Episode 391: Personalization at Scale: Turning AI into Advisory Intelligence

Intro

0:00:18 – (Bob Woods): Welcome to the Making Sales Social podcast featuring the top voices in sales, marketing, and business. Join Brynne Tillman and me, Bob Woods, as we each bring you the best tips and strategies our guests teach their clients so you can leverage them for your own virtual and social selling. This episode of the Making Sales Social podcast is brought to you by Social Sales Link, the company that helps you start more trust-based conversations without being salesy through the power of LinkedIn and AI. Start your journey for free by joining our resource library. Welcome to the show.

0:00:53 – (Brynne Tillman): Welcome back to Making Sales Social. I am so excited about our guest today. I shared a stage with her at Outbound, and can I just tell you, I had more notes from her presentation than any presentation I’ve ever been to. Absolutely brilliant. Amy Franko helps mid-market organizations improve growth results through sales strategy, advisory, and skill development programs. Her book The Modern Seller is an Amazon bestseller, and LinkedIn recognizes her as a top sales voice. Amy, welcome to the show.

0:01:29 – (Amy Franko): It is so great to be here, and I love sharing the stage with you, too. That was so much fun, and we need to do it again.

0:01:37 – (Brynne Tillman): Okay.

0:01:38 – (Amy Franko): All right, I’m in. We’ll figure it out.

0:01:41 – (Brynne Tillman): I’m in. That’s awesome. Well, you know, I ask all of our guests one question before we get started: What does Making Sales Social mean to you?

0:01:56 – (Amy Franko): To me, it means in today’s day and age, finding ways to, in an age of technology, so much information, AI, like everything that we’re talking about, it’s finding the ways to be really intentional, to build rapport and then create value for a long term relationship. And it’s a broad definition because there are so many ways that you can do it. And as sales professionals and sales leaders, that’s part of our role to figure out how, the how of that.

0:02:25 – (Amy Franko): But it’s, it’s creating better relationships in a world of lots of tech and lots of information.

0:02:33 – (Brynne Tillman): I love that. And that’s a new definition we haven’t heard. And we’ve been doing this for over 300 episodes. So that’s awesome. I love it. I love it. You know, the biggest topic right now in sales is how to authentically bring in AI? Now you have another AI acronym, Advisory Intelligence. And that really kind of brings in how you think of sales personalization. Can you talk a little bit about that?

0:03:04 – (Amy Franko): Yeah. So yes, I think about using things like artificial intelligence to create advisory intelligence, AI to create AI, if you will. I think we can use both of those things to create better personalization. Which then ties back to your original question. How do we make this more social and build better relationships? So to me, sales personalization it’s two things. First, it’s your personal plan to create success.

0:03:32 – (Amy Franko): Elite sellers create a personal plan to be successful outside of the sales quota that they’ve been assigned, outside of the requirements of their company. But the other part, which I think is probably where we’ll go down the path today, is with our clients and prospects. And that’s our ability to basically take a territory or vertical, find patterns quickly, and then use those patterns to create better interactions with our prospects and our clients, if we can nail that.

0:04:03 – (Amy Franko): Because part of our job is sifting through lots of information and making sense of it for our clients and prospects. If we can do that and turn it into something of interest for that other person and think of that person as a person, not just a buyer or as a decision maker, being able to do that well will help any seller be successful.

0:04:26 – (Brynne Tillman): I love it, and I love that you said that. I am doing my very best to stop calling these people leads.

0:04:34 – (Amy Franko): Leads, prospects, targets, decision makers, buyers. I use the same vernacular, and I think all of us probably do, but like in our minds, these are people. And how do we? That’s part of personalization is interrupting that pattern.

0:04:52 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. And you know, it’s interesting because with social and LinkedIn and websites and the ability to like research, we have qualified them or pre-qualified them based on all of these factors. But one of the factors is that we rarely use the question of who they are as a human? So, that to me is so important. So I love what you’re saying. I feel like that personalization is what will get the curious salespeople to truly be successful.

0:05:28 – (Brynne Tillman): They’re not curious. They’re going to keep going after leads.

0:05:32 – (Amy Franko): Yeah. You know, that’s a great point, which is that the curiosity and the genuine interest, if we come from it, from that place, that kind of naturally leads us to be willing to take the extra step, to do the little bit of extra research or homework that we need to do.

0:05:50 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. So I love that. I think that kind of bridges to my next question, which is, why do so many salespeople struggle with personalization?

0:06:03 – (Amy Franko): Yeah, there’s probably a lot of different paths that we can go down here. So, if I could maybe parse this into two paths. The first path is kind of the bigger picture. The way a lot of organizations are structured and the quarterly results, the large Territories, verticals that a lot of sales professionals cover strategically, can make personalization a challenge. That’s a. That’s a big thing to solve. But if I. If I take that and think about the sales professionals themselves, it’s typically time. Because something like this does take more time.

0:06:43 – (Amy Franko): I would say there’s a rush to produce because we’re racing toward quarterly numbers, half numbers, what, whatever your organization is organized as. But also there’s a skill piece to it, which is being able to quickly pattern find and find the trends and information and then connect that to something that would be important, potentially important to a client, a prospective client. So those are my. Those are things I’ve learned about myself along the personalization journey. And I do see those same patterns in clients I work with or prospects I’m talking to.

0:07:22 – (Brynne Tillman): That’s so interesting. One of the things I see is that they struggle is they think fast is better than. Right.

0:07:30 – (Amy Franko): Yeah. Yes.

0:07:32 – (Brynne Tillman): Right. Like, if I just throw enough on the wall, something’s gonna. Something will stick.

0:07:38 – (Amy Franko): But.

0:07:38 – (Brynne Tillman): But is it. Is it exactly what you wanted? What do you want to stick to the wall? Right. Like, so one of the tenets that we promote is slow down your outreach to speed up your outcome.

0:07:52 – (Amy Franko): That. I love that. And it works. It’s true.

0:07:56 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that personalization, I think, is so important. And, you know, one thing I do is I look at my inbound and what am I responding to? Because I probably get 400 emails a day. It’s overwhelming. But I do respond to some. So when I do, I’m like, what about this made me respond? And it’s. Somewhere along the line, I felt like they understood me.

0:08:23 – (Amy Franko): Yeah. Especially if someone’s reaching out to you, that there’s a request. It’s a. I want to talk with you about a product or a solution. Eventually. Yeah. There. There has to be something in there that says, Ooh, this is worth having a conversation and investing the time to do it.

0:08:39 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. And for me, as a consumer, the personalization is. I understand the challenge you have right now. Not, I have a solution. Right. Like, I understand. I mean, it’s assumed if you’re going to talk about the challenge that you have, that solution.

0:08:55 – (Amy Franko): Yeah.

0:08:55 – (Brynne Tillman): But that’s what I tend to resonate with from a personalization perspective. I just thought I’d throw that out. But there are many, many, many, many different elements around personalization. Right. And that’s one. What are some other ways or elements that salespeople can go out into the world to identify that they can use in the personalization side of their communication?

0:09:21 – (Amy Franko): Yeah. And as I was thinking about this question, I’m going to look at it through the lens of a specific vertical or an opportunity, maybe that someone’s pursuing. But we can take it in a lot of different directions. When I think about a challenge that somebody needs to solve, and if we’re going to determine whether or not I’m the right fit or it’s something that I want to, you know, I’m in a position to help them solve, there are typically five things that I’m trying to figure out.

0:09:51 – (Amy Franko): And you could take this in any opportunity, any vertical. You can apply it in a lot of different ways. The first is I’ll go back to that advisory intelligence, which is what’s my level of knowledge about the industry, the organization, the individual. To your point, that leads me down the path that we could work together. How can. How can I solve their problem? Do I know that I can do that? There’s also the specifics of understanding opportunity quality, which is the second thing.

0:10:20 – (Amy Franko): There does have to be quality there in order to pursue it. Which comes back to your point about slowing things down to ultimately speed them up. We pursue a lot of opportunities that aren’t the right fit or of poor quality because we’re trying to do quantity. And if we look at quality, we’ll be able to better gauge and win the opportunity. The third piece of personalization is understanding the relationship, ecosystems inside and outside of the organization, with that particular individual or the group that might be looking to buy what it is that I bring to the table.

0:10:58 – (Amy Franko): The fourth is a compelling solution. We can’t, we can’t win without a compelling solution. We often get there too quickly, like we’re thinking about it. And because we know we’ve seen this a million times. Right. But we do ultimately have to get to something compelling that makes sense to the person and actually solves the problem they’re looking to solve. And then the last thing is understanding what the commitments are that are needed.

0:11:23 – (Amy Franko): What do I need to get from you, and what do you need to get from me in order for us to decide that? That this is the right thing to pursue. So. So those are the five that I focus on in a discrete opportunity or in a territory or vertical.

0:11:37 – (Brynne Tillman): You said something magical, and it kind of just was so fast. I’m going to come back to this.

0:11:43 – (Amy Franko): You know, slow it down.

0:11:45 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. No, but it’s a point that I want to emphasize that I think like my mic, every time I hear you, there’s a Mic chop or two. Right. Compelling is not what you think is compelling; it’s what they think is compelling. So if you are going at this too soon, it is not, it is not necessarily compelling for them. So I don’t, I’m not articulating the aha moment that I’m feeling exactly, but the idea is you cannot call it compelling.

0:12:27 – (Brynne Tillman): That only they can.

0:12:30 – (Amy Franko): Yeah. And I’m thinking of an example. This just happened to me a couple of weeks ago. So there’s a, there’s a potential client that I’m having some conversations with, and this is an example of slowing it down to speed it up. Because we are kind of, we were having several conversations and getting to a point where they wanted to see a solution of some kind. I’m somebody, I’m okay with not having all the information to put together ideas to discuss, but I also try not to go into the conversation running on the assumption that this is the thing we’re going to decide on. There’s likely going to be some changes.

0:13:07 – (Amy Franko): So when we went into this conversation, it’s what I had provided. The ideas I had provided weren’t quite hitting the mark. Kind of to your point. Like we, we had kind of rushed to get to this, which, you know, sometimes that happens. But everybody was good, the client included, in kind of slowing it down. Let’s do a little bit more homework together, and then let’s come back and fine-tune it. And I actually fine-tuned it with the client live.

0:13:34 – (Amy Franko): Then I went back, put it into a proposal, represented it, if you will. But we had to slow some things down, and you have to be able to have that personalization and that rapport relationship to do that. Otherwise, you’re just trying to push something through that isn’t going to be compelling.

0:13:52 – (Brynne Tillman): I love that. So, another one of our tenants is detached from what the prospect is worth to you and attached to what you are worth to the prospect. Don’t look at what our proposal is going to look like from my commission perspective, but what is this going to look like from a solution perspective? And what you did in working live with them to come up with that solution. They’ve already agreed to it before they get that proposal. In a way.

0:14:23 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. Like, at this point, they said these are the things we need. Yes. So you’re going to eliminate your negotiation. You’re gonna like. To me, Amy, that is so friggin brilliant. Like, even if I think that’s something that we should try to do in our sales, even if we don’t have to slow it down. The idea that they participated in. In what we’re going to propose as the delivery that takes away so many objections, takes away so much negotiation that might happen, takes away even some price. Objection to. Because chances are, you got the ROI of this in that conversation, too.

0:15:09 – (Amy Franko): Yes. And your comments just jogged a thought, which is probably somebody watching or listening to this right now might be saying, that is great, but I have this huge territory, this huge vertical whatever that I’m calling into. How do I take that and make it scalable, make it a little bit easier to execute? So, if I kind of pull back the curtain on it, I have templated approaches that I use. I’m always looking for ways to make things more efficient, but the key is that that efficiency can’t be at the cost of still making it personal.

0:15:47 – (Amy Franko): So even though I have specific elements and specific approaches that I use each and every time, I personalize those approaches. So I kind of balance that efficiency with the personalization. So for somebody who’s asking, like, well, how do you do that? I build processes and templates, and things that I use over and over again. But I really try not to. It’s a goal. I want somebody to think that that was designed specifically for them, because it really was.

0:16:14 – (Amy Franko): But I’m putting processes in place to make it simpler for myself.

0:16:19 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it’s. It. Reinventing the wheel every time is not personalization. Right.

0:16:26 – (Amy Franko): Like, it’s exhausting.

0:16:30 – (Brynne Tillman): And I think having a process and a framework, it can also be a B test, what’s working and what’s not working. Like, if you are personalizing everything from scratch, you can’t test what works and what doesn’t work.

0:16:43 – (Amy Franko): Yeah.

0:16:44 – (Brynne Tillman): You can’t improve because you don’t know why that one worked if you didn’t have a framework or a process. So I love that you do that.

0:16:53 – (Amy Franko): Yeah. And back to the pattern piece. Every time I have an interaction with a prospect or a client, I go through this process. I learned something, or I identified a pattern that I can use next time. So it’s every interaction, every scenario builds on itself, and you can pull a pattern from it that you could use for the next time.

0:17:11 – (Brynne Tillman): I love that you call it a pattern. I never heard that used. And that’s what it is. I always say framework, but a pattern is so visual. Right. That’s. I love that.

0:17:24 – (Amy Franko): And the pattern might be, how did I create it? What was my thought process, the pattern might be? How many conversations did it take for us? To get to, you know, the end result. So, looking for those patterns, we can kind of interrupt the ones that don’t work, but keep doing and amplify the ones that are getting you to where you want to go.

0:17:45 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. In the olden days, we would say stop, start, and continue.

0:17:49 – (Amy Franko): Yeah. Something that you said earlier, I want to come back around to, which is that one of your tenants about, like.

0:17:58 – (Brynne Tillman): Slowing down your outreach to speed up your outcome.

0:18:02 – (Amy Franko): Yes. Because if we slow down our outreach and we’re more thoughtful about it, we might have two or five or ten great conversations in a day, you know, depending on what. What is your role in an organization? I’d rather have two or three really excellent conversations than five to ten mediocre ones. And that’s a different way of thinking. And so that slowing down can be really hard for us to do because we are just conditioned to move quickly.

0:18:32 – (Amy Franko): So intentionally slowing down, that. That’s it. Like, you really have to make yourself do it.

0:18:38 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. And I’m the reverse of whatever procrastinator is because it makes me nuts. It’s like I constantly go, I gotta get done, gotta get it done. So sometimes I do things way too fast because it’s the check mark on my to-do list that rewards me.

0:18:56 – (Amy Franko): Yes, I can relate.

0:18:58 – (Brynne Tillman): So. So that’s a good lesson for me. So I love that. So, you know, I know you’ve talked a lot about the different types of personal selling strategies. Can you just give us a little taste of that?

0:19:09 – (Amy Franko): Yeah, absolutely. So if I think about the. Nick, if I think about the different scenarios that we are presented with, and I. If I look for the patterns in my own client work, there are typically three types of sales scenarios that I come up against the most. There is. There’s a transactional sale, there’s a solution sale, and then there’s a consultative sale. And counterintuitively, each of them can have its elements of personalization.

0:19:41 – (Amy Franko): But what I have found helpful and will offer up as a strategy for those watching or listening. Take a look at your last few opportunities that you worked on. What elements of those opportunities were like, transactional or solution-oriented? Which of those were really consultative? It’s the consultative ones that give us the opportunity for personalization. But if we can look for the ways in a solution sale or a transactional sale, we can find ways to personalize it, even though they might be more transactional or move more quickly.

0:20:17 – (Amy Franko): So. So that would be. Be what I would offer up as a way to look at your sales consultative solution or transactional solution.

0:20:25 – (Brynne Tillman): I love that. And I think all of us could hit even. No matter how complex your simple your sale is, I think there are different times in the sales cycle where you’re hitting it, kind of can overlap a little time.

0:20:38 – (Amy Franko): Yeah. Like I’m thinking of a client right now that I’ve worked with for a long time. And when you’ve worked with a client for a long time, I think there’s that risk of it becoming transactional. Like you’re just writing a new statement of work every year or every six months or for the project, whatever. And the realization that I had was, gosh, I really could do more to personalize this relationship with the client. It’s a big organization.

0:21:05 – (Amy Franko): There’s probably lots of opportunity. So what I did was, and they had some change in leadership. So I took that as an opportunity to really re-engage with the leaders in the organization and spend some time with them. And it might be conversations like this on Zoom. Occasionally, it’s breakfast or lunch. But that has helped me to not only build better relationships there and take the transaction out of what we were doing, but we’ll find more ways to work together.

0:21:34 – (Amy Franko): Just because, like to your point, I slowed down the outreach, and now I’m seeing the fruits of that slowing down.

0:21:41 – (Brynne Tillman): Wow. We covered a lot. And as we’re coming wrapping this up, what is one question I should have asked you that I didn’t?

0:21:51 – (Amy Franko): Probably one thing that we can talk about is what’s maybe a tangible next step that somebody could take along the lines of personalization. So, of course, in my style, I always have two. I never just have one, Brynne. I always have two.

0:22:05 – (Brynne Tillman): I love it.

0:22:06 – (Amy Franko): But, but I would say one is to just look at your upcoming sales conversations for the week. I think the sales conversation is such an opportunity to personalize and find a way to tailor that conversation, and if possible, set aside some time in the agenda with that person. At the end, it could be five minutes to talk about something related. But different. That’s a way to personalize. And then secondly, we all send lots of email messages and text messages to prospects and clients all day, every day.

0:22:40 – (Amy Franko): Find a way to personalize that communication. And personalizing doesn’t have to be personal information. I want to clarify that it can be something that personalizes the challenge or the problem that they have or the industry that they’re in. So it’s, it’s professional personalization, if you will.

0:23:01 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah, I’m going to just throw out my little LinkedIn tip. Check out their profile. What content are they engaging in, sharing? Who do they follow? There are so many ways for us to find out what matters to them and just kind of sneak that into the conversation.

0:23:15 – (Amy Franko): Oh, absolutely. Every time I have a conversation with somebody, that is oftentimes one of the first places that I go because that’s going to give me just a window into what’s interesting to them. So absolutely.

0:23:28 – (Brynne Tillman): I love this. Amy, you’re brilliant. I just adore you. I think any sales organization that is looking to improve needs to have a conversation with you.

0:23:38 – (Amy Franko): So thank you.

0:23:39 – (Brynne Tillman): I mean it.

0:23:42 – (Amy Franko): Like, I know and I. But I really do appreciate that. Thank you for saying that.

0:23:46 – (Brynne Tillman): So, so now they’re listening. Like, okay, how do I get in touch with Amy? How do they get in touch with you?

0:23:51 – (Amy Franko): So two ways, of course. LinkedIn, Amy Franko on LinkedIn or Amy Franko.com Franko with a K. Wonderful.

0:23:59 – (Brynne Tillman): Thank you so much. And to all our listeners, when you’re out and about, don’t forget to make your sales social.

Outro:

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