When it comes to AI, we all are drinking from the firehose now. Personally, I’m focusing on marketing, or, more specifically, using AI to increase revenue.
I recently ran across an article I wrote in 1997 in my newsletter, Marketing Technology about emerging AI technologies and the new world we are learning to live in now. One of the big messages in that article was that when it comes to buyer behavior, some things don’t change.
The main thing that doesn’t change is that buyers want sellers to treat them as they’d like to be treated.
In other words, the Golden Rule.
As we marketers teach chatbots how to interact with humans, we are certainly teaching them to be polite. But there is a more profound need that we must meet so the chatbots interact in an intelligent, relevant, and helpful way.
We, the chatbot programmers, must actually and personally KNOW our customers. Just as we needed to—even before we all became chatbot programmers.
The trouble is that very few marketers interview their customers.
Instead, they create personas in windowless rooms. The result is copy that reads like marketing blah-blah, and now, with chatbots conversing with customers, those conversations can easily fall into the same category.
Which violates another rule: Garbage In, Garbage Out.
If you’re trying to increase your revenue, nothing—absolutely nothing—is as important as understanding the buyer’s Mindset when they set out to buy.
This consists of their desires, concerns, and questions. These three elements are very specific to your customers, your company, your products and services.
Even if your competitors sell the exact same products or services, people will choose to buy from you because you make it easy for them to understand what you’re selling and make a purchase. You do a good job of explaining how you go to great lengths to satisfy their needs, address their concerns, and answer their very specific questions. You hire good people who genuinely care about customers and their experience with your company, and your processes and systems are designed for customer satisfaction.
If you interview your customers correctly—and you only have to interview 5 to 7 customers of a given type to get bankable insights—you can reverse-engineer your successful sales and create new sales in quantity. (Note: I explain this process, developed and perfected over thousands of customer interviews for hundreds of companies, in my book. I’ve also covered it in this guide.)
AND, everything that you program into your chatbots will be right in sync with your buyer’s Mindset. Not irrelevant garbage, in other words.
Then, you can use AI to support the buying process even more efficiently (and amazingly fast) than before. This is much wiser than building complex AI-driven automations that distribute off-target, irrelevant messaging even more widely.
