where somebody shows one thing works better than a day off site with a workbook.

And I would be wary of anyone selling AI sales training who cannot talk about selling. The tool is the easy half. Knowing which forty minutes of a salesperson's week is worth getting back requires having had the week.