In this episode of Beyond the Prompt, we chat with Kevin Williams from Lytho, revealing how they're leveraging AI to improve their marketing and sales function dramatically. From his roots in software sales to pioneering AI in sales tactics, Kevin shares Lytho's journey toward operational excellence and business expansion through generative AI. Unpack the secrets of integrating AI seamlessly, overcoming privacy hurdles, and the tangible benefits it brings to sales and marketing. If you're looking to harness AI's potential or eager for practical insights into its business applications, this episode is packed with Kevin's pro tips for AI-driven success.
In this episode of Beyond the Prompt, we chat with Kevin Williams from Lytho, revealing how they're leveraging AI to improve their marketing and sales function dramatically. From his roots in software sales to pioneering AI in sales tactics, Kevin shares Lytho's journey toward operational excellence and business expansion through generative AI. Unpack the secrets of integrating AI seamlessly, overcoming privacy hurdles, and the tangible benefits it brings to sales and marketing. If you're looking to harness AI's potential or eager for practical insights into its business applications, this episode is packed with Kevin's pro tips for AI-driven success.
Kevin Williams on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinwilliams3/
📜 Read the transcript for this episode: Transcript of How to Use AI to Boost Your Sales - Kevin Williams (CRO at Lytho) |
[00:00:00] Henrik Werdelin: Welcome to beyond the prompt where we dive deep into the transformative world of AI and its impact on business and daily work life I'm Henrik Wertland and I'm here with my co-host Jeremy oddly. In every episode, we talk with leaders who are in the forefront of integrating AI into the industries. Today, we have the pleasure of speaking with Kevin Williams. We'll explore how life though is using AI to accelerate their business.
Kevin and his CEO has really embraced AI. And if you're running a sales organization, you really don't want to miss it. But this episode now over to Jeremy to kick us off.
[00:00:33] Henrik Werdelin New: So Kevin Williams, welcome to the pod. It's great to see you. Can you start by introducing yourself to Henrik? So folks are just joining us. Obviously we're just starting. I we've had no introduction whatsoever, and this is perfect because Kevin can not only introduce himself to Henrik, but also our audience.
[00:00:51] Kevin Williams: Absolutely. Yeah. Jeremy, great to see you again, Jeremy and I go way back. So Henrik, how do I introduce myself to you?
[00:00:57] Kevin Williams: I I've been in software sales my entire career. I fell into a variety of different private equity owned organizations along the way. It's funny, private equity sometimes gets like a bad vibe, I think, from folks.
I love it. It's actually great. It's a type of organization where it's agile, small, and you can have a great impact. So that's where I got into my world. Now I'm at Lytho and we focus on the creative marketing world. We sell what's called a creative operations platform to mostly in house creative marketing teams that are working from a creative brief all the way through the project management and online proofing of creative assets and then distributing those out. Into the wild
[00:01:39] Jeremy Utley: When did you become aware of gen AI and start to explore either personally or professionally, the implications on your role at Lytho?
[00:01:49] Kevin Williams: ~Yeah, ~Probably like most people, tail end of last year, I got I became more and more aware of it. Maybe that's later than some, but I'd say November, December started getting a few of the rumblings.
I'm an early adopter tech enthusiast and even the simple chat GPTI was pretty early into the idea of our CEO at Litho is also a a gen AI enthusiast. So we both, I think, explored it early, and then I think I probably didn't really appreciate the full team wide application of it until summer when I started really saying, Okay, this is not just a fun, cool thing anymore. This is... It's like here. It's not coming. It's not emerging. It's here. And if we're not doing more with it, then we're falling behind. We can still do a whole lot more than we do.
[00:02:39] Kevin Williams: But I think the first step to Gen AI, for me at least, is just understanding the possibilities. ~And so I've told our team is, if you think that If you think,~ let's think about Chad, GBT, because I honestly think you could just start there for an entire year and live and do some amazing things in the business world.
so I've told our team is, ~if you think that~ If you think, it's about writing sales sequences and writing a blog post and outputting content, you've completely misunderstood the purpose of gen AI, which for me is about knowledge expansion. It's really, every time I have that question around I wonder if like dot. In today's world, you no longer need to wonder.
~Go ask your,~ go ask ChatGBT, go ask some other source of gen AI. I think it has a misnomer in the world that it's about doing routine work and maybe helping us, oh, it'll help you write this faster, it'll help you do that. And it's no, it's about helping you think. It's... It's a virtual human to bounce ideas off of is one of the ways that I think about it.
[00:03:33] Jeremy Utley: ~Okay. Okay.~
[00:03:33] Jeremy Utley: Kevin, I'm just going to interrupt you because there's so much there you have to stop like we could spend the next year just unpacking what you just said. So can we maybe start with let's work backwards? I wonder if what's your last, I wonder if.
[00:03:44] Kevin Williams: Yeah. So different in my role, obviously I'm a CRO at Lytho.
So I'm thinking a little bit, maybe more broadly than I would have the team apply it. But we have a new product that we're launching that has, I think, an obvious play in our European market, maybe a play in the U S market. And so my wonder if was, I wonder what would be the right sort of go to market approach to this.
What's the right sequence of launch and how we take this to market? And so I went and asked ChatGBT. I said, here's the product we're launching. Here's who it's for. Here's the ideal persona. Here's the business, like here's why you would buy it. Where would you sell this? How would you prioritize my go to market efforts?
And they actually came back agreeing with the European market, but gave me a lot more ideas around the U S market as well. So in that case, it was just yeah, a wonder of like, how do I do this? What should we be thinking about?
[00:04:33] Henrik Werdelin (native): One thing that's important, and I think that you point out is that it's really about having a conversation with it instead of what we know from Google, where you just write a search prompt and then you try to find the answer, right?
Often, if you don't get the answer you're looking for, then talking to it like it's a kind of a straight out of school MBA student is probably like a good
[00:04:54] Kevin Williams: way of thinking about it. Yeah. And for us, ~our...~ Our current customer base is more U. S. centric than European. We serve both markets.
We really serve yeah, European and the U. S. market. This product will fit more in the European market. So it comes back with some information. And then I said, Oh, I didn't tell you that X percentage of our customer base is actually in the U S would that change your answer? And then it comes back with more information then, Oh yeah, you should do this and this.
[00:05:18] Jeremy Utley: . Okay. So I love that pragmatic example. One, one question I'd love to get your perspective on. It's one thing for the professor to say it, but I'd love for you to say it as somebody who's leading an organization because I think it carries a different weight.
[00:05:31] Jeremy Utley: How do you, for an organizational leader that's going, how much of our information should we put in there?
What should we be concerned because you just said this percentage of our market is us or whatever, right? How do you think about call it privacy or? other concerns related to confidentiality. What do you choose to put in versus not
[00:05:50] Kevin Williams: great question? ~I think you have to~ for me, I'm never going to put in a customer list.
~I'm never going to put in any,~ I'm probably not gonna put in the actual code of our software, not that I would have access to it, but you're not putting in anything super proprietary if it's things that you can. That are going to come up in conversation. I'm living in the go to market side, sales and marketing.
Like most of this is probably going to show up in a website, a case study, other information. So I think if it's along those lines, that's fine. And quite candidly, you can get so much out of that without giving away privacy information. You can get a lot with, without naming prospects, without naming customers, things like that.
I do recognize that there's some bigger organizations that are going to have more restrictions on it. A friend of mine I was talking to the other day about it, Hey, they won't even let me type in open AI. Like it's blocked, right? And so I think in that case, you've got to go advocate for it. I challenged him.
I said, look, go tell them what you're trying to do. Give them the use cases. I want to use this for. And we'll get to all this maybe, but I want to use this for onboarding and role playing and research and this, and none of that's going to have our company information in it. Is there some way that we can find a middle ground here between just completely shutting us off versus having an ability to do it for certain use cases?
I also would
[00:07:06] Henrik Werdelin (native): add that I think one of the things that will happen real fast is that it's going to be such an integrated part of Microsoft it's going to show up very soon as part of the operating system. I wonder if sometimes people are using it a little bit as an excuse rather than necessarily it's because that there's real proprietary data that they wouldn't volunteer if somebody called and saying, Hey, I'm in a Stanford MBA student and I'm doing a survey, like doing a study of your company.
What do you do with
[00:07:33] Kevin Williams: X? You think about all the security training that we do have, right? And it always gets down to the biggest, the biggest security risk at any organization is actually the people, not the technology, not the other things. And it's, it really becomes then about training the people and trusting your people.
I guess in the sales that I grew up in where it's, Oh, how do we make sure that this and the technology is going to allow them to send some information? And I was like, Guys, they have Outlook and they send emails all day long. If we can't trust them that they're writing emails that we're like, they maybe shouldn't be part of the team at that point.
That's a different issue.
All right.
[00:08:09] Jeremy Utley: So you mentioned team, Kevin, I'd love to hear, you said, just going backwards in the conversation, but you said you didn't appreciate the kind of team wide implications of JNI until probably this summer when you started saying it's here, what, two, two questions, two part question for you.
What made you realize or start to consider team wide implications into once you did realize, oh, this is about more than just me playing around. What were some of your early steps in. Empowering your team members to explore.
I'd say the understanding comes from curiosity and like many things you learn and steal in some ways from others and best, we call them best practices.
[00:08:50] Kevin Williams: It's really stealing from others ideas in many ways. Totally. I think the first step is be, there's plenty of stuff out there. Be all over LinkedIn, be all over everywhere you can be to learn from others and how they're applying it. We're all on this journey together at the same time. You're going to learn and see ideas.
There's a a sales leader I follow on LinkedIn. His name is Jake Dunlap. Great guy that's got a lot going on in this area too. And he brought to light for me the opportunity to use ChatGBT for role playing. I would have not thought about that, but if you give it really good instructions, and again, it becomes this onion that you're peeling and you can say, okay, you're such and such persona.
I'm selling you this information, this software. Here's this and that. I actually did one that the team the other day where we went, and put it in and said, okay, we've got the buy in of the power user. You're now the VP showing up to the call. What are going to be your objections? And let's roleplay them one, you got to be explicit, right?
Let's roleplay them one by one. If you like my answer, move on to the next objection. If you don't like my answer, pry further into that. And you give it these very explicit instructions. And you can get basically this virtual roleplay that comes out of it. You can even pause the role play and say, Okay, hey, actually, you didn't stop me for that answer.
But how'd you like that? ~And~ and you can get so much immediate feedback. So how do I roll that out to the team? every Friday morning. We do a sales enablement and training session. And really trying to get them to be curious and open their eyes around it and show them the possibilities.
I think it's one thing to say uh, AI's here and you should find ways to use it. It's another to say specifically, guys, okay, here's the role playing example. Here's the objection handling example. In fact, during that role playing, I got stumped on, open APIs and integrations of software. Build me a three week development plan to help me get better at overcoming that specific objection.
And all of a sudden, Chad it's the... Iterative process. But the biggest thing is we have a, we have that enablement meeting that we're able to leverage, get the team's attention and show them how to use it. And do
[00:10:43] Jeremy Utley: you take it upon yourself to showcase examples there? Are you inviting team members who've done something cool?
What are the mechanisms you've created to know what to spotlight?
[00:10:52] Kevin Williams: So for me so far, it's been showing them myself. I think the team, we do have a few folks that are curious and have adopted of their own volition. And obviously through those trainings, inviting their feedback, commentary, Hey what am I missing?
What have y'all used it for? On your own as well. I'd love to see us then probably progress into more anytime you can share amongst your teammates without me being the preacher. It's going to be better. We're probably not quite there yet. So we'll work our way towards that. The biggest thing I wanted them to see was that if again, if you think it's about in sales, at least.
People think it's about writing sequences and emails to go to prospects, that's what they think it's for, and if that's what you think, I wouldn't even say you're the tip of the iceberg you're not even at the iceberg, you've got to find other ways to use it. But I feel like if you're going to roll it out at your organization, You've got to be passionate yourself.
You've got to lead by example. What I haven't done yet is prescribed. You must do this on everything. You must do this step of AI on a deal. You have to want to use it. It's got to become natural for you. I can prescribe it into the sales process, but it's much better if they start to have light bulb moments themselves and say, that's so powerful.
He doesn't have to prescribe it. I'm going to go do it because that's necessary.
[00:12:07] Kevin Williams: Have you seen any pushback? I have a few folks that weren't as. Eager to use it themselves. And I think that the use cases and different ways you would use it, enlighten them to the possibilities. I think the pushback comes less in, we have some people that are, Oh, AI is scary.
It's going to take over the world. We should all avoid it like the plague. Sure. But more of the pushback comes from. Not understanding the possibilities, and so therefore not embracing them and spending time on them. And so I think once they could see the application it was much better. I saw a light bulb moment when I showed them, for example, we do a like most any sales process after your product demo.
You're going to come with a, an email summary that has all of the benefits that you showed them and the value and their pains and whatnot, like a summary email, right? And so actually twofold one, this is where the AI is integrated in, right? So we use We use gong to record our sales meetings and it does a lot of stuff in gong.
It actually does what zoom now does as far as trying to transcribe and track the meeting. And then they have a new section that they just released called asking me anything in the gong recording of that meeting. You can go in and ask it to say, Hey, I'm Kevin. I'm the sales. ~I'll pretend I'm the sales.~
~I'm Kevin. ~Write a follow up email to Max, the prospect. And summarize the top three things that we talked about in the value that I showed him in the demo and make it no more than 150 words. You have to be this prescriptive of telling the instructions. And it gave back a pretty good email, 80%, 85 percent of the way there.
You go tailor that email. And then you take it to chat GPT and say, okay, here's a summary email of this meeting. But I'm targeting this vertical. I'm targeting pharmaceuticals with this. Spruce this up to speak more in the language of pharmaceuticals, and then you start to get back more so the more that you can go from one to the next, that's where I see the generative AI actually applying.
I shared that to say when I showed that example to the team, there was a few people that I could tell they even admitted. They're like, Yeah, I'm not really messed with it much. I'm not super excited by it, but that's crazy. You just like you just opened my eyes to what's possible here.
[00:14:25] Jeremy Utley: That's amazing.
[00:14:26] Jeremy Utley: I love that example too of, I, I find that folks imaginations are necessarily limited to what they've seen and really great leaders make a practice of showcasing behaviors, applications, and what you're getting at really is interactions. Fundamentally, the outcome is actually like beside the point in a way you are by showcasing that interaction, you're showing someone, if you behave this way towards a problem, you can yield as interesting an outcome as this, which is pretty cool. How, one other thing I wanted to come back to, you said earlier on that the, your CEO is a gen AI enthusiast. Can you talk about the role that has played in, in, in the CEO being somebody who's excited about it and how and what kind of permissions or empowerment the CEO has given or is necessary to give?
Sure.
[00:15:17] Kevin Williams: Yeah, absolutely. And again, like my answer will be, we're a smaller company, Agile, so maybe the CEO of a fortune 100 may not be quite as personally involved in every and every sort of company meeting and whatnot, but, ~um,~ I'd say it starts with actually our leading value at litho and our culture, which is the phrase, let people run.
And before we even get to generative AI, our philosophy is that you each have a unique skill set that I don't have and so you're here for a reason, and I'm not here to micromanage and do your job for you, you're here to do your job, and I should Provide direction and empowerment and then let you run.
So that's culture precedes the generative AI culture, but it also, I think, lays a pretty firm foundation for, yeah, guys, if you want to do something, you can run. You don't have to ask permission always to run in that regard. And then the other, I would say, I
[00:16:07] Jeremy Utley: appreciate that as like an initial condition, right?
Cause that's actually, you're right. It's critical. It's our principle here is people are going to do things that we could never imagine doing. That's, and then with what technology and it could be some other technology. Yeah
[00:16:19] Kevin Williams: exactly. Yeah. And if that's not your culture, then the rest of it won't.
Fit the same way you might do it different ways, ~but~ so with let people run as the underpinning, then honestly, it's a lot of what what you just called out in my last example is leading by example and doing showing people how it's done. I joke with him all the time that he gets off brand cause it's a CEO with mid journey is like a brand guide run amok.
Like we're going to go all over the place with images, but they're fun and it's exciting. That's, we're a fun culture too. And company meetings, throwing in his mid journey images, throwing in, and I actually told him, I said, don't just put the image, put the prompt. What'd you ask mid, what'd you ask it to draw?
And then have that in there. And so the more that we can start to incorporate, even in internal meetings, internal things. Acknowledging when you're using something like that Hey guys, I just gave you a weekly motivational, like a blog post or something. Did you know, I ran that through chat CPT before I sent it out and asked it to do X, Y, Z to it and refine it some those.
So it's that leading by example and showing what you're getting
[00:17:22] Jeremy Utley: at too is it's really cool. It's like demystifying it. ~It's ~you might think that I'm like a super smart person. Actually, I'm just gonna leave the kimono for a second. What's really got, I've, one of our kind of partners in our network has been doing a research project and we'll do these presentations.
We'll show all these amazing kinds of insights. And then at the end of the presentation, we say, by the way, we built this deck using generative AI, right? And people are like, wait, what? Cause it's you think the level's here and then he just showed you actually it's here and it just causes, whether it's good or not, it's actually somewhat it's passable enough that, people, just don't even pay attention to it.
But then it's you just add this, you question this premise that nobody even knew could be questioned. It's wait, I could make a presentation with it.
[00:18:05] Kevin Williams: I love that. Yeah.
[00:18:06] Henrik Werdelin (native): One idea that I've seen that might be useful, Gavin for you guys and for your CEO is to create some principles of prompting specifically for imagery.
And so for one of the companies I'm involved in, what I've seen they do is that, for example they do a lot of dog pictures and they always, or they tend always to have the pictures on solid background colors. And then there's they create special kind of filters or settings that they always put in.
So always use this lens, always just to create like a sense of consistency in the in the look and feel of the mid journey
[00:18:42] Kevin Williams: output. Oh, I love that. Yeah.
[00:18:44] Jeremy Utley: It's almost like brand guidelines, right? But it's brand guidelines for mid journey. Yeah.
[00:18:48] Kevin Williams: No, it's a hundred percent of that. I was going to say we're not there yet, but we plan to be at the point where we would have within chat, GBT, they've added the custom instruction section.
And providing company approved custom instructions is on our to do list so that it can set everybody up to the same beginning the same tone of voice, the same style. So adding that in is something that we do plan to add in into our release here. Also prompts within, so within our product, there's various modules.
And so again, this is work in progress because we're all living it live. I think right now, maybe we're a little bit slower to the game, but. We have our messaging platform internally about, okay, when you're speaking about this module, here's the pain statement, here's the benefit statement, here's the ICP that it's targeting, etc.
Why there's not a row for recommended AI prompts. For each of those different messaging platforms, there should be, and so we're headed in that direction, too, to be able to say, yeah, you want to do something in our case, in online proofing, these are the prompts you're asking to get the best online proofing feedback from AI,
[00:19:51] Jeremy Utley: yeah, that's cool. I can't help but wonder Kevin, if there's, before you get to company approved custom instructions, whether you start with like team approved and you don't use all of the context window, but it's only like a third or a quarter of the context window, but it's just like for the marketing team, here's our thing.
Chances are there's different, sales team is going to need some different, but you could also parallel path experimentation on what kinds of customers are helpful to the
[00:20:15] Kevin Williams: team's output. Yeah. I don't remember the, what I prompted it the other day, but I did ask it an I wonder statement and ChatGPT actually goes, I'll answer that, but this has nothing to do with creative operations because I was my prompt was that I sell creative operations software and and I had forgotten to yeah, you can turn that off on a different one.
So did you forget who you are? It literally was like, I guess so, but you're out of left field with that one.
[00:20:40] Henrik Werdelin (native): Haven't put down the bottle.
[00:20:42] Jeremy Utley: Exactly. That's right. Exactly. That's hysterical.
[00:20:45] Jeremy Utley: So what do you see as you think about unleashing kind of the next level of creativity turbocharging of your team, where are you looking or thinking know where you are in your journey, knowing what you've already been doing?
Where are you looking?
[00:21:02] Kevin Williams: Yeah I think it would be, well twofold. The areas that I've. Shown the team and we need to build out further again, role playing. I can't underestimate the fact of role playing as a tool. It can role play better than a human being can role play with you. It's that good.
I do believe also both coaching plans for management and development plans for individuals, as far as improving your sales skills in that case, in our case, in many ways I want to get better at, presenting or whatever the case might be, give me a plan, do that. It will build out a plan that we, everything we used to do manually, it does for you now, right?
And so it'll build out a plan of what books to read, what webinars to watch what other things to do as far as increasing those skills. So for me, it's a lot more around the. Team development, skill development, and refining what we already do, rather than trying to write things from scratch, do things from scratch and then, so that's the what, and then as far as the application, I'm a big process person just in general and so I think we have to figure out, and this is admittedly where we're not maybe fully there yet, but we have to figure out how to incorporate it into Thank you.
Thank you. Our current SOPs and processes, it's if we have already a messaging guideline, it's got to become, it can't be here's the messaging guideline.
[00:22:22] Kevin Williams: And then here's the chat GPT guideline. it's got to be embedded in what we already have. Here's our sales process. But here's the chat GPT process doesn't work.
It's got here's our sales process. And at this stage is where you might want to think about these use cases of ChatGBT. And I just go to that one again as like the starting point. There's many AIs out there. But so I think that for us, yeah, it's mostly around development and skills and. And that aspect more so than it is about content creation.
[00:22:51] Kevin Williams: Have you seen,
[00:22:52] Henrik Werdelin (native): This start to flow into other teams in your organization? Or is it really being pushed because you're, such an
[00:23:00] Kevin Williams: adopter of it? No, I've seen it in other areas. I think I haven't seen as much of the, not everyone has a standing sales enablement and training call on a Friday to embed this into, so I haven't seen it necessarily released in the same manner across the board.
But so I, it probably would be more sporadic early adopters across other functional areas currently or others that are following the lead of again, our CEO and his push forward into AI as well, and
[00:23:28] Jeremy Utley: are there any kind of standard the company covers your chat GPT subscription are there any kind of standard enabling things that you've established if you want, or, you have a standard expense for, using AI tools or how does that work?
[00:23:40] Kevin Williams: We have not yet done that. We also, that goes back a little bit to our let people run culture though. If you run and you think that you need it, it's really more about tell me why you need it and make the case for how you're going to use it and then we can probably cover that. Versus, I'm just going to arbitrarily give everybody a...
A subscription that you may or may not use. So that fits more into our culture of show me why you're going to do it. Is it necessary? Is this going to help you run faster and further than let's do it. And then it, so it's a little bit more of the cultural question there.
[00:24:12] Jeremy Utley: I'm more of an X outward processor. So I tend to talk to think not think to talk. I have found that Chad GPT's voice memo is an incredible. Enabler for me, because I for example, say this was like a, a partnership call, right? And the three of us talking stuff, I'll get off, I'll open chat GPT and then just ramble just voice.
And you, I don't have to be structured in my thinking, I don't have to be sequential in my thinking. It's Oh yeah. And he said this, I want to follow up on that.
And then by the end, I usually I'll come to something and then I'll go, would you mind to recap that in an email that I would copy that I would send to Henrik and copy Kevin on. And then, so all of a sudden the structure and synthesis is on chat GPT, but what I've done, what I do well, which is like
[00:24:58] Kevin Williams: vomit.
[00:24:59] Henrik Werdelin (native): Can just not sing enough praises for the app. I agree with that.
[00:25:02] Henrik Werdelin (native): Like the they use this whisper feature to convert and me being a native Danish speaker, it's ability to pick up any language is quite stunning. And If you could even say like that and you can say, Oh, please rewrite it in Danish and it'll just rewrite it in any language, which is just incredible.
Cause I, having lived abroad for 25 years, my my brain just flicks in and out of Danish. And so sometimes I'll say something and I don't realize I just been speaking Danish to it. And then I'll have it translate, which
[00:25:34] Kevin Williams: is quite mind blowing. I love that it's actually a learning.
We had Which had to be T because our international office is in Amsterdam. So it's a Dutch speaking team over there. And I started with translate this to Dutch. That was the prompt I kept giving chat to BT. And then it dawned on me of like, why am I asking it to translate it to Dutch? Why don't I ask it to write it in Dutch.
And these are the little things like if your mind is closed off to the AI, you're never going to get to these little nuanced learnings that you figure out. And so what I've now do is I take the exact same prompt and at the very bottom, write this in Dutch. The output, and I sent it to, I can't read Dutch, but I sent it to our Dutch colleagues and I said, all right.
Here's output a, here's output B are they better? Is it different? They're like output B is like way more normal sounding and whatnot. And it's because it had not, your Dutch
[00:26:22] Jeremy Utley: translation is not spectacular. Is what you're saying.
[00:26:25] Kevin Williams: Chad, GBT's Dutch translation. Yeah, it was like, they were like, yeah, I see what you're doing.
But when you write it natively, it was a whole different experience. So again, like it's those little things where it's, how do I document every single thing? It's really. It's the wonder, like you have to think okay, I'm trying to use this. What am I going to ask it differently? People, I think it's so focused on the prompt writing and maybe even nervous.
I think there's like a a prompt writing hesitancy out there. I'm like, Oh, I don't know how to write the perfect prompt. You don't need to just write a prompt like you're talking to somebody. Cause if you're doing it, like I said earlier, you're going to write a second prompt and a third prompt and a fourth prompt.
That's,
[00:27:04] Jeremy Utley: that's one of the, my big hacks, actually, if I'm, helping folks in organizations and more conventional mindsets, think about how do you start? One of the things I say is don't start with work, start with what's a, what's an emotional question that you want to ask a good friend about, and it's and at first they're they scrunched their head. And then it's I had a friend the other day is like I don't know how to raise a teenage daughter. I'm like, that's a great prompt. Yeah. And ask CIGPT to interview you about your daughter. So it gives you like a behavioral psychologist or whatever.
And then ask you questions about your daughter to the point that it can provide recommendations. What happens there is if it's emotional, you care and care, I feel is what overcomes the activation energy to interact. Yeah. That's if you don't care, you take what's given and you go, what do I think of this?
If you care, you push back, you respond, you pull. So taking the context out of work, because then someone starts to build muscle memory around, Oh like I don't have to take the first thing and I can probe and push and question. And then they go, yeah. Wait, I could do that for that sales email that I was trying to draft.
[00:28:08] Kevin Williams: Oh, I love that. Yeah.
[00:28:10] Jeremy Utley: Because they start by saying the sales email wasn't that good. It's what was its first advice about raising a teenage daughter? Good. No, but like you interacted
[00:28:17] Kevin Williams: and got better. And like most things in life, what's wrong with, I don't have a teenage daughter. I've got 12, eight and three, so they're getting there.
But it's usually not the kid's problem. It's my problem. And so as I work through that, you're going to realize. Oh, I need to be doing something different. Who am I that my kid does XYZ? Like I should do something differently. The same is going to be true. It's not about the prospect. It's not the prospects not doing this or that.
It's what am I doing? I should be doing something differently. So it's weird that we thought, I thought that chat GBT was going to become about the output. And actually it becomes again, much for me, at least much more about the learnings and introspection of Oh, I should think about this differently.
I should do something differently. And all the learnings are about how I'm changing, not how it's like somehow changing the prospect or the reader of the output. So it's really interesting.
[00:29:07] Kevin Williams: I want to come
[00:29:08] Jeremy Utley: back to this idea of roleplay because you have mentioned it a couple times and I wonder if you could give you said it's better than a human at roleplaying.
I wonder if you could give like almost, imagine somebody trying to script. What you do, or if somebody goes, Ooh, I'd love to, I'd love to implement a role play moment. Can you give us an example of how you prompt chat GPT to role play for you? Is there something live right now that is on your mind or what do you imagine doing after we're done recording this?
[00:29:37] Kevin Williams: Yeah, actually, I'm going to give you one real example that I showed our team as I pull it up real quick here. Why I think it's better than a human is that humans let each other off too easily. And that's coming as someone who plays the role play side of that equation many times in trainings and whatnot throughout my career.
You. You don't ask the hard question. You don't ask a direct question. You allow them to squishy their way through it and then get out of it. So again, we sell to creative in house creative teams. This was my prompt before I created my my saved prompts or whatever it's called down in the bottom left.
Again I sell software for life though. Our software is built for in house creative marketing teams to help them with request intake. Project management, online proofing, and the creative process. So setting the stage. You, yeah, tell it who it is. You are the VP of marketing, who's joining a proposal review call.
The creative director is excited about our product, but I need your sign off to seal the deal. Roleplay with me objections that you have as a VP of marketing based on your priorities and concerns. Let's take one objection at a time and you can respond based on my response. That was the one that we actually did in front of the team live the other day.
And it came back. All right. Thanks for that introduction. The creative director is quite enthusiastic, blah, blah, blah. I was like, it's a real life. This is what they say in real life. And they asked about integration and compatibility with other software in their ecosystem. So I wrote back, Great question.
We understand that Lytho is a great part of your larger tech stack. Blah, blah, blah. We do XYZ. That's reassuring to hear, especially the blah, blah, blah. And it's just this back and forth. And then I said so we did about integrations in that question. And at Litho, it was like, okay, we have this may be too techie, but we have open API, we have an iPad solution, or we have native integrations.
There's three layers of how we might integrate. And they didn't think that my answer was bad, but I said, okay, hold on. Pause the role play. How would you rate my answer to that question? And then they said, Oh, you did answer this part and that part. And I said, okay, great.
I could move on and say, okay, restart role play, keep going, whatever the case might be. Some of this you can now do verbally through it. I don't do verbally yet. But you just keep going one at a time, but that took some learning. Cause when we first tried it, I said, role play, you're the VP of marketing and it spit out a list of 10 questions.
And I was like no. One at a time. And then it gave me, it went straight to the next one. I was like no, one at a time, but answer based on my answer. And so you start learning how to prompt it better as you go. And it just got so much better for us.
[00:32:03] Jeremy Utley: And then in that so come all the way to the end of this role play.
What for you is the outcome? Are you more prepared? Does it shift the outbound correspondence? What, because for somebody who's maybe not used to leveraging role play in their day to day, what's the end result of having done this for you in terms of your next steps?
[00:32:21] Kevin Williams: I will say four main areas.
One, just general skill development. I'm getting better at interacting and pitching and talking about our products as a salesperson. That's typical role play. More specific now I see with ChatGPT is pre meeting. So in this case, I do use that example like This person I've never talked to is showing up to this meeting.
What do they care about? I don't have to go research them and look at what's a VP of marketing that manages a creative team care about what are their priorities right now and act like you're them. So I've just saved a whole bunch of research and now it gets jumped straight into meeting preparation. So there's general scale, sales skills, one meeting preparation, two post meeting three.
So the random person you didn't know was going to come to the meeting shows up the it director, who's all of a sudden flying the ointment of the whole thing. You're able to go in after the meeting and say. Okay, IT director showed up, blah, blah, blah, here's what they said, I need to respond via email and a follow up to rebut these three objections.
Help me figure that out and roll. And so you can almost role play post meeting. And then the fourth part is the, is like maybe a separate section, but. Use all of that to identify your weaknesses and again, then let it help you build out personal development plans. And then you know how to grow and get better and better from there.
Oh wow,
[00:33:33] Jeremy Utley: so you actually use the performance in the role play as the basis for a development plan too. You can, yeah. That's cool, that's so cool,
[00:33:42] Henrik Werdelin (native): right? You know what's also really cool is this idea of going back and using the history. Chat TBT to like just jump back into where you have stored all the information of that specific interaction so you don't have to like re
[00:33:55] Kevin Williams: explain everything.
Yeah. So we are, again, like execution wise, I'm not here to claim we're perfect. We have ideas, but you should absolutely have a thread for each purpose. You should have a competitive thread. You could even do it competitor by competitor. Because within that thread or whatever they chat, they're gonna retain all of that history, right?
It builds upon itself only within that chat. So I could have market research, I could have objection handling, I could have deal strategy. These could be categories that I continuously bounce back to. And then what's really fun is to play chat GPT off itself where it doesn't realize that it's doing this.
And so I might ask it a question around market knowledge, like what, which, like again, back to that go to market question for a new product launch, where should I prioritize, blah, blah, blah. And I get it down to a really good answer. You should go ABC. Okay. Perfect. I'm going to take that to another thread that doesn't know that I just had that conversation with ChatGPT.
And now I'm going to ask it about, here's my plan for a go to market to launch this product. Which personas would you, and you can shift the conversation, but use the information that it actually gave you to do so like you start to build the tower using ChatGPT amongst itself. Which is really fun.
Yeah. I just think it's fun to trick it because it's pretty smart. So anytime you can be like, you didn't know you gave me that prompt and I, you just, you did. So it's fun.
[00:35:13] Jeremy Utley: Do you keep a scoreboard in your office? It's five Chad, five million.
[00:35:18] Kevin Williams: Yeah, exactly. That would be fun.
[00:35:21] Jeremy Utley: That's great. That's great. Is there a maybe last question from my side and then I'll let Henry crap and if he has anything else, but Kevin, I'd love to hear if you had to describe, call it your biggest. Okay. Generative AI win right now, or to this point, ~how would you, as somebody, ~somebody from another organization is going, what, but what does it really do?
What is there, how do you even characterize your biggest win and how do you describe it?
[00:35:44] Kevin Williams: Always my wins are not mine. They're the teams. So I'll focus on a team win, which is.
[00:35:51] Kevin Williams: I'll go to the personalization of the follow up to a meeting, and we actually were able to put together the bullet points of the value that we provide, um, and then I showed the team with some live pipeline examples.
I was like, okay, this is actually a non profit. Let's ask it to tailor it for a nonprofit. You got some cool ideas in there. It gives you words. It gives you things that resonate. There's the pharmaceutical or whatever. The one that I had stolen this from originally, she took it back to the actual prospect and re sent it.
And I don't know if it's changed the deal, but we've got pretty good engagement with them. Again, by speaking their language and I could get there I said, Hey, Chad, GBT, I'm trying to sell to a pharma company, speak their language for me. You're going to get okay, stuff. But when we took it and said, here's a value prop, here's the meeting summary.
Here's I've done all the hard work, just tweak it a little bit. And it got so much better at that point. Just little words that you would not think about. So I'd say that's our biggest win is the application to existing pipeline. A lot of people think it's pipeline creation. Sure. There's a pipeline creation aspect to it, but.
I'd say advancing existing pipeline by speaking more to their and it's some of it. You could do this on your own and say okay, I'm selling to higher ed. I should say the word academic somewhere. I should say. It's a content request from a professor. Like I should do that. I don't do that because my reps don't do that because we're in the rope moment where we just, Nope, this is my followup.
And it's based on this feature. And this is just what I say. And it's like, why didn't you drop in the word professor and academic? It's going to resonate so much better with just two words dropped in there. And so it's almost these blind spots that chatGPD can call
out for you in some ways.
[00:37:29] Henrik Werdelin (native): This is super cool. Thank you so much for sharing all this. For somebody who's doing sales, this is just like the masterclass and how to get to use genitive AI real fast. So really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us.
[00:37:42] Kevin Williams: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:37:43] Kevin Williams: Glad to be here. I would give one encouragement to my sales people out there, not this leadership. Leadership you should be applying this to your company. Sales people, as with all things, don't wait for leadership. You got to do it yourself because it's passing you by. If you sit around, you got to do it yourself and take ownership of your sales results and your sales career.
And don't wait for others to just give you the playbook. You got to go figure it out. I love that.
. I tell our team all the time. It's not let people walk.
It's not let people sit. It's let people run. There's a velocity aspect to it. So yes run with chat. GBT run with generative AI. Make it happen.
[00:38:17] Jeremy Utley: Yeah, it's great stuff, Kevin. Thanks so much for making the time for us today. It's a lot of fun. We're huge fans of what you're doing and where, last but not least, where can people find you if they want to follow you learn from what you're sharing in the
[00:38:28] Kevin Williams: world?
Yeah, I am a, I'm not a social media maven. So I'm mostly a LinkedIn guy. Kevin Williams searched for litho on LinkedIn. Cause there's about a million Kevin Williams, I'd rather you find litho than Kevin Williams. Anyways, it's L Y T H O litho. Like it's a typo, the error that we help you avoid. Love it.
Love it.
[00:38:47] Jeremy Utley: That's perfect. Thank you, sir.
And that's a wrap for this episode of beyond the prompt. I hope you enjoyed the show.
And if you did, please do as a favor and like, and share. I mean a lot to us so much appreciative you do. ,
and please come back to our next episode.
We have many more people that we're going to interview about their best tricks and how they using AI to transform their business
until then. Thank you so much