Most organizations confuse content storage with sales enablement. In this RevOps session, Marc McNamara and Craig Klein go over how high-performing organizations operationalize knowledge delivery using buyer context, sales triggers, and in-the-moment guidance.
Organizations have been creating content to help sales, services, and people throughout the organization. And what is content?
Content is anything that your user is looking for at the time that they’re looking for it.
That’s an important thing to think about. Sometimes people call content data, but I think of data now as content. Depending on how you present it, it’s either more valuable or less valuable.
One of the things that I’ve seen — and I’m going back because it’s really an important thing — this has been going on since we got into electronic creation of content. Computers really changed the way that we develop content. And then with the internet and WANs and LANs and all that’s come, content has not only become more important to the organization, but it’s also become more of a problem. By that, I mean it’s just increased in volume in so many ways.
I’ll tell you a quick story, which is incredible. I’ve been doing this a long time. At one point, we didn’t call it enablement. We called it knowledge management, which is what it is. I was at a conference down in Nashville speaking about this, and a woman who was head of worldwide enablement from a big chip manufacturer said, “I’d like you to come in and conduct an audit of our content.”
I said, “Yeah, we can do that.” We were having a discussion, and I asked her how many pieces of content she thought were available to sales that needed to be audited.
She said, “Take a guess.” I said, “Given the size of your organization, I guess two or three million pieces of content.” She laughed at me. I said, “Oh?” And she said, “Seven hundred and eighty million documents.” And I said, “Not interested.”
I walked away from that. That’s something for McKinsey or Accenture to go in and deal with.
Seriously. There had to be a better process. That’s when I started working on a process that really said — and I even said to her — “Why audit? Why not just start over? Isn’t that going to be more cost effective?” She said, “I don’t know that I have that luxury given the product marketing organization.”
But what we’re going to talk about today is that I’m sure many organizations like yourselves have a lot of content that you develop. And now, even with the assistance of AI in the creation of content — be careful, mind you — it’s more prolific.
But I want to make the point, and the title of the presentation today is: “Content Is Not Enablement.”
Enablement is ensuring that people get the knowledge, understand it, have consumed it, and use it on a regular basis to improve their performance and improve company performance.
That’s the missing link for a lot of people.
A lot of enablement professionals, knowledge managers, or product managers think that the more content they produce, the better they’re doing their jobs.
For many years, marketers had checkbox marketing on their minds before marketing automation. “We produced that document. We produced that document.” So you got a loose leaf of stuff before we did this all digitally, and all the salespeople would go to kickoff and by the end of kickoff, they’d take those loose leaves and they’d wind up on the floor of their office or gaining dust on the side of a bookshelf.
But it’s important to know we have a lot of libraries, and they can fail. We want to talk about in-moment delivery. What does that mean? Trigger-based enablement and buyer stage and persona alignment.
The Core Problem: Content Discovery and Relevance
So really the core problem, and what we’re going to get to, and we’ll talk about all the symptoms and everything come in line here.
You don’t really have an enablement problem. You have a content discovery and relevance problem. So you’ve probably worked through with marketing and others that you have good stuff — good stuff that will help people do their jobs, whether it starts with onboarding or even in the moment, like a playbook to say, if you’re facing these circumstances, here’s how you respond.
But how do people get to that? How do they know when to use it? How do they know when to find it? And where can they find it?
We’ve had distribution systems. Some companies distribute content via email. Dangerous. And now that most of us have Google accounts, we have vast Google libraries, drives with all kinds of stuff, OneDrives or whatever you’re using.
And there’s either a taxonomy — not very efficient — or there’s a file structure — not very efficient. That’s not where we’re going to find things. And hitting search is not very efficient either.
I did some business with NCR where we were organizing their top sales support documents. It was all PowerPoint in those days. And they had about sixty-nine thousand slides that they put out for salespeople to use. They said in those days they wanted to use the Google appliance to search the slides to make it easy for sales to find what they needed. So we went out and we did a survey of their salespeople to say, how do you look for content? What search terms would you use?
And we got the top one hundred search terms. About seventy percent of them, when you used those terms, brought back eighty percent of all the slides because the term was embedded in the slide. So it didn’t make much distinction and it created more confusion than solved any particular problem.
So you can see that large libraries and the way that we organize things and the documents that we produce — it’s good, but it doesn’t necessarily get you there.
Craig: One quick clarification. When you’re saying content, what I hear is stuff we’re going to send to the customer. But that’s not all that you’re talking about, right?
You’re talking about internal content that are references for the sales team and things like that as well, right?
Marc: Yeah, I’m talking about all content that sales uses.
And you’re getting to a point where we’re going to talk a little bit more about classification of the content.
So there’s training content. There’s coaching content. There’s reinforcement content. There’s illustrative content. There’s supportive content. And there is content you give the customer, like a document, a white paper, or a product description.
So there’s a lot of categories of content that are all important. And often they’re just sitting in folders or directories, and what to use and how to use it is the biggest problem.
Craig: And not even subdivided as to what those various categories are, right?
Marc: No. Sometimes they cross over. Or they create folders like battle cards. Battle cards are a great example where here’s everything you need to dispel the competition or get rid of the competition.
But there’s an important point. The big word of the day is an ontology. And everybody says to me, what the heck does that mean? I talk about it like all roads lead to Rome. And what technology has begun to allow us to do, and what people who are competent and understand, is the tangential relationships between your data and your content that exist across all your content.
Like this could be useful under these particular circumstances, but unless you’ve been through that before or you’ve been oriented to that and context created, you wouldn’t know that.
Meaning I didn’t think that would be useful in this circumstance because nobody ever showed me that before.
Craig: So it might be like I have a customer I’m selling a specific product to. I might Google or search that application in my internal system and it comes up with the piece to share with the customer.
But then side by side with that would be other resources that help me understand here’s how to present that to the customer. Here’s the other questions to ask. Here’s supporting materials, coaching, et cetera.
Marc: That’s correct. And a lot of these points cross over. The reps suffer the most because people have worked so hard to create the volumes of stuff that could be useful, but there’s no contextual relationship to the content to have it be useful.
And we treat everything as a very linear experience, meaning yes, you go and you get onboarded and you leave onboarding and now you know.
Well, no, you don’t.
Anybody who’s done training before or who does enablement knows that you can teach people something, and within thirty days of having been taught — whether it’s classroom or online or watching a video — you forget ninety percent of it. You’re not going to remember that.
So you have an orientation to things, but you haven’t developed the muscle memory.
It’s like living in an office and I’ve got books I’ve read for years. I know where they are on the shelf. If somebody moves it, where’s that book? I don’t know where to find it anymore.
And it’s things like that.
And we create a lot of content. What’s interesting — and this is another aside — I’m not sure that we know the actual cost of our content creation in organizations.
We used to study this a lot, particularly in enterprise, because executives all contribute to content, but the only costs we typically associated with it were the vendors who stylized it. We didn’t account for all the time spent on the consideration, the crafting of the message, what’s gone into that unless we paid a consultant to do that.
And if anybody’s been through a playbook consulting exercise, some of the big ones cost a quarter million, three hundred thousand dollars to put a comprehensive playbook together. And it doesn’t stop there. It’s a continuous exercise over time.
So how do you get the value out of that?
That’s the change that happens. We really want to promote the fact that content is most useful in the moment that it’s required, when it’s needed.
And as I’ve seen over the years, and I’m sure other people have experienced this, you point to content in the organization and the rep goes, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don’t have a need for that now.”
But when they do have a need, they’re going to have trouble pulling it together.
The Measurement Disconnect
So there’s a measurement disconnect and this sort of repetition.
We measure how good we are in enablement, in most organizations, by the number of assets we create.
Do we have what the salesperson needs? “It’s all here. We’ve done the checklist. We got it all done. It’s there.”
And then we look at things like simple transactional metrics. Have they come to the portal? Yes. But did they find anything that helped them? We don’t know.
They went to the LMS for onboarding and other courses. Yeah, they took the course and they completed it, but did they remember anything? We don’t know.
Because we don’t follow up.
So there’s a lot of measurements that we’re taking that’s wrong, which we can improve on and get to what the reps are going to care about, particularly when you’re hiring people.
Am I going to win deals? Can I do the work? And what are you doing for me that’s going to make me successful?
The Fundamental Mismatch
Let’s go from static repositories to a dynamic guidance system.
Missiles are hyper-local precision. We’re looking for hyper-local precision.
At the time that I need something, give me the exact material that’s important to me to solve this problem.
You probably get what’s going on in the world. There’s a lot of old bad habits and it’s hard to break them. People fall back on what they know best.
There’s some points in here that are important overall. Tribal knowledge is good from the standpoint of when it’s working about something that can be passed on. But tribal knowledge about where to find what you need to do the job isn’t necessarily a good thing. We want to get people to organically get to what they need.
Don’t improvise messaging.
People work very hard on your corporate messaging. How do we make sure that it gets instilled and used appropriately? And I don’t mean putting words in people’s mouths. I mean coaching them on the important aspects of that message for the particular situation that they’re in.
If you sell solutions, this is complex. The conversation is not the same. We’re not a hammer looking for a nail. If you’re selling something, we’re trying to help each individual in the decision-making process make an appropriate decision relative to who they are and what their role is in that committee.
That’s a lot of work. That’s a lot of thought. That’s a lot of distinct conversations and distinct messaging. Is it a financial message? Is it an operational message? Is it an executive hubris message? “You’re going to look good if you do this” kind of thing.
There’s all kinds of reasons people buy, but how do you go in there and actually facilitate the conversation across a group of people that are going to have different perspectives on how valuable what you have is to their organization or to their personal success?
The Hidden Cost of Misalignment
So there’s a lot of costs to the old ways. And this is just a call to action to think about changing because we have an opportunity to change.
And if you don’t, the competition will and you’ll lag behind.
AI is changing everything. And we’re bringing AI into the fold in a way that’s going to work for people in the context of this environment of content and the ability to compete.
You’re going to get a personal librarian. Which is interesting because another story:
When I first got started in sales way back at an insurance company, we had librarians.We actually had librarians. And when I wanted research on a company, when I wanted to know about the executives in the company, when I wanted any information about any organization that I might be communicating with, I could put a request into the librarian who gathered that information and made a personal file, which got delivered on my desk.
It was photocopied, but it was all out of directories and microfiche and all kinds of things.And it took a while. It wasn’t instant. But it came in a form that was easily digestible and even translated for me. If I didn’t understand it, the librarian created a document that helped me understand that. Well, librarians in that regard have been replaced with software.
Now we have another way to get agentic about it and create context and guidance the way that librarian used to and create more efficiencies or more effectiveness, which is really the big win.
Can we sell more? Can we service the customer better as a result of putting the right content in our hands?
Operational Impact
Without contextual guidance, without really rethinking how to use content in the organization, we’re always concerned about how fast is somebody on board? How fast do they matriculate?
Without it, they’re going to matriculate slower. There’s data to prove that.
How much does the inconsistent messaging hurt your organization or when the sales manager has come in to correct something that’s been misrepresented or not represented well? Or suddenly there’s a curveball because we didn’t follow a process or get the information that we needed and the questions answered that were needed. Slowing down the velocity or even losing a deal. And then lower adoption.
Craig: That’s what I was going to say, Mark. The one thing that’s not explicitly on this slide is lower sales.
I mean, it comes down to literally just that specific moment in every deal where maybe you got two or three competitors that are still in the running, and the customer asks you a question that’s an important, ‘Hey, will this meet my needs?’ kind of a question. And if you’re not able to answer that clearly and confidently, but your competitor is, that’s it. Done. Always.”
Marc: What we’re saying is that the ability to message well, run your processes well, is no longer a nice to have, it’s a got to have because solutions are commoditized. We’re all getting commoditized rapidly.
And the better you sell, that is a true competitive advantage.
And what I’ve learned over the years, and you have too, Craig, is that selling is part of your value. If you sell well, customers appreciate that because you’ve aligned what you have with their needs and truly aligned it with their needs, and moved away from them when you know you can’t help them.”
Craig: Yeah, that’s right. Sometimes it’s best to say, ‘We might not be the best fit for this application.’
From Libraries to Readiness
Marc: So the shift to modern enablement requires going from libraries to readiness. What does that mean?
The old enablement is content storage, training events, static courseware, manual searching, and one size fits all delivery. We got to move away from that.
And we have the opportunity to do that and do it in an evolutionary manner, not in an instantaneous manner, because while it’s elegant in its execution, it is complex in its implementation.
And I don’t want to say this is flip a switch and everybody’s happy, but it takes some getting used to how to move forward.
We’re going to talk about things, and Craig is too, that…
One of them here, really important, is trigger-based guidance.
And it’s bringing together the CRM and the data that you’re collecting during the sales process and triggering content as a result of what you’re learning through that process and using those repositories to trigger that content and how to do that.”
Buyer Context Delivery
Maybe you haven’t even started an opportunity and an SDR says, ‘Okay, this is a potential buyer. What do I know about them? And what content is most appropriate given what we know about that persona and the environment that they’re working in, but we haven’t even talked to them yet?’ And we think about that and pull that together.
Role-based recommendations.
That would be similar, but also internal, the ability to help someone inside the organization who may not be as up to speed as somebody else.
Or outside the organization, being able to look at those roles and make recommendations on what they should hear and how they should hear them.
We talked a little bit in the trigger-based guidance, which is very much connected to CRM aware enablement.
So your live opportunity data triggers a lot. And as it moves forward and you make changes, the content suggestions roll along with that.
Continuous Coaching
And last, which is really, really powerful and most important relative to the rep, is that continuous ongoing in-the-flow coaching.
It goes back to, ‘Yeah, I took that training, but I took that training a year ago. What am I supposed to remember again?’
Or KPIs are not what they should be. I’m not hitting the numbers. So how do I help this individual in a low risk way, meaning haven’t called them out to their manager yet, but we help them understand where they might have some weaknesses and move them forward in their advancement to get better and then even call on their manager automatically when the manager can play a role in that as well.
The Questions a Good System Should Answer
A good system is going to examine the following questions:
- What should the rep know?
- What should they say?
- What should they send?
- What should they do next?
Those are simple. And that’s what a good playbook does.
But we’re now moving from the concept of a static playbook to a dynamic playbook, meaning we can classify this content and make it contextually delivered based on what you’re encountering, when you’re encountering it, and who you’re encountering in that opportunity.
Trigger-Based Content Delivery: The Right Content at the Right Moment
Traditional delivery was the rep searches manual.
Is it in my email chain? Do I go to a drive? Is it in the LMS, a content portal, even in Slack?
But how do you move past that?
Trigger-based delivery is quite a simple proposition. We did this for many years using machine language, is that the system detects and makes recommendations.
And Craig, you’re in a good position to talk about this because SalesNexus. You’ve got buyer stages, sales stages, personas, industries, opportunities, objections, product focus inside of a sales process. Which we can then read and recommend the relevant content based on what we’re getting as a trigger to do that.”
Craig: I find that your experiences with bigger enterprise-style organizations, mine’s with smaller, medium-sized teams.
I find that in those kind of teams, just trying to even think through all the contingencies and organize things in a logical way is really overwhelming for most people.
Just trying to create a simple trigger-based system, just trying to decide when is the right time to send this piece of content to the customer. People don’t know because the problem is every customer is different and they’re going to go through their own learning process.”
Marc: That’s true. And part of it is the content that gets created often with product marketing or marketing itself.
John Seely Brown used to say — he was the head of Xerox PARC many years ago — that knowledge is not embedded in a document, it’s the conversations you have around the document.
And marketing themselves, when they create that content, they know what it should be used for, but the salesperson isn’t oriented to that.
It’s not like we used to have sales support reveal meetings.‘Here’s the new package.’ But it doesn’t necessarily ingrain in the user what this is good to do in terms of what circumstances.It talks about very general value and there’s no nuance in how to position it.
So to your point, Greg, it’s like, ‘Okay, what do I do with this and why should I care?’”
Aligning Content to the Buyer Journey
So the other aspect here to engage sales is that everything you do with content should be automatically inside the workflow so you’re seeing that happening in the CRM itself.
And as you look at enablement, how do you extend that?
One area is to align the content to the buyer’s journey. And the buyer context determines the content relevance.
And we went through it last time that a buyer’s journey is not a sales process. A sales process has more to do with what you collect and when you know you can go to the next stage.
In terms of the buyer’s journey, they can be anywhere in this depending on who you’re talking to at any particular time in terms of what they need to know in order to move to the next phase of their journey.
Craig, is there anything you want to show us in Nexus that connects us to this a little bit as we move on?
Craig: What we’re constantly trying to teach people to do is set up a pipeline full of triggers.
With our platform, you can set up triggers for each stage. So as a sales rep, as I move — let’s say Amanda’s over here in my prospecting stage — and then I move her to qualification, that automatically sets off all of these automations. You can send them emails and give me a task to call them, send them a text message, all the basic stuff.
But to the point that you’re making, Mark, the problem is that every customer should not get the same exact set of messages. And so one of the things we’ve built into our new version here is when I update a specific field in the CRM, which may be their budget, or their current competitor that they’re using, or some other key detail that really changes how you’re going to approach that customer, then, in this case, if they have ample budget, I’m going to move them to the next stage in my pipeline.
But if they don’t, maybe I’m going to move them into an entirely different pipeline that just treats them in a different way. So I’m going to have different roads that I’ve mapped out for all the top five or ten sort of scenarios that we see a lot.
Which is a simple example of the kind of thing that you’re starting to talk about here.
Marc: Well, what’s interesting there is that actually takes a process, but then fishbones it into more of what their journey might be.
Craig: If they click on the email that you send them and therefore show some interest, then that can move them to the next step.
If they don’t, then we do different things.
Marc: And those are distinct actions for each one, are they not? I mean, if you’re moving them into another place.
Craig: Yeah. And that’s really important. Including if they come back to your website.
You know, that’s a good signal. That changes how you want to handle them next.
Marc: And I’m excited about that because that could be used very, very well in what we’re doing here.
How You Organize Things Changes Everything
What Craig just showed us is really important to that dynamic. Because now you have the opportunity where traditionally we’ve had a product folder, a department, a file type, but to organize things contextually.
And what Craig just showed us was the opportunity to move them into a different buyer decision stage relative to how they’ve reacted to something, which oftentimes a salesperson doesn’t necessarily recognize — where somebody is in that buyer’s journey and the motion — and then provide content appropriately to that step.
So here’s an example of an individual, and I’ve got multiple views here. We can dive into each one, but this is called Advisor.
And just for those who don’t know, we mentioned it last time. This is integrated with Sales Nexus. So all the data that you see on the screen is coming out of Sales Nexus.
This is John and this is his pipeline. Here’s my deals or my opportunities, and it’s all going to track in what stage I’m in.
And depending on how it’s organized in Nexus, you can look at the stage of the sale or the step of the journey. It’ll recognize it either way because the contextual implementation is the critical part of this on how you deal with the content.
So if I drill down into any one of these, this continues to pull data, and it provides an overview on activities, which you can see there as well, but it’s summarizing it from the standpoint of understanding it so that the content can be displayed appropriately.
So we’ll culminate the deal intelligence. As a result, we’ll have some supporting content out of the box depending where you are, but then it comes down to very specific guidance as we were just talking about in terms of individual conversations.
So in this case, the CFO is in a particular part of their journey. And at this point we’re suggesting to schedule a thirty minute call and we’ve provided an ROI calculator. And also how to handle those price objections as a result. All of this is delivered, including hard content that could be put into an email back to them. That you either develop or it’s already a white paper developed for you depending on what the circumstances are. It’ll also give you your call agenda based on guidance that you’ve put in here.
So all of this is based on your content, knowledge, and data. That’s a combination of things.
These suggestions are going to come from how you train them at the onset.
So you’re going to onboard people here with content. It kind of replaces your LMS. It’s smarter than an LMS. And you’re going to teach the agent what people need to know and when they need to know it.
And you’re going to constantly reinforce them over time to make them very facile and be able to respond to what they’re going to be delivered at any point in time inside of their opportunities overall.
Craig: There’s just so many easy wins that you’re providing the interface for here.
Every conversation, there’s all this context that the customer gives you. Part of it might be in email conversations. Part of it might be in an actual face-to-face meeting or an online meeting. Part of it might be in documents that they send you. But all of that information is the picture that you need to decide what’s the right piece of content at the right time.
Even within an opportunity, there’s multiple different people who need different pieces of content.
So, the cool thing about what we’ve done with SalesNexus is now we have all that context in one place and we’re making it automatic. We’re just grabbing it all. And now to put what you’ve built on top of that, and in an organization like you’ve been describing where they have developed that content and they can lay the content in this system on top of all that great context, wow.
Are we automating salespeople? No.
Marc: No, no. What we’ve done here is we’ve created the master librarian. That’s the metaphor. It’s just a guidance system. It’s not a replacement. And I think that’s a really important thing to consider.
I think AI really needs to be seen as an assistant, not as a replacement.
I heard a good podcast the other day that was pointing to technology that over time people thought would eliminate jobs, but actually it created unique categories of businesses because people wanted to work with people and have experiences.
Sales is a trust exercise. And it’s a help exercise.
Craig: A lot of times the salesperson’s job is you’re almost more like a doctor. You talk to the doctor and you say, ‘Hey doctor, my back hurts.’
Well, he doesn’t immediately break out the scalpel and say, ‘All right, we’re doing surgery.’ He may discover that it has something to do with the shoes you’re wearing or whatever. So as a salesperson, you’re there as a diagnostician to a large degree. And that means asking a lot of good questions.
The other thing that I think about all this is that if you want to sell me shoes on Amazon, I can see where an AI agent might be even better than a human being at that for the most part. But if you’re selling me a fifty thousand dollar piece of machinery or a multimillion dollar multi-year deal, you’re going to supply some critical component of my supply chain over the next five years, I’m not signing that deal without talking to some people and building a relationship with some people that I trust.
Marc: Exactly. Exactly.
You can see here, this is the enablement manager’s point of view, and it’s the ability to upload all of your data and content, link with the CRM, link with other data supporting systems that give context.
But you’re merely just classifying your content and teaching the agent on what’s important and when it is important. So it’s a very interesting way to get content in and tag it, categorize it, and make it accessible to people.
And the AI just speeds that up. It’s the modern librarian to pull out the important components and keep sales relative to what they need to do at the time they need to do it.
Questions:
Question 1: Where do you start in building out the library of content? One of the questions was specifically, can you reference any specific books or resources that can help people think through what are the things that I need to create for my sales team?
Marc: We’ve actually done a lot of study on knowledge management.
A great place, which is a third party, is the American Product Quality Council. They offer a lot of suggestions on how to self-audit and put a direction together on what to create.
We’ve boiled that down into a toolkit, which I’m happy to send to people. It’s called the Science of Readiness Toolkit. It basically helps you think through what do I create first, what do I create second, third, and how do I tag it? How do I think about tagging it and categorizing it for it to be used, even if you were just doing it in a series of folders. It’s not necessarily about having to adopt any particular technology.
Craig: To be a little more practical about that, you were showing your tool earlier.
Let’s say somebody has that already. They got their folders. They got a handful of pieces in each folder. Can your system, does your AI just look at that and go, okay, here’s — and categorize it for you? Or is that something that you help the customer do?”
Marc: Yeah, so it does require human intervention. It will do several things.
One, if you have an onboarding program, you can upload that completely in the system if it’s recorded, say SCORM files or videos, and the agent will know and become intelligent about your sales training.
In terms of the content, you have to identify what the content is, what it’s for, and what particular circumstances it would be for.
So there’s two ways that can happen. You can take the content and categorize it and tag it inside the content. So you would say this piece of content is good for this industry, this sub-industry, this persona. Because the AI doesn’t understand that. It’s a message, it’s a position, but it doesn’t understand that that would be good for this particular circumstance. You have to teach it that.
So there’s two ways to do it. You can make existing content, and we have a standard set of categories and tags that map back to your CRM. And boom, boom, boom — you just tell it what it’s good for, and then it will abstract that and deliver it up at the time that it sees as appropriate relative to the data that it’s pulling on the opportunity.
So it is knowledge management. You can’t get away from that.
Craig: And is your system going to identify needed content?”
Marc: You know, that’s a good question. We haven’t built that in as of yet. But it wouldn’t be hard to do.
Right now we’re still working on optimizing that it recognizes the right content. We don’t want it to necessarily create content, but it won’t take long for it to know that something is missing based on what it understands the selling to be and what it gets from the CRM.
Question 2: Why wouldn’t I just use ChatGPT every time I meet with a customer and they ask me a few questions and I want to send them a follow-up? Why can’t I just go to ChatGPT and have it generate the perfect response to every customer?
Marc: Well, if you want to commoditize your business really fast, go ahead. There’s a couple of things behind the wall.
Everything that goes into this system is private. This is a private, secure, trusted system.
We’re also seeing, and we rely on multiple AI systems, but we’re still seeing a lot of slop. Again, this is a matter of opinion.
AI is very good at rote, taking from what exists and spitting it back out.
Craig: But you just referenced two really important things that I think generally people are relatively ignorant about in terms of how AI really works.
If your AI doesn’t have the context of everything — not just that you know as an individual, but that your organization knows, including proprietary private information that you can’t put on the public domain — if it can’t see that, which of course ChatGPT can’t, then it’s acting in ignorance.
And then secondly, if you’re the individual sales rep just trying to use these tools on a tactical level day to day, if you don’t write the right prompt, you’re going to get a whole different result. If you and I both try to create some resource for a customer right now for the same exact situation and write two different prompts, we’re going to get two different results.
Some people are good at that and some people are not.
Marc: I think the other thing to know is we’re not creating content, we’re creating context.
That’s a really important distinction.
Meaning it’s the company’s content. It’s your organization’s content. We’re not inventing anything. And we’re creating the context to tell the agent when it should be used. It’s important under these circumstances.
So that’s what I mean by the librarian. We’re giving it the cues and the core information as to when to bring it to the person. It understands the context from the opportunity. And we’ve identified, given the context of the opportunity, we’ve identified that content to fit that context.
So it knows to use it and it crosses over. What I meant when I said all roads lead to Rome — you can have one piece of content that’s going to fit many circumstances, but not all circumstances. So what you’re saying is the agent says, ‘Oh, I recognize what you’re in the middle of. Here’s what you need,’ and pulls it from the library of information.
Craig: To me, where the magic of what you’re building really becomes apparent is in a bigger organization, or in an organization where you’re at least at the scale where the customer interacts with a lot of different people on your team throughout the relationship.
In other words, they might be taking advantage of certain products right now from your company and they’re interacting with your billing department and your customer service department and all that around that product. But they’re also talking to you about some other product, an upgrade or whatever.
Now the AI can see all of that correspondence and prior business and order history and everything while you’re trying to communicate with them about the importance of this upgrade.
That context changes what that customer needs to see significantly. The frame of reference of ‘I’m already using this product and it’s not meeting my needs for some reason.’
Marc: It’s really a very simple proposition.
At the end of the day, it’s bringing content to people when they need it at the time that they need it.”
Craig: Somebody asked if you have written a book that they can check out.
Marc: Not yet. I do have an eighteen-module online course called the Science of Readiness. If somebody is interested in that, that’s available for free.
People are welcome to listen to it. It’s an audiovisual course and it has a lot of tools. It teaches people how to prepare and utilize this process that I’ve outlined.