Simple Ways Chat GPT Can Help A Wholesale / Distributor-Type Business
If you’re operating in a wholesale/distributor business model, you might wonder, “What’s Chat GPT and how can it help me?”
If so, this article is for you.
I’ve enjoyed the feedback I get from folks reading and subscribing to this newsletter. It has helped me greatly gain perspective as to how many people either view or use the bot.
This article came directly from a subscriber’s comment: “I haven’t quite figured out how Chat GPT can fit in operationally yet.”
This article will explore how Chat GPT can greatly assist in creating resources that can help attract and support the right dealers and customers.
For additional context – here is an article I wrote on this specific topic: https://sutherlandweston.com/website-content-reverse-engineer-common-questions-for-high-value/]
First – A Quick Overview
The Perspective Of The Dealer
Attracting new dealers – the right dealers – means gathering and providing information to help vanguard bad fits.
A powerful and effective way to do that is by getting answers to the most frequent questions, situations, and concerns in written or video form.
Creating resources based on what you know can help scale the information you typically spend most of your week dealing with. As a simple example, these topics are regular concerns of potential dealers:
- Reliability: Can they trust your supply chain?
- Quality: Are your products any good?
- Support: What’s your after-sales service like?
The Perspective Of The Customer
Your dealers are the ones talking to the customers. They have to answer all sorts of questions about your products. How can you help make their job easier and make them look good i the process? By creating resources to help dealers respond promptly with value. Some areas of routine concern of customers might be:
- Reliability: “Is this thing gonna last?” Trust is a big factor here.Warranty: “What if it breaks?”
- How To: “How do I use or fix this myself?”
- Support: “Can I get help if I need it?”
Second – How Chat GPT Can Help
Building Customer and Dealer Profiles
This exercise is something you do to help Chat GPT help you. It’s not something that you have Chat GPT do for you.
But, it will become the most important exercise you do to get value out of using the Chat GPT bot for anything related to your business.
What’s In The Profiles?
Create at least two profiles: One for your dealers and one for your customers. You may want to create even more subsets but at the very least start there.
The profiles are literally a document listing every detail you can think of that can help describe them (in this case, dealer or customer). You’re simply creating a narrative. Think of it as telling a story.
Start with the obvious, like what business they are, what they sell, who their customers are, and how they sell.
Then move on to the business challenges they face, like workforce, supply chain, distribution, etc.
Then move on to the mental or emotional concerns, like what makes them happy, what frustrates them, what they like, what they don’t like, etc.
If it helps, have one of your better dealers in mind as you write this out. The more specific and granular you make this, the more valuable it will be.
Keep this profile in a document outside of Chat GPT. Update it as you get more ideas. You only have to do this once, and it will serve as the foundation for all the business-related work you do with Chat GPT moving forward.
How you’ll use this?
You can paste it into the beginning of a Chat GPT conversation and tell the bot that this is the perspective you want to focus on as you work with it.
Expand Questions with Chat GPT
Once you’ve got a detailed profile, you can use Chat GPT to pretend you’re the customer or dealer. Ask the bot to play the role of the customer or the dealer and give you questions it would have when considering doing business with you.
Unlike searching Google, you’ll want to use conversational tones for best results.
Direct it to be as specific as it can with the questions. This exercise can help generate questions or topics you may have overlooked.
Building Out The Answers
Armed with a library of questions, the next step is creating thorough, objective, and detailed answers. This exercise will help create a robust library of resources that can be used in many beneficial ways, including:
- Website and marketing content
- Email marketing to customers or dealers
- Faster replies to service inquiries
- Improve onboarding of new employees
Use Chat GPT To Review & Recommend Edits
Because you’ve built your detailed personas, you can then use Chat GPT to help make the articles and resources you’ve created as meaningful and helpful as possible.
Here are some simple ways – paste the persona you’ve created into Chat GPT and ask it to:
- Read the article through the eyes of the customer or dealer and share with you recommendations to improve clarity or add details.
- Analyze technical support or training manuals to help improve clarity and understanding.
- Review a page on your website. Ask it to provide you recommendations for updating the content to help clarify and address the questions and topics that matter most to them.
- Provide recommendations for improving the clarity and details of any marketing or advertising copy.