For the last 15 years, marketing & sales leaders have championed everything ‘at scale’ and ‘automated’ damn near every tactic, channel or hack imaginable. And what have we to show for this effort? Buyer indifference. Longer sales cycles. <30% sales quota attainment.
Sam Altman, a CMO and a CEO walk into a bar…
Before Sam can get the word LLM out of his mouth, the CMO drops everything, hastily deploys an untested AI ‘solution’ while the CEO calls his CFO, fires everyone in marketing & sales and replaces with a ChatGPT agent.
Solutions looking for problems.
From my b2b marketing & sales perspective, the startup community building off and growing around public LLMs like ChatGPT is too focused on efficiencies over outcomes. Once again creating scale (remember above?) while reducing t&e at all costs. The easy to identify use case over the gamechanger. And caveat emptor: remember the results I mentioned above? Well, that’s the data set being scrapped today to train these new miracle models.
And therein lies the potential trap. No other industry so quickly discards proven fundamentals for the new and the untested. Two generations of marketing & sales professionals have been modeled to suspend critical thinking (too slow) and trained only to ‘send this’ or ‘say this’ when the software ‘sees this’. What happens to our profession if/when the cost of creativity, originality, adaptability, and most importantly knowledge reaches zero?
I am not some old man yelling at clouds. I’m excited and look forward to the advances and maturity of generativeAI models to empower our profession, not destroy it.
J. Robert Slaughter 