Want to watch a sales director turn a funny color? Ask how many AI subscriptions the company pays for. Then ask how many are bringing in business.
The silence that follows is usually long enough to make a pot of tea. And possibly drink it.
Most businesses collect AI the way we collected football stickers as kids. ChatGPT? Got. Claude? Got. Gemini, Perplexity, Gamma, HeyGen? Got, got, got and got. Six months later they’ve paid for the full album and they’re still doing most of the work by hand. It’s like buying a Ferrari and using it to store the garden furniture.
The question I’m asked most is, “Frank, which AI should we be using?” I’ve stopped answering it, because it’s the wrong question. The right one is far more profitable:
What should your AI be doing while you’re asleep?
From Clever Chatbot to Proper Employee
Phase one was the chatbot. You typed a question, it typed an answer, you copied, pasted and told your boss you were “using AI”. Lovely. But it was never a strategy. It was a very expensive thesaurus.
Phase two was the tool explosion. Everyone became a collector. Very few became better sellers.
Phase three is where we are now: agents, bots and workflows. AI that doesn’t just answer, it does. It works from your material, follows your rules and handles the weekly jobs that used to need a junior hire and an industrial quantity of coffee.
You’ve stopped hiring an adviser and started hiring an employee. One who never calls in sick, never asks for a pay rise and never pinches your sandwich from the office fridge.
How I Taught a Bot to Be Me
I never ask an audience to do something I haven’t tried myself. So, I gathered over 2,000 pieces of my own work: 25 years of articles, keynote transcripts, videos, LinkedIn posts and training notes. Either a valuable body of intellectual property or a remarkable amount of hot air, depending on whom you ask.
I fed the lot into Google Drive then connected it to ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude so they could learn how I write, the stories I tell and, more importantly, the things I’d never say.
The first drafts were rubbish. It was written like a corporate consultant who’d never met me but had somehow read my diary.
So, I did what I’ve done with every young salesperson I’ve trained. I coached it, corrected it and showed it what good looks like. It took half a day, which is less time than most companies spend arguing about the Christmas party venue.
Then I loaded everything into a bot. I call him Tab. As a former jazz drummer, I can tell you he keeps far better time than I ever did. Drummers keep the beat for everyone else, then turn up late to their own gigs.
Frank’s Quick Tip: Your AI is only as good as what you feed it. Feed it generic rubbish and you’ll get generic rubbish back. Feed it your stories, case studies and wins, and it starts sounding like you on a good day.
What Tab Does Every Week
|
Area |
Tab’s weekly workload |
|
|
5 posts in my voice, 40 targeted invites to Vistage and TEC chairs, event organisers and speaker bureaus, plus daily connection tidy-ups |
|
Video |
7 Reels, 7 TikToks and 3 YouTube Shorts cut from my keynotes, edited and captioned |
|
Content |
8 articles republished across Medium, Substack and Quora, with a hook and a question on every post |
|
Admin |
A Friday summary and tracking which invites actually get accepted |
That’s 22 posts a week across four platforms, all run from one WhatsApp chat. I send a voice note from a hotel lobby, and it’s done before I’ve worked out which way up the room key goes.
A few years ago, that would have needed a marketing department of three or four people. Or one speaker working evenings until his wife forgot what he looked like (I know, that was me).
But here’s the detail that matters most: I approve every name before an invite goes out. Tab finds, drafts, edits and publishes. Tab has never once decided who I should be talking to. AI without a human in charge isn’t a strategy. It’s a runaway shopping trolley heading for the car park.
So What Does This Mean for You?
Salespeople: Imagine waking up to briefing notes on your ten priority prospects. Finishing a meeting to find it summarized, the CRM updated and a follow-up waiting for your approval. The AI handles the preparation. You handle the persuasion. That’s where the money is.
CEOs: Stop buying tools and start building workflows. Tools don’t create revenue. Workflows do. On Monday, ask your team which tasks get repeated every week and which should never need a human again. That list is your first agent. Just don’t hand it the keys to your CRM, inbox and LinkedIn account and hope for the best. A clever workflow that gets your account restricted isn’t terribly clever.
Small businesses: This is the great equalizer. You’ll never outspend the big players, but you can absolutely out-workflow them. And you’re already sitting on your own 2,000 pieces: proposals, emails, quotes, reviews and recorded sales calls, all gathering digital dust.
Frank’s Quick Tip: Don’t start with technology. Start with last week’s to-do list. Anything you did more than three times is a job for a bot.
The Bit No Bot Can Do
After 25 years of selling in more than 70 countries, one thing hasn’t changed. People still buy from people they know, like and trust.
Tab can write in my voice. He can’t stand on a stage, spot the CEO glancing at his phone and win him back with a story. AI can suggest five brilliant questions. It will never notice that question three just made the customer squirm.
So my rule is simple:
Automate the admin. Accelerate the thinking. Protect the relationship.
The salespeople who lose out won’t lose to AI. They’ll lose to the humans who learned to run it.
Want Your Own Tab?
I’m building agents, bots and workflows into my sales training, leadership workshops and keynotes, using real examples from my own business. I also run a practical, no-jargon paid webinar showing exactly what I loaded, how I taught it and what I got wrong first.
Drop me a line at frank@frankfurness.com or call UK +447711 672888 or USA +1 407 558 9714.
While you’re asking AI to write yet another email, what do you suppose your competitors’ agents are doing tonight?
Frank Furness
International Keynote Speaker | Sales, AI & LinkedIn Training
No comments:
Post a Comment