Understanding your clients/customers is the foundation of business development. Successful business development and sales depend on deeply understanding potential clients' needs, preferences, and expectations. Integrating Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) can significantly enhance your ability to create precise and comprehensive client profiles, streamline sales strategies, and proactively address client requirements.

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I agree. Deeply understanding are the key words. Years ago, one of my colleagues suggested that one should not “over research” a client because too much information would lead to confirmation bias thus limiting your ability to ask open questions. Well, that’s one point of view. But going in naked without preparation was not my style. And, after all, wouldn’t a prospective client expect you to have done your homework?

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That homework in the past included viewing the prospect’s website, public documents, investment reports, lists of products and services, news sources, LinkedIn profiles, and other sources. The process might have taken days to collect the information, copy it and create a folder or binder.

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Working with my trusty A.I. partner, that multi-hour process can now be accomplished in less than an hour.

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Using ChatGPT, I set up a project that captures my uploads and facilitates multiple chats. Within this project, we will build a model of the prospective company.

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We start a conversation. Not a “magical prompt.” A conversation.

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Let’s start with the company’s website. Most of my clients are private companies with moderately-sized websites. We ask A.I. to download, extract and analyze the website, describing the contents in detail. If my prospect is a division of the company, we could focus only on that portion of the site.

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At this stage, A.I. and I discuss the market, the products and services, the company leaders, etc. That opens the door to ask A.I. to search its sources for more information about these topics, for instance, significant announcements, competitors, market outlook, significant issues, etc. From that, we can delineate significant challenges the business faces and its prospects for the future.

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At this point, I usually ask for a preliminary SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunity, and Strengths).

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If I am scheduled for a meeting with the CEO, for instance, A.I. can develop a detailed profile of that person, using LinkedIn and other sources. A.I. can prepare an outline of the interview session, including questions, cautions, primary focus of the meeting.

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We may have identified other documents from past work—our own work products, processes or techniques. I can add these to the A.I. project to help AI further prepare its answers.

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Now, suppose new information has arrived—an email from the prospective client that lists some objectives of our upcoming meeting and a paragraph of her main concerns about the company. We upload that document to the A.I. project along with any other information we gathered. From this and the analysis so far, in conjunction with A.I., we can derive goals for a possible project for the client.

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As you can see, the sophistication of the “model” is growing as we add additional data. Also, my questions and interactions are helping A.I. learn about my view and objectives about the project.

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Now we can ask A.I. to develop a detailed program description for the client’s program with a detailed step-by-step process, and a time line for implementation. If you have added  your schedule of service or product fees to the A.I. project space, then you can proceed to ask A.I. for a complete proposal package.

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At its core, business development is about relationships. People want to work with businesses that understand them and bring real value to the table. A.I. doesn’t replace that human connection—it strengthens it by giving you the insights and tools to show up prepared, engaged, and ready to help. And in today’s competitive world, that’s what really makes the difference.

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At the beginning, I mentioned this was a conversation. Treating your interaction with A.I. as a conversation will expand your thinking and yield amazing results. Give it a try.

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