Trust Fall Into the Uncanny Valley

When you think of sales, what comes to mind? The people? A good pitch? For me, trust is at the heart of every sale. This aligns with a Salesforce study that found 78% of business buyers are looking for a trusted advisor when in the market for a solution. Customers want to trust the product they are buying; they want to trust the person that is selling it as well.

So, as we look at AI this week, we aim to answer the following question: how does using AI-communication tools affect trust within sales?

CHATBOTS, DEEP VALLEYS, AND THE EERIE

Last week we mentioned the qualms many people have about mixing art and artificial intelligence—there is hesitation to letting AI run certain avenues of our world. Yet there are plenty of areas where AI has existed for a while, and it’s hardly given a second thought.

AI-driven chatbots have been around since the 1960s. Today’s versions can be available 24/7, speak multiple languages, and address most common pain points by picking up on keywords. But as sales professionals, we need to always question the norms and ask ourselves, “Is this adding to our close? Is this building trust? Is it mitigating risk?”

In a study done just last year on chatbots, researchers found that as a chatbot increases its likeness to a real human, the trust in that chatbot decreases rather than increases. This dip in affinity is known as the “uncanny valley.” When something is obviously AI, it is generally accepted with trust and comfort by human users, but as the chatbot becomes increasingly human, the user’s perception enters a valley of eeriness that triggers discomfort. As AI becomes almost human, there is extreme unease that leads to distrust.

You likely weren’t planning on communicating with your prospects via a creepy robot. Instead, you’re thinking about (or already are) using ChatGPT prompts to create emails for potential clients. Will your recipients know that the messages are AI-generated? Will your AI communication then be perceived as untrustworthy?

The answer: yes. In a 2019 study on AI-created “human-like responses,” participants had a significant bias toward human-generated reviews and communications and negative feelings toward reviews written by AI. In the study, the subjects were not always told whether the content was AI-generated. Their discomfort came when the text was attributed to a human but they suspected it to be written using artificial intelligence.

What does this mean for you? If people suspect you used AI and are trying to pass it off as your own, you are going to lose trust, big time. Trust is developed by understanding emotions and responding to subtle, human details. With a lack of ability to understand these, AI is creating more mistrust, rather than less, when used in written communication on its own.

COGS IN THE WORKPLACE

AI, of course, is still useful in communication. It can aid in efficiency and free up resources so long as the user takes time to offset the AI impact and restore the trust associated with human authorship. You can add in the human part to your AI-generated communication when you need to and be a sales rock star.

There are also instances in the sales process for which AI’s non-humanness doesn’t pose a risk. Within a sales company there is the passing of much information related to leads, current prospects, and pipelines. Communicating this information requires synthesizing substantial amounts of data, which is something AI is great at.

For example, let’s say you just gave a presentation to a client on your product and its capabilities to shorten their hiring process. You have to synthesize the presentation—and the client’s feedback from every previous presentation—then pass it all along to Jeff. Jeff is your closer, and he’s next in line to chat with this client to address any outlying items and get them to sign.

The reading and summarizing of this information could take a full day to do, maybe longer depending on your reading speed, how long the presentations were, and the amount of client feedback. Or you could have an AI tool that does it for you. AI is great at summarizing large bodies of information and identifying important threads, and it can accomplish the task in three minutes. Furthermore, these AI tools can create graphs or tables in seconds that accurately paint pictures of important data points. There’s no need to worry about losing Jeff’s trust, because Jeff is expecting summaries. AI boosts your ability to communicate by making you faster, giving you more time for other communications that you previously had to skimp on.

It is worth noting that there may be people in your organization who pride themselves on their summary-driven communications, like Savannah. Savannah loves writing the weekly summary of the team meeting and enjoys finding a cute joke that relates to something mentioned in each meeting. When balancing between using AI or letting someone enjoy a small part of their week, remember that people are more than just cogs in a machine, and sometimes little joys go a long way in the workplace.

SUGAR, SPICE, AND EVERYTHING NICE

When the purpose of your communication is both information transfer and trust-building, the key is to be smart about how you use your AI tools. ChatGPT and Lavender (an AI tool that helps write emails), are two examples of AI platforms that can help save a lot of time in communicating if you keep several things in mind.

When writing an email to a new prospect, think about how much of the purpose of the email is information transfer and how much of it is to build trust. Then use your answer to decide how much you can expect AI to work for you.

For example, imagine Mariana is writing an email to a new prospect. They have never spoken, so she needs to quickly build trust while also explaining how her product can help her potential client. She is also a terrible email writer.

She gives Lavender the data she needs and has it mock up an email. This should be done quickly, and without spending much effort focused on getting the email to read naturally. Mariana can then go in and add the levels of humanity needed to keep trust high. She adds in a note about the prospect’s interest in salsa that she found on their LinkedIn. She deletes some of the formal words used by AI and adds a softer tone, changing “that would be ever so appreciated,” to, “that would be appreciated.” She will add a better greeting than shalom from the mountains.

It’s better to spend less time to get an email that’s 50% to your standard than to try building the perfect AI email prompts that only get your message 60% of the way there. There will be more work to do when these tools give you your email or summaries, but the goal is to use these tools to save time where you can.

AI can speed up your communication processes in sales without losing trust if you remember to use it wisely. Weigh the amount of time needed to get an AI prompt to feel “human” versus how quickly you can add in the human yourself. Remember that people are still inherently skeptical of AI in communication, so any communication outside your organization should feel written by you.

AI can make things faster. Humans make the deal.

Reach out to mastery@maestrogroup.co for more information on training, assessments, and more. Your response will be from a real human.