THE SOVEREIGN SELLER ISSUE #34

Own The Angle — The Best Application of AI in Sales

Sunday, April 26th, 2026 | Lauderdale By The Sea, FL | 7:11 AM

Two weeks ago, I held a focus group with twelve of my ideal buyers.

None of them exist.

I built them inside a custom GPT - twelve personas, each modeled on a real LinkedIn profile of the kind of executive I’m actually trying to reach. Credit to Kevin Donlin, a marketing mentor I hired, for the idea.

A custom GPT is a version of ChatGPT you configure with specific instructions, reference material, and personality. Think of it as a purpose-built assistant - trained on the job you actually need done - inside the tool you already use.

Before I send an email, draft a DM, write a voicemail script, or launch an offer, I run it past the room. So should you. Your twelve personas are the buyers on your target list.

The feedback is fast, unfiltered, and alarmingly accurate. It tells me when a subject line is limp, when my offer isn’t clear, when the first sentence sounds like every other consultant’s first sentence.

Here’s what that looks like in practice. I’m working on a sales letter for a marketing agency targeting orthopedic practices. I ran it past a panel of eight orthopedic buyer personas I built for that project - separate from my standard twelve.

The letter quotes a client comparing the agency to an octopus ... “They focus on data, and when one tactic isn’t delivering, they pivot.”

This is a strong testimonial on its face.

Three of the eight loved the unconventional framing - confident, memorable.

Three were neutral.

But two - the personas who buy on simplicity - read “octopus” as “many arms, many things to manage.”

The exact opposite of what the agency was selling. The fix wasn’t to cut the quote; the content was good.

The fix was to front-load the client attribution so “a real marketing director said this” lands before “octopus” does.

That’s a note I would not have caught on my own.

AI can’t sell for you, but it can help you figure out what to say - so you can cut through the tsunami of clutter washing over your prospects every day.

Why This Is A Competitive Advantage

Focus groups are a marketing discipline.

A real B2B focus group costs tens of thousands of dollars and takes weeks to assemble. You recruit the right executives, pay each one for their time, rent the facility, hire a moderator, build the discussion guide, run the session, and then pay someone to write up the findings.

I’m doing it with a $20 ChatGPT subscription, on demand, in under five minutes, before I send anything to anyone.

That’s the edge. I’m applying marketing-grade feedback to sales-grade outputs while everyone else is still guessing whether their subject line lands.

This matters because most people are good enough at selling once they’re in the conversation. The bottleneck is getting the attention of (and appointments with) better prospects. A focus group that pressure-tests every message before it ships is fuel for exactly that.

But the focus group is only as sharp as the angle I bring to it.

Own The Angle

AI has one limitation most people haven’t caught up with yet.

It cannot originate.

It can rewrite, reformat, refine, and scale.

What it cannot do is originate the angle. That’s still on you.

This is where sellers are getting it wrong. They skip the thinking. They ask AI to do it all.

They paste a prospect’s LinkedIn URL into a tool and ask it to “write me a great cold email.”

The output is grammatically perfect, but indistinguishable from what thirty other reps are sending this week.

The angle is still yours to bring.

The offer is still yours to define.

The point of view is still yours to develop.

The Test I Run On Myself

I know I’m leaning on AI too hard when my content starts sounding like AI. It happened to me earlier this year with some LinkedIn posts and comments.

That was the tell. I was outsourcing the thinking I should’ve been doing myself.

Now I run a simple gut check before I use AI for anything customer-facing:

Do I have the angle?

Do I have the offer?

Do I know exactly what I’m trying to provoke in this reader?

If yes, AI is rocket fuel. It’ll draft in thirty seconds what would’ve taken me an hour, and my focus group of twelve non-existent buyers will tell me if it landed.

What This Means For You

The reps most at risk of being replaced by AI are the reps already doing AI’s job - sending generic outreach, writing generic proposals, chasing volume over precision.

The reps who’ll become more valuable are the ones using AI to amplify what only they can bring: the angle, the offer, the point of view, the judgment on which deal is worth chasing.

Sovereignty isn’t in the tool. It’s in what you put into it.

Own the angle. Everything else is just typing.

To your success,

Shane