You get on the phone with someone who needs the service you’ve spent years getting good at. They ask what the job involves, you explain it, and then you hear:
“Well, ChatGPT said…”
I’ve been speaking to business owners who feel like winning sales is getting harder. You can blame the economy or the number of competitors in your industry. Some of that may well be true. But there’s another voice in the sales conversation now, and it often gets to your buyer before you do.
The buyer has already asked ChatGPT or Claude what the work should cost, how long it should take and how it should be done. They’ve had a detailed answer back. By the time they reach you, that answer can feel less like a starting point and more like a fact.
Then you, the person who actually does the work, tell them something different.
A £40 job and a £20 answer
I watched a video the other day about a plumber who’d agreed to fit a tap for an older couple. He wasn’t charging them a call-out fee. He had the tap in his van and offered to do the job for £40.
While he was under the sink, their son arrived and started checking ChatGPT. The answer he found suggested the job should cost around £20. Then came questions about how the tap ought to be fitted and even whether the plumber was paying tax on the money.
The plumber had to explain what the tap cost him, what he wasn’t charging for and what he’d actually make from the job. You could hear how fed up he was getting. He’d turned up to fit a tap for people he knew, and now he was defending himself against an answer produced without the details of that job.
I’ve had my own version of that conversation. People have come to me about a website, then told me what ChatGPT reckons it should cost or how Claude says I should build it. I’ve built websites for businesses for over ten years. I still have to spend part of the conversation explaining why a general answer doesn’t fit the project in front of us.
Your buyers aren’t doing anything daft by researching a purchase. If you were about to spend serious money on a service you didn’t understand, you’d look for answers too. The problem starts when the first answer becomes the standard you’re expected to meet, even though the tool never had enough information to give a useful answer about their job.
The first number sticks
There’s a name for part of what’s happening here: anchoring. People tend to use the first number or piece of information they receive as a reference point when they judge what comes next.
Imagine someone asks ChatGPT what an extension on their house should cost. It gives them a figure of £50,000 and a four-week timeline. They go back and forth with it for an hour. The answer is detailed and sounds confident, so £50,000 starts to feel like the right price.
Then a builder visits. They look at the size of the extension, the ground, the materials, the access to the back of the house and everything else that changes the work. They reckon it’s nearer £70,000 and eight weeks.
That builder might be bang on. The buyer still hears “£20,000 more than ChatGPT said.” Before they can have a proper conversation about the job, the builder has to explain why the original figure was wrong for this particular house.
The same thing happens with process. A buyer arrives expecting the work to be done in a certain order because an AI tool described it that way. You explain how you’d do it and why. Instead of your experience making the decision easier, you’re left trying to shift an expectation that was set before you ever spoke.
The sales call starts further back
This is the bit that costs business owners time.
You first have to find out what the buyer thinks they know. Where did they get the number? What did they ask the tool? What details did they leave out? Only then can you explain what applies to their situation and start talking about what they want done.
That’s a lot of work before you’ve even got to the normal sales conversation. And some people will still trust the answer on their screen more than the person who’d be responsible for delivering the service.
You can’t control every answer a buyer gets from AI. You can give them a better place to check it.
Your website has a bigger job now
I’ve seen the claim that nobody needs a website because buyers can ask AI instead. I don’t buy it. People can still reach your website, sometimes later in their research, after they’ve already got a rough price or process in their head.
At that point, a page that says who you are, lists your services and asks them to “get in touch” isn’t doing enough. The buyer needs to understand how you work. What affects the price? Why might two apparently similar jobs cost different amounts? What needs to happen before you can give a sensible quote? What does your process involve, and why?
I’m not saying every business needs to put a fixed price on every page or give away its entire method. For some services, an exact price without seeing the job would be bollocks. But if every useful explanation lives in your head, your website leaves the buyer with the general answer they got elsewhere. Then you have to do all the explaining when they call.
The better your site explains the questions you get asked over and over, the more chance a good-fit buyer has of arriving with the right picture of the work. They can still ask questions. They can still challenge a quote. At least you’re starting from something closer to the real job rather than spending the first half of the call picking apart an answer that never had the full context.
There’s another possible benefit. AI tools can draw on publicly available website information, so clear explanations of your own service may help shape what people find about you. I wouldn’t promise that ChatGPT will quote your website or send you enquiries. The reason to put that knowledge on your site is the buyer who’s already looking at it.
If your sales calls keep starting with “ChatGPT said…”, listen to what comes next. The gap between that answer and your explanation will tell you what buyers need to understand before they enquire. That’s the work your website should be doing while you’re busy delivering the service.
If you want me to look at what your website leaves unanswered, get in touch. I’ll tell you whether that’s making those sales conversations harder and what needs sorting.
