Readers who know me are aware of my age and experience in our industry. For those who do not, suffice it to say I have been in sales and sales management for over 50 years. I have never seen a greater tool to help salespeople “make their pitch” and get a “valid assessment” of their creative ideas than using Google NotebookLM. This is a beta product and I am certain there will be a lot of other services soon. AI, as a tool for your business, is a phenomenal utility and its value has yet to be fully evaluated. I have written about it in previous columns, but it grows exponentially every hour.
In my experiment, I wrote a fictitious proposal, as you will read below. Then, I fed it into NotebookLM. It took about three minutes and the audio was ready. OMG! It was like the world’s greatest coach for sales pitch development and idea evaluation all in one. I have an ego when it comes to sales presentations. I was trained by some of the best, but AI dwarfs us all. You and I do not need pride of ownership, we just need sales.
My Written Presentation (first shot, written in a car during a 10-hour drive)
This presentation is in response to your request to help promote your facility and services to school nurses. The objective is to get referrals from nurses when students need to go to an emergency room. The promotional items selected will create brand awareness and are medically relevant in a school nurse’s office.
We recommend a frequent mailing every other month. All products recommended will be branded and prepacked for distribution. The theme of the program focuses on “swift and compassionate care from the finest medical facility in our area.”
Items for consideration:
Digital thermometer
Custom adhesive bandages
Cotton swab dispenser
Clip board
Writing instrument
Wellness wall poster
Hand sanitizer
Teddy Bear
Stethoscope cover
Feeding It into NotebookLM
After browsing, but not fully learning the functionality of the NotebookLM tool, I copied and pasted my draft proposal into NotebookLM. In less than two minutes I was able to listen to, and download, a conversation between two AI voices you can hardly tell are not human. The interaction was mind blowing. What was delivered were sales pointers I could use in my own presentation to the hospital and a bonus. These non-humans gave me their opinion on my creativity. They were on target in many ways. As I continue to refine my proposal and feed it to Notbooklm, I should have an audio I would consider sending to my client with my written proposal. The future will tell us if clients are interested in this tool. They, whoever the AI duo is, dented my ego armor. At this point, I want you to listen to what they said in their informal conversational style Link To NotebookLM Conversation.
My Take
Listening to this has sent me back to a rewrite. I need to consider my selection, my theme and more. I also need to learn how to feed and phrase what I put into NotebookLM. It can read my writing and, to some degree, my mind, but I need to feed it better.
My Creative Round Table
I have always touted that the advantage of being in a larger distributorship is that you have colleagues who can critique your ideas and presentations and help you build better ones. I push for people to join regionals, so they have a community of helpers. Well, it is obvious that AI will bring this assistance to you.
The Beginning
I am not going to write more now. I urge you to explore NotebookLM.google. I would love your feedback on your experience and experiment. I will continue this and head into presentation videos that could have cost tens of thousands of dollars a few years ago but are now almost free.
I will not be around to see the shape of things to come in 25 years, but the journey young practitioners in our business are embarking on is “wild”. I believe many of these are essential tools to help the small to medium size supplier and distributor compete against the “big box” companies on both sides that are determined to squash the little guys out of business.