Teaching machines to communicate value in sales

Typical sales situations are trust-destroying. Sneaky salespeople cold calling senior citizens by night to sell worthless goods, or door-to-door sellers being intrusive and inappropriate.

The ugly side of sales has created prejudice, which prevents legitimate people from talking to strangers. Because of this, we instantly assume that we are being persuaded, tricked or robbed, whether it is of our time or our money. In sales situations, our first instinct often is to remove ourselves from the situation, as we scan our thoughts for reasons to say no.

How do we fight these assumptions?

Prior to working in sales myself, I believed the above. Most of my experiences with salespeople had been unpleasant and annoying. Despite being randomly picked from a list of calls, they were certain I needed their product.

At Stealth, I teach machines to communicate better than human beings. Through this, I’ve learnt the fundamentals of creating valuable conversations.

In order to introduce novel products or services, conversations are imperative. In doing so, we must also realise that not all sales opportunities are equal. The world is full of opportunities, and by identifying the one’s with the greatest potential for us to succeed in, we won’t be left feeling guilty of wasting someone’s time.

How do I talk to the right people at the right time?

Companies (and individuals) have needs that require fulfilment, and those needs are constantly changing. A business needs employees, insurance, electricity, a premise to operate in and so on. However, even the best of prospects aren’t good prospects at any given time. With the help of technological tools which utilize comprehensive real-time data, we can identify the most probable time for these needs to arise.

How do I talk with evidence?

Your counterpart in negotiations will always appreciate that you’ve done your homework. So back your claims with fact-based evidence, and present these with images, live demos or performance metrics. Visuals have a greater recall rate, and when your solution is real, there’s endless possibilities in data to justify your arguments.

 

While these points may seem obvious to some, to a computer nothing is self-evident. Each thought, idea and opinion must be based on verifiable data to enable machines to replicate them. Subsequently, machines can perform these processes more accurately and more precisely than humans can – and repeat these actions infinitely.

Nora

Nora

The future of negotiations

In negotiations, humans are likely to make long-term errors due to a number of factors such as stress, insecurity or fear of rejection. When it comes to utilising data let’s face it – human’s are not naturally great. The average short-term memory of a human being can only carry five things simultaneously, and for example rapid calculation is impossible. While these can be overcome with the help of computers, there is one key issue as to why computers are not invited into negotiations – natural language

The Golden Era for computer-assisted negotiations

In the future, when we talk to strangers, there will be no conflict or misinterpretation amongst facts. I believe computers will work as advisors that have all the necessary information for a successful negotiation due to efficiently analysing data sets as large as everything ever written. Humans will remain as decision-makers however, as unlike computers they experience desire, a dominant factor in decisions. The rapid development of NLP technology has created the Golden Era for inviting computers to join human-to-human negotiations.

The increasing help of technology will improve the quality of human interactions and yield value from conversations in multiple ways.

Identifying valuable conversations

The very same technological leap that is needed to guide negotiations will enable us to simulate them. By simulating negotiations and predicting the end result, we can also know beforehand whether the negotiation is worth our time. For example, in a sales situation, we would only enter negotiations in which the following conditions are met:

  • The counterpart has a need for our offering
  • The counterpart has the necessary resources to purchase our offering
  • We have confidence and ability to express that our offering can meet and exceed expectations within the particular market

These are the first steps that we at Stealth Black have already taken in our journey towards our Grand Vision. The mission of Stealth Black is to fulfil its vision in a financially feasible way by initially entering the most addressable markets. These markets include those in which valuable conversations are continuously entered and progressed in large quantities daily: leasable office spaces, insurance plans and electric vehicles.

Within our operating markets, we are continuously analysing companies and building the strongest of arguments to guide negotiations. By connecting the strongest candidates to the most suitable offering in the marketplace, we are creating superior conditions for successful negotiations. While doing so, we are also ensuring that our technology remains as generalisable as possible for future expansion.

Our journey begins with a single negotiation type:

Me: ‘’ I would like to negotiate a new rental agreement for my currently vacant office space.’’

Computer: ‘’Sure thing. I will now analyse all of the past lease periods of all commercial real estate properties from the past 30 years. I will find your location and particular office space the best tenant that will most likely still be your five years from now’’

Me: ‘’Thanks, sounds good.’’

Computer: ‘’After 1 second of processing I have learnt that there are 56 candidates to move into your premises this year. The number one candidate with a 35.6% probability to accept ideal terms is ‘Sam’s IT Software Inc.’ . They have just announced a series A funding of €4.8M and have within the past two weeks published three new job openings on their website for software developers. Would you like to contact CEO Sam Wright?’’

Me: ‘’Yes.’’

Computer: ‘’Great, here’s what you should say to CEO Sam via LinkedIn:

Hi Sam!

Congratulations on your latest funding news! Nicely done after only 23 months of existence. I wanted to ask whether you are looking for a new office to fit your team and all the additions you are currently hiring? I would love to have an opportunity to show you this beautiful vacant space only a 3-minute walk away from Main St. 200. The last tenant had a similar background to Sam’s IT Software and now they are moving into a bigger space. You might actually know them, they are Lisa’s Robots Inc. So what do you think, would you like to come and have a look, say next week?

Is this message okay to you?

Me: ‘’Yes.’’


Tuomas Rasila

Tuomas Rasila

Hello world, we are Stealth Black

As this is the opening for our blog, I want to tell our story in brief. This company was founded a year ago. We believe that computers can find and build better connections between humans than humans can by themselves only. We have built a machine that makes these connections in B2B world, where every conversation tends to happen for a well know reason. Most often that reason is trade. The very reason for this text too is trade, I am promoting a solution that I wish to sell.

Why?

In the marketplace where everyone is bombarded with high volume and low insight solicitation, we built something completely different. A machine that will write a message for you and select a recipient for you to get you into a conversation in where everyone wants to be talking within an agenda that is meaningful for each person. Considered this. You are driving on a freeway and get a flat tire. Two minutes later a truck stops next to you and the drives greet you: “Hello there, seems like you have a flat tire, I’d be happy to fix that for $50 and you’ll be back on the road in 15 minutes”. It would be a great rendezvous for both, It would be a short and fruitful business negotiation with mutually beneficial outcomes. We are building these kinds of confluences with pre-set agendas on daily basis.

How?

First of all, any type of conversion that leads to business is crowded by nature. Most crowded are the most top-level offerings. “Software development services, sir?“, “Insurance policies?“, “Perhaps a new office space or an opportunity to be featured in a trade journal” to write a message that will be read, is to isolate oneself from the mass. This can be done by saying the things that others cannot say. By knowing:

1. What kind of conversation you wish to have?
2. With whom and when this conversation can be had?
3. How to prove in closed form that the value proposition is real and unique.

What?

The best way to tell what we do and what can be bought from us is to tell what our current customers do. Our customers are mainly commercial real estate owners, who rent office space for companies. Every time a tenant leaves, they need to find a new tenant.

1. We follow through with ever-increasing amounts of publicly available information about all of the companies that could become their next tenant.
2. On a daily basis we find the most lucrative opportunity for a new tenant. This is being calculated from a standpoint of both parties. We can predict the tenant who would benefit most by renting the space
3. Finally, like a ghostwriter we generate the first part of the communication, the initial message to start this conversation with pre-set agenda. This is being delivered to our customer, who reads it and sends it to the recipient.

That’s it. This is the minimum effective dose of sales that needs to happen to yield extraordinary results. In this blog, we intend to dive deeper into the insights of these conversations. We do believe that the next version of a market economy will be built upon an idea of having near-perfect communication even in the most customizable products and that big data, machine learning, A.I. NLP and game theory and at the intersection of this new world.

Tuomas Rasila

Tuomas Rasila