The Chief Sales Energizer Reveals Her 3-Step Framework for Strategic AI Implementation

How EI + AI = Your Return on Intelligence to Accelerate Your Sales

The Brutal Truth About Your Sales AI Investment

You’ve probably invested thousands in AI sales tools, hoping they’d transform your results. Maybe you’re even seeing some improvement.

But if you’re honest, you’re also dealing with more complexity, frustrated team members, and the nagging feeling that you’re missing something fundamental.

Here’s what Alice Heiman discovered that changes everything: Most AI sales implementations fail because they’re “random acts of AI.” Technology without strategy, tools without foundation, artificial intelligence without the emotional intelligence to guide it effectively.

I introduced you to the concept of EI + AI = ROI: Your Return on Intelligence, a couple of weeks ago in my conversation with Dr. Robin Hills, on episode #529.

Today’s show demonstrates its effectiveness in sales through Alice’s three-step approach that starts with the CEO investing their business intuition coupled with real-world customer insights, amplified by technology.

But the human sales strategy must come before the AI activation.

Your sales acumen combined with artificial intelligence is what generates the most important ROI of all: Your Return on Intelligence. It’s that return that drives typical ROI, or return on investment.

Meet Alice Heiman: The Chief Sales Energizer Who Gets Results

Alice Heiman has spent her career elevating sales performance to increase company valuation for B2B organizations with exceptional growth potential.

As host of “Sales Talk for CEOs” with over 150 episodes and a teacher at the University of Nevada’s entrepreneurship program, Alice works directly with CEOs and sales leadership to build strategies that find new business and grow existing accounts.

What makes Alice different?

She’s not selling you another AI tool.

She’s showing you how to think strategically about the tools you already have, and the ones you’re considering.

Alice’s 3-Step Strategic AI Implementation Framework

In this game-changing conversation, Alice reveals her systematic approach to AI implementation that prevents costly mistakes while maximizing results.

Her framework demonstrates the practical application of my EI + AI = ROI concept in sales strategy:

Step 1: CEO Strategy Ownership “If your sales suck, it’s the CEO’s fault,” says Alice. This isn’t about blame. It’s about taking full responsibility for sales strategy before implementing any technology. You must develop a positioning strategy FIRST, then choose tools that support your vision.

Step 2: Customer-First Intelligence Gathering “Talk to your customers, don’t rely on AI to understand them,” Alice insists. While everyone else uses AI to guess what customers want, successful organizations build genuine customer insights as the foundation for AI enhancement.

Step 3: AI as Strategic Amplifier “AI is an amplifier, not a replacement,” Alice explains. The breakthrough happens when you use artificial intelligence to scale your human effectiveness rather than replace your human judgment. Quality targeting beats volume every time.

The Strategy-First Insights That Will Transform Your Approach

Alice reveals counterintuitive truths that challenge conventional AI wisdom:

Why “Random Acts of AI” Destroy Sales Performance: Most organizations implement tools without a strategic foundation, hoping technology will solve problems that require human emotional intelligence first.

The Customer Connection Advantage: While competitors rely on AI assumptions, you’ll gain a competitive advantage through direct customer insight combined with AI amplification.

The Future Leadership Model: Alice predicts C-suite autonomy and expertise will replace traditional pyramid leadership structures, requiring new strategic thinking.

Human Connection Amplification: Why face-to-face engagement enhanced by AI beats AI-generated email sequences in building lasting business relationships.

What’s In It For You

After listening to Alice, you’ll walk away with specific strategies you can implement immediately:

  • CEO Leadership Playbook: Specific actions for taking ownership of your sales AI strategy instead of delegating it to vendors
  • Strategy-Before-Tools Implementation Guide: Alice’s proven methodology for preventing “random acts of AI” and ensuring strategic foundation
  • Customer Intelligence Framework: How to build genuine customer insights that become the foundation for effective AI enhancement
  • Quality-Over-Volume Methodology: Targeting and personalization strategies that outperform mass AI-generated outreach
  • Human-AI Collaboration Tactics: Practical ways to enhance your personal effectiveness with AI support while maintaining authentic relationships
  • Future-Proofing Strategies: How to position your organization for the leadership evolution Alice predicts is coming

Chapters:

  • 00:00 Introduction and Branding Insights
  • 03:00 The Role of AI in Sales Strategy
  • 06:02 Navigating the Future of Leadership
  • 08:52 The Importance of Emotional Intelligence in AI
  • 11:46 Rethinking Sales Practices with AI
  • 15:10 The Dangers of Misusing AI in Sales
  • 17:48 Ensuring Accuracy and Accountability with AI
  • 23:21 Understanding AI’s Role in Business Strategy
  • 25:14 Strategic Planning and Positioning in Sales
  • 29:26 Customer Engagement and Understanding Needs
  • 33:14 Practical Applications of AI in Sales
  • 37:00 The Evolution of Content Creation with AI
  • 43:11 Sales Strategy: The Human Element in AI

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Transcript of Show:

Park Howell: Alice, welcome to the show.

Alice Heiman: My gosh, pleasure to be here again. You know, I always love to chat with you.

Park: Well, it’s great having you back because you do so much amazing work. mean, you are the rock star of sales strategy, sales consulting, the sales energizer. I love that moniker. You must have just given yourself that. I’ve not seen that before.

Alice: Yeah, I forgot who said that. And then I was like, chief sales energizer. I love that.

Park: I love that. That’s where I got mine, the world’s most industrious storyteller. had a client tell me that one day and I go, I love that. I’m going to take that. So.

Alice: Yeah!

Alice: It is, it’s a really good one. you you helped me so much with my brand when I wanted to kind of pick things up and do a better job and redo my website. And the words that you gave me, I still use today every single time someone introduces me or I put information out, it’s on my LinkedIn. And the short words are, I elevate sales to increase valuation.

Park: There it is. There’s the bottom line.

Alice: Right now who I do it for, of course you can add that on tech CEOs, right? But if somebody says, what do you do? It’s like, Hey, I elevate your sales to increase your valuation. they say, how do you do that? Right? That’s remarkable. That’s a story in a short little sentence.

Park: It is. It is. That’s the ultimate teaser right there. The other one I really liked and it was the position you came back to me with after we worked through everything is you said, know who I’m really working with are CEOs. It’s not so much the sales enablement people. mean, I can help them and I can help the chief marketing officer, but it’s really the the CEO. you said this and I love this line. If your CEO and your sales suck, it’s your

Alice: Yes.

Park: fault.

Alice: Yeah, it’s true though. It’s so true, right? The sales, the CEO is usually the sales prevention department and they don’t even know it, right? I mean, it’s just crazy, right? But yeah, I think when I niched into CEOs, it, I’m going to say, I know for sure my revenue increase and my profitability increased, but also everything just got easier, right? Because I was, you helped me with that. It’s like I was just speaking to one,

Park: The sales prevention department.

Alice: audience only and it became so much easier when I was more kind of sales general and talking to you know, VPs of sales or see him like a group of people. It was so hard, but now I just speak to CEOs and it makes it easy for me to write everything that I write because I know who my audience is and I can imagine them in my mind. The CEOs I’ve worked with I kind of conglomerate all of them and then speak to them right so that helped. tremendously also. I want to say one more thing. I know the audience is like, well, okay, what are they going to talk about today? But when we named my podcast, remember we went through so many names and then you said, well, what, what really like, what, what is this? You know, and I’m like, oh, it’s sales talk for CEOs. He goes, well, just let’s call it that then now as a sales talk for CEOs, let’s call it what it is. Cause I had all these other names. Remember? Yeah. Like a list of them. And you’re like, yeah, no, no, no, no.

Park: You

Park: huh. yeah.

Alice: It’s sales talk for CEOs and bam, it works.

Park: Yeah, and your show, you’ve had your show what, for three or four years now?

Alice: Yeah, I think three years now were like, I don’t know, over 150 episodes.

Park: Yeah. And it’s fantastic if you’re in sales at all in any way, shape or form, and you don’t have to be a CEO to pull lots of great Intel from it. So congratulations on that. know it’s not easy producing an ongoing show and having be meaningful people, you know, showing up for us. So congrats. Now today though, since the last time I had you on my show, which was about the time you launched your show, a lot has

Alice: Right. Yeah.

Alice: Yeah. Yeah.

Alice: Yeah, yeah.

Park: changed. And it has changed, of course, with the two letter acronym that everybody seems to be now shying away from, and that is called AI. And here you and I are in the twilights of our careers. We’ve been doing this for over 40 years. No, I’m not. think very experienced, very wise. mean, I call my archetype is the wise fool, right? Because

Alice: yeah.

Alice: Are you calling me old, Perk?

Alice: Yeah, yeah.

Park: I’ve got 40 years of wisdom and I could show up as the fool and, you know, poke people and say, why are doing this? Why are you doing that? What are you doing this? But AI and so many people are reluctant to use it and or are just as you had said, random acts of AI. And so I wanted to get your take on how you were seeing AI helping and hurting sales.

Alice: Yeah.

Alice: Yeah, so this is just a topic I’m so passionate about. I actually did a solo episode the other day on vibe selling, which came from vibe coding. And I’m like, oh, no. You know, like, if you want to listen to that, go ahead. I’m not going to rant about it here. But I will rant about the fact that there’s a lot of hype around AI, a lot of hype. But look, here are the facts.

Park: you

Alice: We are here now in this new industrial revolution where we’ve gone from exponential to quantum, right? And you need to get your brain wrapped around that or your future is going to be pretty dim. Our brains can’t even, right? Our brains can’t even process at that quantum speed that the AI can. So what we have to look at is what is hype and what is real with AI and what can we as CEOs do to harness that power to help propel our companies, right? That’s really what this is all about. So you need to get yourself in a place where you understand the big picture and how you can integrate AI into your strategy to build your future, right? And that is not random acts of AI, like, gosh, we got this. tool for our salespeople so they can write better emails to spam people with. OK, great. Well, if you don’t train the AI properly, they’re still going to write really bad emails and they’re not going to get a response. So that’s just crappy. Right. And then, you know, another department. I have this AI tool. Tools. What tool? That’s like the bottom of the pyramid. We got to go back to the top part and we got to think about what is the strategy for our company like which means like what is your positioning in the marketplace and how do you maintain it and or grow it, right? So what is your strategy to do that? And then your go-to-market falls, your go-to-market strategy falls out of that. And then you can start to look at now, how can AI help us? And then what tools might we use? And I’ll tell, just one more pet peeve and then I’ll be quiet, but. These tools are not plug and play. You don’t just randomly give them to people and think they know how to use them. It’s like any other tool. We have to train people. We have to give them guidelines. They have to be in the handbook. This is how you use these tools. This is what they’re for. This is what they’re not for. This is how you know, and then the training for them. And then we have to retrain and then we have to have expectations and hold people accountable, right? Otherwise, it’s just here’s another expensive tool we’re paying for.

Park: So it goes back to the old fashioned days of three weeks ago where you have to start with strategy. First and foremost, to sit down in the room and you can actually use AI for discovery and research and you’ve got to vet what’s coming in to make sure that it’s accurate, but you’ve got to do the good old fashioned brainstorming and figuring out what your strategy really is.

Alice: Yes!

Alice: Yeah, yeah. And I mean, yes, you can use AI to help you with a strategy. What can you do? Well, you can use it to analyze the marketplace, right? You can use it to analyze, you know, some things that are going on in your business. You can use it to gather information on any thing that you want to gather information on. Then you can take that and synthesize it, right? But don’t expect it to build your strategy because your brain, you’re the CEO. You’re the founder, probably. You are. You have the vision, right? So that’s you. Don’t let AI tell you what to do. You have to decide that in your heart. Like, you know, what do I want to do? You know, what do I? How do I want to make a difference? How do I want my company to help me make that difference? How do I want to spend my time making a difference? You better know those things before you put a strategy down because.

Park: Mm-hmm.

Alice: If that strategy takes you in a direction where you’re not going to be happy, how well can your company possibly do? So it starts with you, CEO, founder, and then you build that strategy for your positioning in the marketplace and how to improve it. And then from there, everything else is easier because it just falls out.

Park: You know, it’s emotional intelligence. And a few weeks ago, I had Dr. Hills on the show and he’s an emotional intelligence expert. And we talked about EI first, your emotional intelligence, plus AI, once you figured out what that strategy is, equals a new kind of ROI. And instead of return on investment, we talk about it return on intelligence.

Alice: Yeah.

Alice: Yes.

Alice: Yes.

Park: that it only works if you bring your humanity and your intelligence and then use it, collaborate with AI as a tool to help amplify that and even speed the market, but you got to have your act together before you use it.

Alice: Absolutely. And right now, as we are leaders looking at everything that’s going on in the world, how the marketplace is changing so rapidly, how buyer behavior is changing, and thinking about the future, which is going to look so different even a year, two years, three years from now. I mean, we used to do these like three, five year strategies and nothing really changed that much in that time period. So that worked really well. Throw that out, right? You need like a 10 year and beyond strategy if you want your company to be healthy and you have to be thinking about the changes that are coming and imagining like follow futurists. I met this amazing futurist. I don’t know. Sometime this year we’ve become fast friends. Her name is Alaysha Abate and you should have her on the show. In fact, I’ll introduce you guys and she’s saying, look, whatever you’ve been doing in the past, right? That’s there and you should absolutely celebrate all of that.

Park: Great.

Alice: but don’t build your future on your past, right? That’s an old way of thinking. And we have to take what we’ve done, celebrate it, and there’s some good things in there, right? And we have to keep running our business while simultaneously building our future. And so it’s a different way that leaders have to think now, doing these things in tandem, because we still have to bring in money every single day, right? So we have to keep that going. But while we’re doing it, we have to be building the future. And AI can certainly help us do that if we understand how to use it properly, which most people just simply do not. They just open chat GPT and ask it questions, or some of them are using good prompts or finding other people’s good prompts and using those. And it’s helping them think differently in some ways. But it’s a piece, a piece, a piece, a piece instead of using AI to be a part of how you’re going to build your future and what does that mean? What does that look like? It’s not just by tools.

Park: Mm Now you were talking about having an eye on that 10 year plan and what does that look like? That things are changing so quickly. How can you have one foot in the 10 year plan world and the other foot in the 10 hour world? Because you were going to have to make all kinds of course adjustments to get there with how it’s changing. How do you go about that?

Alice: Right? Right.

Alice: Yeah, I mean, I’m really just learning right now and Alisha has helped me a lot to think about things differently. But some of the things we have to think about are the way that we lead, right? So the way we lead now today is not the way we will lead in the future. And in fact, I’m listening to this amazing book called Mastering Change. I can’t think of the author’s name right now, but you can look it up. There’s several books by this author and he’s talking about leadership in the future and how it will look different and why, right? Because in the world we live in now, we have this kind of pyramid structure where there’s one person at the top and everybody reports into them somehow, right? Okay, that works okay right now, but it doesn’t work great. And in fact, it hasn’t been for a while. And the proof of that is all the C-level titles that have come into play in the last 10 years, right? Didn’t used to have that. We had a CEO and probably a CFO. And then there was like a VP of marketing, a VP of sales, and a bunch of VPs or director levels. There wasn’t a full C-suite with everybody having a seat at the table, right? The CEO, the chief customer officer, the chief marketing officer, the chief information officer, the chief security officer. I mean, holy cow, like, The C-suite has grown so much. Why? Because the CEO cannot be an expert in everything. And many, many years ago, there weren’t all these other things to have to know so much about, right? So the CEO could run their company and not need a whole C-suite. But now they need experts in every area. And why? Because it’s too much. It’s exponential, right? It’s quantum. And so if you think about this way that we have this C-suite, now we have to start depending on them and start to let them lead when it’s appropriate, especially in the future. if the most important thing for our company in three years is going to be building a new facility, then we have to focus on who’s going to lead that. It’s not the CEO, right? And the CEO needs to let that person lead and trust them. And if our go-to-market strategy is tanked,

Park: Mm-hmm.

Alice: right now in this moment, it will be tanked in the future too, unless we have an expert who can lead us out of that and we need a go-to-market expert. That’s not typically the CEO. But again, if we continue this pyramid type of leadership, I don’t think we’re going to get there. We have to really make all of these C-level players very autonomous and equal and able to lead the thing that they know best. And I think that is what’s going to take us into the future. Now in a small company like ours, where we don’t have a lot of people and we wear all the hats, how am I thinking about the future? I’m thinking about my customers and I’m thinking, hmm, this is what they sell. Will they still sell that in 10 years? Will it be something completely different? What will it look like? What changes will they make? How will their sales team be different? Will they have bots selling? Will they not need as many salespeople? I think already we don’t need as many salespeople and not because of AI. I think it’s because if we really took a look at our A players and who was really doing the selling, we’d get rid of everybody else who wasn’t. And then we’d increase the capacity of those who can and do, and they would sell even more. We can use AI and human assistance to increase their capacity. We’d have less salespeople. selling more. Imagine that, right? So I think that we have to start to rethink a lot of things and not rely on the past. Well, we’ve done it this way for 10 years or, well, those emails were 10 years ago. Right, they were 10 years ago. They don’t work anymore.

Park: What have you seen out there and maybe you can take us to a horror show if you will of someone that too, you know, prematurely implemented AI in their sales systems and it blew up because they were not operating from a proper strategy.

Alice: Yeah, well, so if you’re emailing using AI, mean, look, I’m not an expert in this, but I can tell you this. You’re going to get on a blacklist, right? So when you start to email, right, and you’re you know more of this than I do, Perk, but when you start to email a big list, right, you have to warm up your DNS. You have to slowly, you know, build it so you don’t get blacklisted. But think about this. If you take bad email practices, and automate them with AI and continue them, people are going to not just delete you, they’re going to report you. because I mean, I’m sick of it. I use that little button on my Microsoft all the time to say that this is phishing, this is spam. I’m reporting them. I don’t want any more of this crappy email. And so that is going to hurt you. Now, it’s going to hurt you possibly because you’re going to get blacklisted, but worse, it’s going to hurt your reputation. Because now if I see the name of your company and I keep getting bad emails from you, like, ugh, I would never buy from that company. I would never recommend them. You know, they’re just awful, right? And I’m thinking to myself, I’m thinking, Park, I’m thinking, why are these CEOs letting salespeople send these emails out? And then I’m thinking, they let them use AI to write these emails. And, you know, now we’re We’re personalizing at scale. No, you’re not. You’re spamming at scale. It’s like get rid of volume and increase the quality and send an email that your CEO would open. Right. I’m like CEOs, if you wouldn’t take a call from a bot or a call from a cold call from a salesperson, if you wouldn’t open that email, then why are you?

Park: You

Alice: perpetuating that activity. Stop it and let’s do something better. Let’s do something better. And I just wrote about that on my LinkedIn too. So you can go check on that. think about what would be better. What would a CEO, a VP, a director respond to? What could you have your salespeople doing that would actually engage people and make them want to have conversations with your salespeople? That’s what you should be thinking about. AI can help you do that. Why? because you could put all your personas and all your industries, right, into AI and say, what are the main things these people are concerned about? What are the ways we can phrase those so that they’re grabbers, right? Or in your language, use an ABT, an and but therefore statement to get their attention. You can train your chat to be to do that, right? And then get this input back and then digest it and talk about it and then put it back through the chat to BT again to even improve it more. Right. And now instead of huge volume, target your customers so well. These are the people who need what you sell, who are likely to buy from you. There’s less of them. Yes, there’s less of them, but there’s plenty of them. And then use this very highly customized messaging and then personalize it and send it out. And guess what? You’ll get a response. Now tie that with some person level intent data and your response rates now go up to 30 to 40 % versus, you know, 1 % or less. Some people are getting maybe 10%, but imagine if your response rate, positive response rate was 30 or 40 % on your cold outreach. Holy cow.

Park: But you’ve done the work. You’ve brought your emotional intelligence to AI. And again, it’s now this return on intelligence. But what do you do when you’re working with Chat, TPT and other Gen.ai products out there and, you know, they hallucinate on you. They don’t give you accurate intel. And a lot of people, I think, are quick to like, I just want to get this done. I’m just going to go with that without doing the due diligence.

Alice: Yes. Correct.

Alice: Well, you’ve heard this before and I say it a lot. A fool with a tool is still a fool, right? And not to diss anybody, right? But here’s the thing. You cannot use AI if you don’t know how to use it, right? So you have to know what good looks like first. You have to know what a hallucination is, right? I mean, we do use AI to help write the podcast. blog that goes on our website and our newsletter, right? We’ve trained it and all of that, but it still hallucinates. This does not remove the human element. Someone who knows has to read it and see whether it’s true or not, whether it’s, you know, hallucinated or added some crazy stuff. So I think there are people saying, yeah, AI, it’s more than just a tool to help you do this. It’s an agent. It can actually do the job completely for you. Hmm, yeah, maybe not yet. Maybe for some things, but even like scares me more is science and math and thinking that end to end AI can do that without anyone checking all the formulas and stuff. know, every time I build a spreadsheet, I have to check every formula and make sure it’s right. And then I look at the output and it should match. And then I might go back and check again. And AI certainly can help you with that, imagine AI hallucinating on your spreadsheet that’s supposed to calculate your EBITDA. Not a good idea, right? So I think we have to know how to do the job in order to have AI do it. Just like we have to know how to do the job to train someone else to do the job. We hire somebody, we have to know how to do it to train them to do it. And it’s the same with AI. You have to know how to do it. You have to know what problems can occur and what mistakes the humans will make because the AI will probably make those mistakes too. And then you have to know how to look and check for the hallucinations. So like I said earlier, it’s not plug and play. You give them a tool that fits into the bigger picture of what you’re trying to accomplish, which fits into your strategy, right?

Alice: and then you train them on how to use the tool. And that includes all the problems with AI that we have to watch out for. So I think, you know, AI in a way slows us down because at first we have to learn really, really well how to use it. And that takes time, but then it can really speed things up for us. And I think that’s one of the big myths. AI just quicker, you know, like, yeah, it will be quicker. once you really learn how to use it, but in the beginning it’s not quicker. I mean, it can do that work quicker, but you can’t use it well quicker.

Park: Yeah, and you haven’t even mentioned

Park: And prompt engineering, you didn’t even mention that part of it about just really understanding how to talk with it and prompt it in the right direction. So let’s, let’s do a little role playing here. Okay. Cause I would love to hear your process and now say I’m a new customer of yours and I’m a CEO, let’s just say of a tech company. I’ve got 40 people that work for me and I got a sales team of five and, and we, you know, we have a, we have a.

Alice: Right.

Alice: Sounds about right.

Park: proven business model. We’ve got a good product and but our sales are nowhere where they need to be. And I’ve heard you on the business of story and your own show and Alice, I want to hire you and I need you to come in and get us up and running as quickly as possible on AI so that we can optimize our sales. What do you tell them and what’s your approach?

Alice: Yeah. So first, yeah, first thing is like, I am not an expert on AI, right? So we may have to find one unless there’s someone in your company who’s willing to champion that. I can tell you what we need to look at and what needs to happen, but I’m not the expert on apply AI here this way with this tool. That’s not me. So that’s the first thing I’ll tell them. And second thing I’ll tell them is let’s have a look at your strategy. Now I find, you know, here’s a funny thing. Like I, I’ve been thinking about this for a long time and I’ve heard some people talking about it. We have this term for companies, strategic planning. Okay. So break that down. Like, what is that strategic planning? We’re planning our work strategically. We’re planning a strategy. Like what are we doing? And I’ve watched a ton of companies do strategic planning and it’s all about. what department needs something and how we’re going to get it to them. It’s not usually where it needs to be at a higher level before you’re doing that, which is what is our position in the marketplace and what do we want it to be? So and how are we going to keep it there or move forward? Right. That’s really when you talk about strategies, like the strategy of this company, it’s like, what are we trying to do? Why do we exist? Right. How do we help? so that we have a viable business because if people don’t need what you sell, you’re out of business. But guess what? Lucky for you, there’s a lot of people out there who need what you sell. Now, how are we going to position ourselves to get that to them? So if we get up to that top level strategy and I hear from them what they’re trying to do and why and how it impacts them personally, especially when I’m working with a founder CEO, then I say, okay, so Based on that, what are we doing now and what’s going to have to change? And then we can start to look at what’s the best way to change these things to support the growth of the company that you’re looking for, the more sales, right? That’s where we can start to say, my gosh, here’s the way we’re going to market and reaching out to the people most likely to buy from us.

Alice: How can we impact the way the customer interfaces us and improve their experience using AI? Let’s think through that. Once we’ve done that, then we can go say, well, we need a tool that does this based on that. Let’s go look and see what’s out in the marketplace. That’s the way I approach it.

Park: Well, you’re talking about positioning is perfect timing, too, because we just had on the show Laura Reese, and she is the daughter of the famous Al Reese, the author of Positioning, probably the go to Bible on positioning. And she has a new book out called The Strategic Enemy, how to build a position, a brand. I’m sorry. How to build and position a brand worth fighting for.

Alice: Yeah, absolutely.

Park: And it just comes right back to what you’re talking about is you’ve got to do that work first. And you can use AI for some research on that sort of thing, some competitive research, but unless you really understand the enemy that you are out to position yourself against, and they could be not necessarily a competitor, it could be the enemy that your core prospect is fighting that you can help them overcome.

Alice: Yes.

Park: But it all starts with really sitting down and understanding the emotional intelligence first around that brand position and then bring AI in.

Alice: Yes. And I want to bring something else into the fold that we haven’t really mentioned a lot yet, but it’s super important. And why are we doing that? To engage the customer. And it is really all about the customer. It always has been, it always will be. I don’t care what anybody says. It’s all about the customer, right? We went from being all about the customer to being all about ourselves. And now we’re back to saying we should be all about the customer. I had Todd Capone on my show the other day. He’s the sales historian.

Park: Mm-hmm.

Alice: and he was talking about how this evolved, how did we get away from being customer focused? one of the things I was ranting about in my vibe selling solo episode was use AI to understand what the customer’s thinking. was like, what, what, what? Wait a minute. Like you have customers, you need to ask them what they’re thinking. Don’t depend on AI. It will definitely hallucinate plus. Did all of your customers download their brain of what they’re thinking about your product and service into AI? They did not. How could AI possibly know that? That is not the way you do it, right? So your position in the market is whatever your customers think it is. And you better go ask them, and AI cannot do that for you. Now, AI could help you build some sort of a survey or a questionnaire. It could help you build the call plan to call

Park: Mm-hmm.

Park: Yeah.

Alice: to use when you call your customers to ask them a good set of questions. Absolutely. But mostly you just want to be human and you know, hey, Park, you know, you’ve been buying from us for 15 years now. Your company, we love working with you. You’ve been so successful. You know, what do you think of when you think of us? Like what are the words that you use to describe us? If you had to tell somebody else, hey, use Alice’s service, what would you say to them, right? You got to get that out the mouths of your customers and not just anybody your customer, the decision makers. And if there’s three, four or five of them, they may have a different opinion of that. So you want to listen to all of them. When you get that, that is so valuable, right? You can put all of that into AI and then it can help you change your messaging to represent what your customer said about you. And it can help you build really good messaging around that, just like we do in Story Genie, right? And so I think that we have to be careful what we use AI for. Is it the gathering of the information or it will think like your customer thinks? No. I think we do that part. We call and find out exactly what our customer thinks. Then we can take that data and put it into AI and it can help us make really good use of it.

Park: Mm-hmm.

Park: And one of the things that we talk a lot about with the StoryCycle Genie is it does not replace you or your intelligence. It amplifies it. And so you have to bring your intuition to it. You have to bring your interviews, your customer interviews to it. You have to bring your own business intelligence, your hard earned experience, and you bring that together and then you collaborate with AI to make it even more special. It’s that return on intelligence and you were talking about talking, going and talking to your customers. I had a call that came in about two months ago for a training for a healthcare company, a medical company. And the guy said, I want to do all the story training and all that. I want to teach my people how to do that. But what I really want from you is to teach us how to do customer discovery. So we really understand our customer. And I’m like, well, don’t you just talk to them? I mean, maybe I’m dumb and I probably am. I’m not an absolute sales expert, but don’t you just talk to him? Yeah. How do you do it? Pick up the phone.

Alice: he probably didn’t think of it, right? Or doesn’t know how to do it. Yeah, you just talk to them. That’s right. But I don’t know why that that just eludes people.

Park: It really does. But you get that Intel and then you use AI to help amplify it. So how are you using AI in your own business to help sales?

Alice: Yeah, so I am trying to learn how to use it better. So right now, honestly, what I’m doing is learning what are all the different uses for AI. I am in a group called Pavilion, which is a membership organization that’s worldwide for go-to-market professionals. And we held an AI roundtable the other day. we had one person who had has been becoming an expert in AI, she knew quite a bit. And then everybody else who was just at whatever level they were, some were so beginners and some were a little further along. And we were talking about, well, just what you asked me, how are you using AI? What are you using it for? And as I listened to them, I was like, oh, hadn’t thought about that, hadn’t thought about that, right? So I think the first thing that any of us can do is just learn about AI in general, you know, what uses it has. what it’s really good at, what it’s not as good at, right? And think about what things we should do and what things the AI should do and then how we bring those together. So that’s what I’ve been doing lately, just thinking about that. And I am using it, using the StoryCycle Genie to help me talk about the things I want to talk about and stay on brand and kind of repeat myself, right? Because what we know is that any thought leader has to have some topics that they always talk about and they need to gather information and synthesize it and come out with something, an opinion, something new about it or something different about it. So in trying to do that all the time, it’s a lot of work because you’ve got to a lot of reading, which I do anyway, but it’s still a lot. And so I’m using it that way to try to help me stay on brand with these are the three things I always talk about. others too, but like those are the three main things they should creep into everything. And it kind of stems around the what CEOs need to know about sales, go to market, all that stuff. And that is helpful. I use it a lot for research. And when I’m helping my clients who are doing random acts of AI right now, and I’m trying to move them towards being more strategic, that I’m like, hey, a really good use for the AI tool that you have purchased.

Alice: is research, but let me show you how to do that research. And it’s only augmenting because you, a human, still need to look at certain things, right? And so I think, you know, I use it for research and it works really well. I use it personally for things I want to research. Like I’m having my book club over tonight. We read The Tea Girl of Hummingburn Lane, a great book. I highly recommend it. And it’s, you know, based in it’s based in China and like all very accurate. to the time and everything and I wanted to put on a little Chinese tea party. That’s probably not the right word for it, but I have the right kind of tea, have the right kind of biscuits, all the stuff that we should have and Chachi P.T. planned it for me, right? Okay, that was great and fun. I have another friend who planned her whole garden even with how many of each thing to plant to take up the square foot of blah, blah, blah, blah. Worked really well for that kind of stuff. So I think

Park: Thank

Alice: a great thing to do and I’m doing is practice on yourself, right? And that will help you think of ways you can use it in business too. So yeah, so that’s what I’m doing. I’m really in a learning stage, right? Like, yes, I’m using it. I’m doing random acts of AI myself, right? I have it help me write. I have it help me think of things. have it help me design things. And I actually designed my first picture with AI.

Park: Mm-hmm.

Alice: I posted it on my LinkedIn, it was pretty funny. But hey, it took three iterations and I was like, I don’t have any more time, I’m putting this one up. And it wasn’t bad, right? But I’m learning and I did it on something fun. So it didn’t really matter. So I would say, don’t take yourself too seriously at first and start to use AI. But more than that, study what is AI, how does it work, what is it best for?

Park: you

Alice: And then when you feel confident in that, then when you take a look at your own strategy, you can see where it will fit in.

Park: Mm-hmm. Well, you have been through the StoryCycle system the old-fashioned way when it took us several months to put it together and you’ve used the StoryCycle Genie now that can do it in several minutes. What has been your experience with that?

Alice: Yes, I have.

Alice: Well, I love both, honestly, because when I got to work with you and you led me through the story cycle journey, I loved it. And I love the way you thought about things and you made me think differently. And that was what was so important. And when we came up with Sales Talk for CEOs, was like, yeah, that’s, I mean, all I had to say was like, yep, that’s exactly right. But it took a couple of iterations for me to get there. And I think that a part of all of this is thinking differently. we get super comfortable and then we do what we do. And that just isn’t going to be our future. Our future is uncomfortable. It’s we’ve got to stretch. We have to learn. We have to think differently. And if we don’t, right, we’re just our future is going to be pretty bleak. So whether it’s for work or your family, it’s the same thing. You have to start to think differently because the world is different. It’s impacting you differently. our kids and like my grandkids, it’s just so different for them, right? So yeah, I mean, the StoryCycle Genie is so helpful to help me think differently. And I can, with any AI, chat, GPT, Claude, Perplexity, whatever you use, StoryCycle Genie included. If you use it well, will help you think differently. And that is probably the most important thing that it is going to do for you. The final output. Well, that’s great. And you probably could have done it on your own anyway, but the output you will get because it made you think differently is what you are really looking for. Right. And so I think using StoryCycle Genie, I love it for so many reasons, but one that I want to make sure everybody hears loud and clear is on it’s contained. It. your information stays in there. It’s in a box. The other people who use it can’t get it. And the internet at large can’t get it where you need to know that even if you’re paying for these other AIs, it’s taking your data, taking your information, and it’s mixing it into everything. And if you’re putting proprietary information in there, that scares me. So what I love about StoryCycle Genie is I can tell it everything about my business. I could even tell it my financials and my EBITDA.

Alice: In a box. It’s not going anywhere.

Park: It’s built on the Brightsea platform that is the brainchild of Matt Levine and it is a fortress. It’s locked down. And as Sean Schroeder likes to talk about with the genie is right now it’s 24 different experts. So it’s an ecosystem of experts that work on your brand story from developing your brand brain to then building on the marketing strategy with your input. And you’re right, Alice, it does make you think differently because I will go on there and I might do five different iterations on a script working directly in the genie. And then I get something I really like because I brought my own voice to it. But the genie is learning me every single time I do it. And I’m like, ooh, that’s good. Save that record. And so it goes into its brain and then creates the content. Now here’s the funny thing. Old dog, new tricks, even though You know, I’ve been a co-creator with Sean Schroeder and Matt Levine with the StoryCycle Genie. I will still find myself defaulting back to the old ways of creating content. And I’m like, wait a minute, dope. I’ve got a genie for that. So a thought leadership genie is built into it. I can go in and I, I need a thought leadership piece on return on intelligence. I need you to access the brand or the business of story brand. So you write with everything you know from the archetypes and everything about our audiences and what they care about and create this thought piece for me. It’ll do it in three minutes and then I will go in and I might spend another hour tweaking it, really bringing my voice to it, but it’s always on brand and it would have been a piece that would have taken me a day or two to really dial in.

Alice: Yes. Yes. I mean, I don’t know why people think writing is such a quick process. My goodness. Yeah. Oh, I’m going to write a blog. You can do that in an hour. Really? I don’t think so. I mean, it probably takes me three hours to write a blog from scratch, right? And I’m a good writer and I do it all the time. And then after I write it and then I might like sit on it and then take another hour on it. So the story cycle genie speeds it up. It does that three hours for me so I can do one.

Park: Yeah.

Park: Mm-hmm

Park: Yeah. The other beautiful thing about Brightsy is it’s enterprise ready. So you can, a large enterprise can come and plug into it using the APIs. They can build their brand brain, lock that down so sales and marketing can’t mess with it, but they have access to it. And then they can create their content from that. it bridges that gap that you always see in sales and marketing, which has always boggled my mind in 40 years is how come those two departments don’t talk to each other?

Alice: Yeah, nice.

Alice: my gosh, let’s not go down that rabbit hole right now. I mean, my name is Alice and I have been known to go down rabbit holes, but we’re not going there right now.

Park: That’s a whole other episode.

Park: Well, Alice, this is great. Any last words of wisdom relative to sales strategy and AI that you would love to share with our audience?

Alice: Well, I think, you know, your strategy for sales, right, is to be positioned in the marketplace this way so that it is frictionless for people to buy from you, right? You’re growing and expanding in that. And I think what I want everyone to know is writing better emails is not the answer to increasing sales. Sales is not hard, even when you have a complex sale. Sales is about talking to humans and understanding what they need. and seeing if you can help them and solve their problems. And it’s about making sure they can use what you sold them successfully, this all in the back end. But on the front end, really, when you’re trying to reach the people who are most likely to buy from you, and you’ve keenly targeted them, cold outreach is not the best way to get to them. There are so many other ways. don’t ask, how can the AI help me? write a better email. Ask, how can I get the people most likely to buy from us on the phone with our sellers and engaged in a conversation? Ask AI that, right? So send a better email? maybe, but maybe I could get an introduction from a client to their vendor or their partner or their customer because probably in your customer base, there are tons of introductions to be made. Wouldn’t that be easier? Perhaps you could have an event and invite all of the right people to that event and bring them marvelous insights and help them network and know each other and bring them tremendous value and then continue the conversation. There are lots of things you can do and AI can help you think of those and how to do them. It’s not just get AI to write a sequence of emails that are engaging. Because even when AI writes them really, really well, it’s still not as good as that human touch of having somebody introduce you or bringing someone to an event and getting to see them face to face, whether it’s on video or whether it’s in person. Nothing beats that. So ask the right question, which is how can AI help me ensure that people who are likely to buy from us have conversations with our sellers and are engaged and continue learning?

Alice: until they either decide to buy or decide it’s not the right fit.

Park: Good old fashioned human to human connection.

Alice: Right. Have the AI help you be better at that.

Park: the last thing you had mentioned Pavilion and you told me about that before the show. It sounds like a fantastic group and you are the Sacramento Chapter President of Pavilion. OK.

Alice: Yeah, co-chapter head with Jennifer Penquere, the two of us lead that group together. Now, people are like, Alice, you live in Reno. Yes, I do. It’s two and a half hours away. It’s the closest metro area to where I live, but it’s really phenomenal. So if you’re in that area and Pavilion has chapters in every major city, so you can absolutely go check one of those out. And if you want to get an introduction, just ask me. Connect with me on LinkedIn. Tell me you heard me here on Park Show and say I’d like to get an introduction to Pavilion.

Park: Ha ha!

Alice: I’ll be happy to introduce you. If you are a CEO or any kind of go-to-market professional, you will love this group. Super supportive, so much education, and so much in-person networking, right? And talking, having serious conversations about things like AI so that we all help each other learn and grow together.

Park: Yeah. Well, my co-creators, Matt Levine and Sean Schroeder, happen to be right in the Sacramento area. So I’ve got to connect you guys. Yeah, I would love for you to meet them.

Alice: I’m going to invite them. Okay. That will be awesome. That would be awesome. And I’m going to remember to introduce you to my new friend Alisha because you will love her topics. Oh my gosh. Talk about storytelling and the future. She’s great at it.

Park: please do. I’d love that. Thanks, Alice. It’s always a hoot speaking with you. You’re always filled with so much energy, enthusiasm and brilliance around sales. So it’s great to have you back on the show.

Alice: thank you.

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