The Opportunity: Assisting Sellers During Sales Conversations
An American mass media corporation was exploring ways to leverage technology to assist sellers during the sales conversations to further empower them to increase revenue in radio advertising.
Hypothesis: Automate the ad copy generation
Based on early client conversation, we hypothesized through leveraging an LLM we can:
- Automate the ad production process, a time consuming step in the seller workflow, to reduce the time-consuming manual process of managing and generating content.
- Shift the ad production process earlier in the seller’s workflow to provide the seller additional resources to enrich sales conversations.
Our Process: Human-Centered Design Agile
Our team started its discovery process by interviewing sales representatives (sellers) to understand the points of delay and disconnection with the ad buyers and frustrations with the current process of ad copy generation.
Through this we learned:
- Current workflow uses a large amount of unconnected software tools.
- Sellers are inundated to learn, maneuver and use many different software tools.
- Sellers have many responsibilities including managing the development of ad production scripts leveraging individuals or software, as well as voice talent to produce the audio ad.
- The ad buyer informs the seller of key variables aiding in a successful advertisement (i.e., key message, tone & voice, target audience, call to action, product elements, etc.).
- Uncover and establish the current seller workflow and where ad production fits.
The Solution: Ad Production
We then created a prototype / proof-of-concept leveraging Large Language Model-base AI to automate the ad production based on the buyer’s key variables.
The Ad Copy Generator streamlines the ad production step to empower sellers with additional tools and by reducing time spent on lower priority job responsibilities. This was accomplished by leveraging OpenAI to generate the ad copy text from the key variables, and then processing using the ElevenLabs text-to-speech to generate ad audio samples with distinct voicing and personas. The user interface was built using a streamlined website to ensure easy adoption and the POC was refined with ad seller feedback.
Outcomes:
The proof-of-concept was demonstrated to the ad sellers and was met with very positive responses.
"Having the voice and audio effects help bring it to life. It no longer is a concept, hearing it gets the buyers excited." - Ad Seller
"When we go to a meeting with a client, we sometimes have to help create the ad and figure out what it is they’re trying to accomplish with the ad. I think you’ve got it perfect." - Ad Seller
The benefits we realize are:
- Provide an integrated experience for the seller.
- Speed up the seller workflow.
- Eliminate steps in the current process.
- Reduce the number of software platforms currently used.
- Reduce time spent on manual and mundane job tasks to allow more dedicated time to tasks of higher importance.
- Shift ad production sooner in the process, providing the seller with supportive resources to entice potential clients earlier in the workflow.
- Better overall workflow experience for the seller.
