How AI Can Help Sales Teams Craft More Personalized Pitches | Inside The Secretive World Of Shark Tank Deals: Who The Real Winners Are | The Best Podcasts of 2023 | Research: Why So Many Packages Don’t Get Delivered

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How AI Can Help Sales Teams Craft More Personalized Pitches - Harvard Business Review

In the past, hours of leg work and research were required to create relevant and resonant sales interactions. With seller time at a premium, this sort of intensive prep work typically falls by the wayside for average sellers. But advances in AI are fast removing the excuse that this type of prep is too time-consuming. Modern sales platforms have the potential to help the average seller get to expert-level preparedness, in a fraction of the time, increasing their relevance and credibility with buyers.

Progressive sales leaders have used AI and machine learning to increase the efficiency of their organizations. Revenue operations and enablement teams have fine-tuned advanced models built for the structured data housed in tools like CRM systems. Many vendors have offered powerful ways to identify patterns and suggest new sales methods, improvements in forecasts, or even modifications to sales incentives.

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Inside The Secretive World Of Shark Tank Deals: Who The Real Winners Are - Forbes

As Vladislav Smolyanskyy made his way out of the tank, he started to panic. It was 2016 during the filming of Shark Tank’s eighth season and the then-21-year-old had just agreed to a deal that would give away majority control of his company, Pinblock, to celebrity investor Kevin O’Leary.

After sharing his “American Dream” story about immigrating from Kyiv, Ukraine to New York and starting his toy business—a Lego competitor in which every block is the same shape, allowing users to create complex, 3D models—O’Leary offered the young entrepreneur a typically sharky deal: He’d give Smolyanskyy $100,000 in return for half of the company, contingent on the pair striking a partnership with a major toy manufacturer. Smolyanskyy owned 85% of Pinblock (his cofounder, who was no longer involved, had the remaining 15%) so he’d be left with a minority stake if the deal went through. No other shark put an offer on the table, and O’Leary made a strong case: “I’ll bring it to the toy industry because they all return my calls and I’ll bring deals to you,” the investor said during the episode, noting his close relationship with industry giant Mattel. “You have no chance of doing it successfully yourself,” O’Leary added.

Smolyanskyy was visibly upset while taping his exit interview after the pitch, feeling he had given too much away, and a Shark Tank producer tried to reassure him off camera that the deal with O’Leary would be worth it. “I had to go through a lot of mental gymnastics to convince myself that it’s a good idea,” said Smolyanskyy. But he did, and soon became excited at the prospect of working with the investor.

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The Best Podcasts of 2023 - The New Yorker

It was another tumultuous year for the podcast industry, with layoffs and cancellations at Spotify, Pushkin, WNYC, and NPR, which cut four of its series and ten per cent of its staff in March. But great work continued to be made, including by independent and listener-supported shows. There were bold new projects from veteran producers and creators; series that managed to make unbearable subjects addictively listenable; storytelling with the confidence to engage us without sensationalizing; and even, improbably, a funds-and-consciousness-raising podcast, “Strike Force Five,” hosted by the biggest names in late-night TV. (Cue thunderclap.) Several perennial favorites impressed, among them “Heavyweight,” “Rumble Strip,” “Slow Burn,” “This American Life” (including the “Jane Doe” episode), “Ear Hustle,” “The Paris Review Podcast,” and “La Brega,” whose music-focussed second season was followed by cancellation; may it find another home. My picks for the year’s ten best are below.

Jonathan Menjivar’s exploration of class—how we perceive it, how we’ve internalized it, whether we try to change ourselves in relation to it—begins with a discussion of teeth. Menjivar, a longtime audio producer and the son of L.A. factory workers, goes to the dentist and is scolded by a hygienist about the “crowding” in his mouth. “It’s true—my teeth are all jacked up in the front,” he says. “But when she said that, all I heard was, ‘Your teeth are crooked, because you were too poor.’ ” It’s an “emblem of my class status stamped right on my face,” he says. “But I’m done keeping my toothy mouth shut about it.” Menjivar explores issues like class disparity in military service, the role of race in fashion, and trying not to be a “classhole” as he interviews a range of figures, including the comedian and actor Wyatt Cenac, who talks about debt, Hollywood, and the creative life; Terry Gross, Menjivar’s old boss, who grew up working class in Sheepshead Bay and became synonymous with NPR bookishness; and the British pop icon Jarvis Cocker, of Pulp, whose hit “Common People” became an anthem to many. “I wanted to find a different class,” Cocker tells Menjivar. “I wanted to find my own place to live, and people to live in that world with me.”

Besides having the best title of the year, “Magnificent Jerk,” from the producer-host Maya Lin Sugarman, has a singularly amazing premise: it sets out to solve the mystery of how Sugarman’s late uncle secretly wrote a semi-autobiographical screenplay about Chinese American gangsters that morphed into a straight-to-video action movie set in Eastern Europe, starring Burt Reynolds, Ice-T, and a pre-comeback Rob Lowe. (“I wanna stop smokin’ rock . . . real bad,” Lowe slurs in the movie, 1997’s “Crazy Six.”) Sugarman’s uncle, Galen Yuen, straddled the worlds of street crime and Hollywood—after getting out of jail, the podcast says, he moved to L.A. and played roles like Low Life No. 1 in “Kindergarten Cop”—and she briefly lived with him after college. But she didn’t know much about his past, and her education takes us to a pool hall in seventies Oakland Chinatown, a B-movie shoot in nineties Bratislava, and a recent “Crazy Six” screening in L.A. By the end, it’s become a moving rumination on why we keep family secrets, and what we choose to hide.

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Research: Why So Many Packages Don’t Get Delivered - Harvard Business Review

I study an inconvenience we’re all increasingly familiar with: the product we ordered online doesn’t arrive on time. Up to 20% of e-commerce packages aren’t delivered on the first attempt. These failed deliveries not only cost companies billions of dollars each year — they also impact customer satisfaction and damage retailers’ reputations.

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