The Potential of AI in Sales: Ethical Use, Risks, and Strategies

Discover how to use the power of AI in sales ethically and avoid common pitfalls.

You may not realize that you and I are among the first salespeople and sales leaders in history with access to artificial intelligence. No earlier generation had anything like a large language model. The implication is that you and I are going to figure out how to use it. As AI becomes a more common sales tool, you can expect that some salespeople will use it in ways that do more harm than good.

You know IQ and EQ, but you may not know MQ, which stands for moral quotient. While you and I pursue this new and powerful tool, we will follow some version of the Hippocratic oath: First, do no harm.

Other salespeople, those with exceedingly low MQs, will have no trouble using AI to do things that harm their results. However, these people’s tactics will make it more difficult for all of us. If the damage was limited to those people who use AI poorly, we would have no reason to be concerned, but there are a number of ways that can cause real problems in our industry, now and in the future.

Within a few days of the launch of GPT, one low-MQ salesperson decided to scrape profiles from LinkedIn and use GPT to create something that personalized and automated outreach emails. The goal was to lead the recipients to believe the salesperson was interested and had done their research. I watched this person present a webinar to help others do the same.

AI Ethics in a Post-Truth Era

I tend to stay away from politics. It makes people negative, and I prefer to be positive. That said, propaganda, deep fakes, and other things make it difficult to know who to trust. In our chosen profession, trust is critical. Your clients and mine need to know that we can be trusted with their relationships and their business. What follows here is a list of ways AI may harm you and the community of salespeople:

1. Using AI to do your writing without editing it yourself: In AI Edge, you find a list of words that AI uses that ensure your client knows they are reading something a robot penned. Lazy. Poor writer. Lack of care. This will harm the sender, but as more sales reps practice this approach, the more your communications and mine will be ignored.
2. Responding to emails with AI content: Some of our platforms are now including a way to respond with something AI wrote. This may be okay if you worked on the text, but if you are letting your AI respond for you, you may have a difficult time building relationships. Nothing says "I care enough about you" like deciding to have an AI reply to your message so I can spend less time on it.
3. Gathering customer data: There are laws about gathering data without a person’s awareness or their consent. But the low-MQ folks who look for every shortcut that might allow them to make money, have no regard for the people whose data they stole. Laws will need to keep up with these predatory practices.
4. Automated outreach: A long time ago, marketing platforms were turned into sales platforms. This allowed low-MQ sales leaders to automate cold outreach by building a sequence of emails. The first email is followed with a second email with the first email pasted below to ensure the contact knows they already attempted to reach them. This sequence will have as many as seven of these emails, the last being a childish breakup email. Your contacts and mine are already overrun with cold outreach that they delete on first glance. If you don’t do a lot of cold outreach using the phone, you may not yet know that everyone’s voicemails are full, and they are keeping them this way.
5. Spamming social media: Recently, a person said they could help me with what the industry calls reach. They promised that they could use generative AI to make thousands of images and short videos to send to clients. For over 14 years, I have written my content myself. I prefer human hands and human brains over a robotic encyclopedia that lacks context.
6. Over-reliance on AI when making a decision: Recently, I read an article about how we are using AI. Once I read the article, I changed how I use AI. The article said we should stop prompting AI. Instead, we should ask AI to ask us questions. If you use AI for analyzing data, this approach can help you to identify patterns. While AI can illuminate trends, you still need to make sense of the data.

Jeb Blount and I wrote a book titled AI Edge: Sales Strategies for Unleashing the Power of AI to Save Time, Sell More, and Crush the Competition. If you want to use AI in sales, this book will help you improve your results without harming them or making it difficult for the community of salespeople to do the work we do. You can find the book here.

AI is growing fast. We will keep you updated on the new sales strategies for using AI in B2B sales. If you are using AI now, this list will keep you on the high-MQ side of the ledger.

Do good work!