Improving Sales Performance
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Improving Sales Performance
The AI Task Force: Making AI Work for Your Organization with Brent Tripp
In this episode, we’re discussing the benefits of having an AI Task Force at your company and how such a brain trust can be an invaluable resource to ensure that your organization stays ahead of the curve.
Joining Matt to explore it all is Brent Tripp, Digital Marketing Coordinator & Podcast Producer here at CSS.
Brent offers some solid points to think about, like:
- Why it’s essential for everyone at your organization to have a firm grasp on how AI tools function and what they can help you accomplish.
- How having an AI Task Force at your company can help you make decisions and provide recommendations as new tech innovations become available
- And, finally, why if you or your organization is reluctant to embrace AI tools, you just might be missing out on an opportunity to compete with larger teams.
LINKS:
Welcome to Improving Sales Performance, a podcast highlighting tips and insights aimed at helping sales organizations realize, and maybe even exceed, their goals. Here we chat with thought leaders, experts and gurus who have years of sales experience from a wide range of industries. I'm your host, matt Sunshine, ceo at the Center for Sales Strategy, a sales performance consulting company. In this episode, we're discussing the benefits of having an AI task force at your company and how such a brain trust can be an invaluable resource to ensure that your organization stays ahead of the curve. Joining me to explore it all is Brent Tripp, digital marketing coordinator and podcast producer here at CSS.
Matt Sunshine:Brent offers some solid points to think about, like why it's essential for everyone at the organization to have a firm grasp on how AI tools function and what they can help you accomplish. How having an AI task force at your company can help you make decisions and provide recommendations as new tech innovations become available. And, finally, why, if your organization is reluctant to embrace AI tools, you just might be missing out on an opportunity to compete with larger teams. With that, let's jump into the conversation. So can you break down the top reasons why the AI task force was developed here at CSS?
Brent Tripp:Of course. I mean I think and let me know if I'm missing anything but I think the AI task force was really born out of a desire to really ensure that CSS as an organization was staying on top of the rapidly developing AI tools that were coming out at the time. So just a little background. The task force was developed back in late winter, early spring of last year when ChatGPT first made its big splash. It kind of entered the public consciousness and the tool itself had been around for a minute, but it was around that time last year that people really kind of caught on to what it could do and what it was capable of.
Brent Tripp:So, and at that time too, which it's kind of still the case today chat that was the name on everyone's lips, but there were so many other tools that were coming out. It was like a never ending avalanche tools that were coming out. It was like a never ending avalanche. So I think mainly the goal for the overarching goal was for us to kind of like go out there, see what is out there and just make sure that we were staying at the head of the curve as best as we could, trying to keep up pace all these different tools that were coming out.
Matt Sunshine:Yeah, there's that, there's that expression that I know we throw around sometimes, that you know you can do anything. You probably you just can't do everything. And I right, and I think that was the when all the AI was happening so fast, it was like okay, well, what should we do? Well, we can do all that, but what should we do? We can do all that, but what should?
Brent Tripp:we do Exactly, exactly, and not to mention that, like every other day, there was a new name you heard, right, like first it was Chad GBT, and then you're hearing Bard. You know, now Bard is Gemini and you were hearing this and that and you're like, okay, well, what is it? Is it the same thing? Why is it a different name? Is it has it? Has it have a different focus? You know? So, yeah, it was, it was. It's hard to do everything. You can't do everything, so what?
Matt Sunshine:what were you know, as the AI task force got together? What? What were the primary goals and objectives when, when the task force first was established?
Brent Tripp:Yeah, so when we first started, I think there were three solid goals that we kind of kept in mind. The first was really kind of, as I mentioned just previously, to identify, research, test what exactly was out there. We wanted to help, you know, answer the question of what was available to us. And so we kind of divided and conquered in that way, kind of looking at all these different tools that were out there and seeing like, okay, we're hearing these names, we know what chat, gpt can do, what else is out there. That was number one.
Brent Tripp:Number two we wanted to come back with recommendations of specific tools that not only were practical but kind of aligned with our goals here at CSS. You know, what tools made the most sense for everything we do here, what tools can make us work smarter, not harder, kind of casting a wide net, seeing, collecting everything, seeing what makes sense, tossing out what didn't. That was number two. And then three, we wanted to, from the entire process, come back and educate and support everyone here at CSS.
Brent Tripp:As you know, they folded these tools into their processes and strategies and I think we wanted people to feel competent when testing these tools out. We wanted to make sure they felt confident and okay to test these tools out, to use these tools out, because, I mean, when these tools first started coming out, it all felt very foreign to a lot of people. You know, people didn't know exactly what all this stuff was, even the name, like we're so used to the name chat, gpt now, but at the time, to like chat, what g? What is a gpt? People can even say it. And so, uh, we wanted to make sure that everyone here at css was educated and felt confident that like, oh, this is exactly what it does.
Matt Sunshine:I could put this in, get this out, that kind of thing yeah, I think that's a really good point that you bring up is today, almost everyone has heard of chat GPT, whether they've been on it or not, whether they've experimented.
Matt Sunshine:It depends on their curiosity level and those sorts of things. Pretty much everyone has heard of it or knows someone that has heard of it Right heard of it, or knows someone that has heard of it. When the task force started a year and a half ago, whatever it was, there were plenty of people, certainly in our company, certainly in my circles, that had not even heard of it that were like, what are you talking about? Like it is a science fiction movie. I mean, right, this wasn't a household name. So I like the fact that there were specific goals and objectives that the task force said this is what we're going to do, this is what we're trying to accomplish. So, as you started finding these new tools, how did the task force go about investigating and testing and how did collaborating with colleagues from different divisions and different departments in the company? How did that enhance or improve or challenge the task force?
Brent Tripp:Yeah, so I'll start with the second part of your question first. I mean, aside from any of the tangible AI results we got, I mean it was just fun because we are for anyone who might not know, we're entirely a remote organization and I think we already do a really great job of making it feel like we work shoulder to shoulder with our colleagues. But the fact of the matter is is like there are people that I don't work with every day. There's people I don't see that often, even in a virtual sense. So just being able to like connect with and see people from other departments that I may not have worked with before, that that was a fun experience. But segwaying into the actual results that we found and the benefits of that, like multi-departmental brain trust, if you will, it was like so cool and it made me so honored, in a sense, to work with people. I know that everyone at CSS that we work with, everyone here, is the best, the best, so smart. But just having this multi-department brain trust just made me feel like wow, we work with some really smart people, and I know that because, like, I'm here talking about the AI task force today, but I'll be the first to tell you I did a lot more listening in those meetings than talking a lot of the times, because there were people that were far more educated in the realm of AI than I was at the time and there were just so many great ideas put forth, so many great use cases. So that really having everyone from different departments directly influenced how we went about researching all the tools that are out there. So pretty much what we did is we divided and conquered.
Brent Tripp:I went off and, you know, kind of looked at all the tools available through the lens of the marketing department what use cases made sense to kind of make our processes more efficient, what can enhance our strategies as a marketing team. Trey went off and looked at different tools to see how these things can benefit the sales process, benefit our clients, our sales training. Kate went off and looked at how these tools can benefit the talent and up your culture teams. And Aisha, you know she went off and looked at these tools through the lens of serving lead G2s clients and how they can optimize, you know, B2B sales and marketing performance.
Brent Tripp:So we kind of all went off on our own and that's only to name a few, by the way, just a few people in the task force, but we all went off on our own, looked at these tools through our own like departmental lenses and came back and kind of threw things at each other. And so I'd come back for example and say like, hey, I found this cool thing it is X, Y and Z and I think that would be great for A, B and C for the marketing department, and Trey might be like, oh, that's really cool, but I could also see how we could use that in, you know, A, B and C with our clients here at Center for Sales Strategy. So it was really a really cool way to collaborate and we all found different things and it was awesome. It was really great.
Matt Sunshine:Yeah, I would say that we certainly, as a company, have did, did then, and have now embraced an AI, embraced an AI mentality. Right, I don't think that we're scared of the technology. I think we embrace that. That does not mean that we adopt every single AI that is out there, but it does mean that we are open to looking to see how AI could help us to improve. With that said, can you give me or can you share a specific example, perhaps a recommendation that the task force had and what it looks like today in action? Have we implemented it?
Brent Tripp:Yeah, no, absolutely Absolutely. So I think the first thing that I'd say is I think I've already mentioned a little bit, but I think we did a pretty good job, at least you know, both for the entire organization, also in our own individual teams kind of like educating everyone in terms of how they can practically use these tools in their everyday responsibilities, everyday duties. So so we, when I know I've already kind of talked about this a little bit, but there was a certain intimidation factor, people didn't know what this was. There was a certain leeryness. It's like what did this tool takes something that I tell and it can. It can generate an entire. It can generate an entire workflow of emails for me in two seconds. I don't know about that. So I think we did a good job of kind of mitigating any of that leeriness, any of that intimidation factor that may have been present in some of our team members. May or may not have been, I don't know, because we're like you said, we're very forward thinking in this way. So we did a good job of educating, but we also, I think, one of the main takeaways that we spread throughout the company and people probably are familiar with this by now I think it's still relevant, even though it might sound cliche is we emphasize that. You know these tools are capable of absolutely amazing things, but we should not rely on them completely. You know there's. You can't expect just to input something, get something out and be like, ok, that's it, my job's done. These tools are here to make us better at what we do, not replace what we do Right, and so so there has to be a, a human touch involved in this process. Because if it's just AI, I can tell you just from having reviewed so many different AI tools and AI generated content it is beyond obvious to me these days whenever there is something that is just raw AI that was slapped up on the Internet, like it's these, they all have different or familiar ways, I should say, of phrasing sentences, the certain words they use that are very familiar. So it's very obvious whenever you do not edit and do not add your own personal touch to things that AI generates. So that's a big thing we recommended.
Brent Tripp:Another thing that we kind of hammered home and it's still an evolving process is your prompts matter. You know, I feel like when chat GBT first came out, I'm saying chat GBT a lot, but that's just. Like you know, it's ubiquitous and it's kind of like the basis of what spawned all these different evolutions. But when tools like that first came out, if someone were curious and they and they're like, oh, let's see what this is about, and they typed in a simple prompt, you know, like, write me an email that does this, does A, b and C. It might not generate a great response for you. You might be like, well, okay, I mean, it's an email but it's not specific, it doesn't? Well, you didn't write a specific prompt, you know. So we kind of hammered home how you prompt these things matters, and prompting AI tools is an art form in and of itself to this day.
Brent Tripp:And the last thing, that the most tangible and I certainly can't take credit for this idea, but the initial concept of what would become this universe sales strategies, sales accelerator AI tool was born out of the AI task force meetings. And for those who don't know, you know sales accelerator AI is our own tool here at CSS. It don't know you know Sales Accelerator AI is our own tool here at CSS. It helps salespeople, you know, refine their valid business reasons, create really great sales emails to prospects. You know, generates awesome thought-provoking questions for needs analysis, meetings, almost any aspect of a salesperson's daily routine.
Brent Tripp:Sales Accelerator AI can help them work smarter and faster in that way. And what's different between Sales Accelerator AI can help them work smarter and faster in that way. And what's different between Sales Accelerator AI and, let's say, gemini or ChatGPT is that Sales Accelerator AI is a closed tool, which means it's trained exclusively on our own proprietary information here at CSS, our own training resources, that kind of thing, versus Gemini, which scours the entire internet to give you a result. So, um, yeah, without the task force, you know, we we might not have reached that idea as quickly or at all. So, uh, that's kind of the most tangible result from the task force.
Matt Sunshine:Yeah, I, I agree with that exact. I don't know if we would have come up with that idea, or or certainly not as fast as we came up with it. That was such a clear, unanimous, very well thought out idea that the task force had. Where a problem was identified, a solution was identified. All everything had been thought out. Where a problem was identified, a solution was identified, everything had been thought out.
Matt Sunshine:And I remember when the AI task force made that presentation, it was one of those moments that, I think, changes the course of history for the company. It was, boy, this is the right thing to do right now. We need to put resources behind it to make it happen, and I think from the moment that the task force made that presentation and everyone agreed it was the right thing to do, to the moment it launched Six months. Yeah, I mean, we put resources behind it and we built it, and it's still, I think, probably certainly one of the shining stars.
Matt Sunshine:So, whether a company leans in, as you've been describing, to AI with something like a task force or some other version of that, or they lean out and say you know what? We're not participating in any of this. We're going to be. We're going to sit, we're going to be on the sidelines and just watch. Influences the culture of the business, of the business. How did, or how has the AI task force influenced the company culture with regard to its approach on innovation? How do you do you think it's made an impact?
Brent Tripp:I think so I mean, and I think the main way it's made an impact is that it's it's deepened and maybe emphasized a certain mindset that I think we kind of already have as an organization and you said it earlier which is curiosity, right, and I think we already do a great job of thinking about what are the best ways we can adapt as an organization, what are the best ways we can evolve to do the best work possible.
Brent Tripp:And I think the AI task force just the very existence of the AI task force kind of communicated that message throughout the organization.
Brent Tripp:And one thing that I really appreciate is, like, personally, one of my goals in life is to always stay curious about absolutely everything. Because it's so, it's so easy to resort to judgment or raising your eyebrow and skepticism of something that's new and like what I don't know it can do what I don't think that's right for us. You know, I don't, you know it. Just, you instantly just clam up, feel like whenever judgment enters the picture, and that's on a personal level, on an organizational level. If there's this newfangled AI craze, well, you want to know whether it's real or whether it's hype, and if you have a company that's willing to lean into that, to investigate that and to report back. You know, I think it just kind of transmits the fact that, yes, we're a curious organization and and our curiosity is, will always be a part of what drives us, and so I think that I think it did a good job of transmitting that to everybody.
Matt Sunshine:Yeah. Last question for you is I know when people listen to this, uh, there are going to be plenty of people out there that are like, wow, I think we should do that in our company, like that would be a good thing for us to do with, you know. And so what advice would you give to other organizations, other businesses, who maybe haven't fully explored all the capabilities that AI, all the AI tools out there and all the different capabilities that AI has?
Brent Tripp:What advice would you give to them? Well, I'd say that it's not too late to explore these tools, because there are businesses out there, for whatever reasons, that are still kind of resistant to using these tools. There's a myriad of reasons, but I'd say it's worth exploring them because people far smarter than me have said this and I couldn't agree more. I feel like we're living in a window of time where smaller teams, smaller companies, all of a sudden have the capabilities to compete with much larger teams, much larger companies, and I don't know if this little window of time is going to last forever. I don't think it's going to last forever, but the sooner you investigate these tools, the sooner you figure out what tools can work best for you and what your organization is doing, the sooner you can compete with those much bigger teams and the sooner you can make a three-person team have the productivity of a 10, 15-person team. So I think we're living in that moment right now and the opportunity is there for the taking.
Brent Tripp:And, if you know not I'm in no way trying to toot our own horn at all but I think if organizations are out there that haven't fully explored these tools, for whatever reason, I say maybe try an ai task force. You don't have to publicize everybody, just just connect a few different people together, your company, see if they're interested in exploring these things and see what they report back. They may report back and you may find things that aren't right for you. That's cool. But they may report back and you may find out that you can create your very own tool or something or completely change how you do these different operations and stuff. So, yeah, we're living in a window of time that you can compete against much bigger companies and bigger teams and it's there for the taking if you want it.
Matt Sunshine:Yeah, and that's exactly right. Very, very well said, that's exactly right. Very, very well said, brent, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing with us your perspective of the AI task force, from someone who was a big part of the AI task force. So thanks for doing that and thanks for being a guest on the show. For anybody that wants to get in contact with Brent, brent's information will be in the show notes. You can email him there or link connect with him on LinkedIn there, and I know Brent well enough to know that anyone that reaches out will certainly get a response.
Matt Sunshine:We're we're always like to be helpful, and with that, I just want to thank everybody for listening and for joining us. We look forward to seeing you on our next episode of the Improving Sales Performance podcast. This has been Improving Sales Performance. Thanks for listening. If you like what you heard, join us every week by clicking the subscribe button. For more on the topics covered in the show, visit our website, thecenterforsalesstrategycom. There you can find helpful resources and content aimed at improving your sales performance. Thank you.
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