3 Ways AI Sales Technology Is Changing The Game

Our view at Stack - ClickFunnels was founded by an online marketing legend Russell Brunson and it offers several benefits for online businesses and marketers:

• Time and Cost Savings: Efficiently create sales funnels without extensive development efforts.
• Maximized Conversions: Test offers, copy, and images to enhance conversions.
• Specific Landing Pages: Generate highly targeted landing pages.
• Predictable Pipeline: Create consistent, predictable sales paths.
• Increased Sales: On average, it boosts sales of lesser products by 15%

The post 3 Ways AI Sales Technology Is Changing The Game appeared first on ClickFunnels.

AI might turn out to be the greatest technological breakthrough of our age akin to the Industrial Revolution.

Today we are going to discuss how you can use AI sales technology to grow your business!

Introduction to AI

We want to start by going over the most important things that you need to know about AI. Why?

Because if you don’t have a basic understanding of what AI is, how popular tools like ChatGPT work and what are their limitations, you might run into trouble. 

For example, when a Chevy dealership added a ChatGPT-powered chatbot to their website, they probably didn’t expect that online pranksters would start jailbreaking it for fun. Twitter user Chris Bakke even went viral for persuading the chatbot to sell him a car for $1!

No one who has a basic understanding of what ChatGPT is would ever use a ChatGPT-powered chatbot on their business website. Just because everyone else is doing it doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea!

That’s why you need to educate yourself on the subject of artificial intelligence. Otherwise, you might find yourself in a similar debacle!

What is AI?

“Artificial intelligence” is a term that refers to machine intelligence.

There’s some debate as to what exactly counts as “intelligence” when we are talking about computers. 

But generally speaking, experts seem to more or less agree that intelligence involves an ability to learn from previous experiences and solve problems that one hasn’t encountered before. 

It’s important to differentiate between specialized artificial intelligence and general artificial intelligence:

• Specialized artificial intelligence is a term that refers to machines that are “intelligent” across a narrow range of skills (e.g. chess software that can beat the best chess players in the world but is completely useless when it comes to anything else). 
• General artificial intelligence is a term that refers to machines that are “intelligent” across a broad range of skills and either match or surpass human general intelligence. In theory, AI doesn’t necessarily need to be sentient to be considered general, but in practice, when people talk about general artificial intelligence, there’s typically either an implicit or explicit assumption of sentience.

At this point in time, we only have specialized artificial intelligence. 

Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT may be “intelligent” across an extremely broad range of skills but they are still considered to be a type of specialized artificial intelligence. 

Google has an online course that provides an overview of the field of artificial intelligence. If you want to learn more about this subject, consider investing a few hours in going through this course. It doesn’t require any technical skills!

Or you can watch this video to get the summary in 10 minutes:

What is Generative AI?

The current AI hype is fuelled by the recent breakthroughs in generative AI.

As Helen Toner explains in her article about the differences between generative AI, large language models and foundational models:

Here are some examples of popular generative AI tools:

• ChatGPT (text generation)
• Dall-E (image generation)
• Vall-E (audio generation)
• Sora (video generation)
• Copilot (code generation)

Nowadays, when people talk about using AI sales technologies, they are typically talking about generative AI. 

What are Large Language Models (LLMs)?

Here’s how Helena Toner explains it:

As Toner points out in her article, there’s some discussion regarding whether popular tools like ChatGPT should be described as “powered by LLMs” or as being LLMs themselves. For the sake of simplicity, we will be referring to them as “LLMs” in this article. 

If you want to learn more about LLMs, we recommend watching this introductory lecture by the computer scientist Andrej Karpathy, one of the founding members of OpenAI:

What are the Current Limitations of Large Language Models?

Here are the three key LLM limitations that you need to be aware of if you want to use these tools in your business:

LLMs are Black Boxes

This might come as a surprise but no one really knows how LLMs work.

These aren’t regular computer programs that were written by a team of software engineers who have access to all the code. 

Imagine that you have a black box that you can feed data to and that can spit out data back in response to user queries but you can’t see what’s going on inside it. That’s what LLMs are. 

To give a concrete example, no one really knows how ChatGPT works, not even the people at OpenAI who created it. 

It’s important to keep that in mind when you are working with LLMs because the inscrutability of these systems is a fundamental problem that various other issues stem from. 

Here’s how computer scientist Javier Viaña summarizes the dangers of relying on these black boxes:

LLMs Have a Tendency to “Hallucinate”

In practical terms, the most important LLM limitation that you need to understand is the phenomenon known as “hallucinations”, which is their tendency to just make things up and then confidently state them as facts. 

This means that you cannot blindly trust their output the way you’d trust a calculator’s output. If you ask an LLM a question, you need to verify that its answer is indeed correct. 

Same goes for using LLMs to create online content such as website copy, sales copy, blog articles and so on. You must make sure that the information in that content is accurate before publishing it.

Finally, you shouldn’t be using LLMs for anything that involves direct, unsupervised interactions with customers because there’s no way to know what these black boxes are going to say to them. 

LLMs might make offensive statements, provide incorrect information and potentially dangerous advice or just start spewing gibberish like ChatGPT did when it had some sort of an “episode” in February 2024.

While the laws that deal with the use of AI are still evolving, you don’t want to risk getting into legal trouble for something that an LLM said to one of your customers!

It’s also worth noting that quite a few computer scientists and software engineers argue that hallucinations are an inherent feature of LLMs and therefore cannot be fixed.

No one can foresee the future but if you hope that this problem is going to be solved anytime soon, it’s probably best not to hold your breath. 

LLMs are Easy to Jailbreak

In this context, the term “jailbreaking” means getting an LLM to do something that it shouldn’t, like reveal confidential information, make ludicrous suggestions or say racist stuff. 

Since computer scientists who create LLMs have no idea how these black boxes work, they cannot prevent jailbreaking, especially when AI enthusiasts on Twitter jump on this task the moment a new version of a popular LLM like ChatGPT is released. 

This means that if your app or chatbot is powered by an LLM, there’s a high likelihood that eventually, people will start trying to jailbreak it for fun, like in that Chevy case we discussed previously. 

Typically, these jailbreaking attempts are relatively harmless, but they can nevertheless cause brand damage, especially once they go viral. Say, would you trust a company whose meal planner app provides recipes that include chlorine gas, bleach and ant poison?

This is another reason why using LLMs for anything that involves direct, unsupervised interactions with customers is too risky. So don’t do it!

What You Need to Know About AI Sales Technology

What is AI Sales Technology?

We will be using the term “AI sales technology” to refer to any AI-powered technologies that can help you grow your business. 

Are AI Sales Technologies Powered by LLMs?

It’s probably safe to say that most AI apps out there are powered by LLMs such as ChatGPT.

If an AI app allows you to generate text, images, audio, video or code, then it’s probably just an LLM wrapper. 

Meaning, the underlying technology that powers it is one of the popular LLMs, but it’s “wrapped” with an interface that makes it easy for the user to get the result that they want. 

There’s nothing wrong with using wrappers like that in your business but you need to remember the LLM limitations that we just discussed.

Of course, not every AI sales technology falls under this category, which is why we recommend reaching out to software vendors directly if you aren’t sure if an app is powered by an LLM.

How AI Sales Technology is Changing the Game

1. AI Sales Technology Can Help You Build Sales Funnels FAST

Our co-founders Russell Brunson and Todd Dickerson both got into entrepreneurship in the early 2000s. 

Back then, building a sales funnel was a time-consuming, laborious and expensive endeavor: 

First, you had to hire a web designer to design each page in your funnel and then hire a web developer to build those pages. 

And once you had your sales funnel, you couldn’t just make changes to it yourself anytime you wanted, you had to pay a web developer to do it for you. 

That’s why our co-founders launched ClickFunnels in 2013: 

They wanted to provide small business owners with tools that would enable them to build and optimize sales funnels all by themselves. It was a revolutionary app that changed the way online marketing was done forever!

Now, more than a decade later, we want to take it to the next level with our AI sales funnel builder that we will be adding to our ClickFunnnels 2.0 platform soon.

Thanks to the recent advances in artificial intelligence, you don’t need to manually build sales funnels anymore, you can simply answer a few questions and AI will generate your sales funnel for you in 5-10 minutes!

2. AI Sales Technology Can Help You Overcome Writer’s Block

Generally speaking, when it comes to writing, producing the first draft is the greatest hurdle. There’s a reason why the term “writer’s block” is associated with staring at a blank page.

Once you have that first draft, no matter how bad its initial quality is, you can start editing it into shape. Remember, even Hemingway’s first drafts were terrible – he said as much himself. But that didn’t prevent him from receiving the Nobel Prize in literature!

That is why one of the most common pieces of writing advice is to complete the first draft as quickly as possible of course, if you ever had to write anything, you are probably well aware that this is easier said than done! 

Fortunately, with the advent of LLM-powered AI sales technology, you don’t have to agonize over first drafts anymore.

You can use AI to generate the first drafts of:

• Sales copy
• Blog articles
• Social media posts

…etc. 

Once you have your first draft, all that’s left is fact-checking, editing, and proofreading. Then you are ready to publish!

While it’s not possible to completely automate the entire writing process yet – at least not if you want to avoid the risks associated with LLM hallucinations – using AI to help you create first drafts can save you a ton of time!

3. AI Sales Technology Can Help You Analyze Business Data and Uncover Actionable Insights 

Businesses are collecting unprecedented amounts of data:

Traffic metrics, marketing metrics, conversion rates, sales records, refund requests, churn, customer support tickets, etc. 

In theory, this should enable companies to make better, data-driven business decisions.

In practice, though, raw data in and of itself isn’t useful, it needs to be analyzed. And analyzing vast quantities of data can be challenging. 

However, AI can analyze your data for you, uncover actionable insights that you would not have been able to uncover yourself, and present those insights as prescriptive suggestions based on your business goals. 

Of course, if you want to use AI in this manner, you shouldn’t trust it blindly, especially if we are talking about LLMs. So make sure to manually verify AI claims whenever possible and only follow its advice if it makes sense to you. 

Also, know that you don’t have to use LLMs for data analysis, you can go with software that is based on other approaches to machine learning instead. 

Say, if you want to analyze large quantities of textual data, such as all customer support tickets, you can do so with text analytics apps that use a machine learning technique called text analysis. 

That can help you learn what the overall customer sentiment is, what are the most common issues, what features are the most requested, etc. 

Of course, text analytics apps aren’t perfect, so you shouldn’t blindly trust them either.

In fact, they might provide questionable insights due to data misinterpretation, data overfitting or data analysis heuristics that are too simplistic. .

But at least they won’t outright make things up like LLMs tend to do!

How ClickFunnels 2.0 AI Funnel Builder Can Help You Grow Your Business

Look:

If you don’t have a proper sales funnel yet, your top priority should be to get one up and running ASAP.

You can do that with our AI sales funnel builder:

1. Answer some questions about your business, your product, and your target audience.
2. Choose from six funnel types: the opt-in funnel, the application funnel, the webinar funnel, the summit funnel, the bridge funnel, and the video series funnel.

   (If you aren’t familiar with these funnel types, there’s no need to worry: each funnel comes with a short description that will help you pick the one that makes the most sense for your business.)

3. Choose a color scheme, design style, and image style from the provided options.

Then, click a button and let our software generate a sales funnel for you, which should take around 5-10 minutes. 

Once you have your sales funnel, you can customize it with our visual editor and publish it online.

All this can be done in one evening so don’t procrastinate on it, don’t overthink it, and don’t hesitate to publish your funnel. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be live!

Try ClickFunnels 2.0 Risk-Free!

Let’s be real:

We are biased in favor of our software. 

So we understand if you take what we say about it with a grain of salt.

Fortunately, we have a free 14-day trial, so you don’t have to take our word for it. 

You can go and see ClickFunnels 2.0 for yourself without any risk!

So what are you waiting for? 🧐

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