Everyone wants a slice of ChatGPT - Even B2B sales teams.
Today’s business ecosystem demands maximum speed, and ChatGPT is arguably the world’s leading productivity improvement tool.
However, the ChatGPT for sales use cases are relatively unknown beyond content creation and chatting.
Probably because AI can’t fulfil complex sales needs with just a few smart prompts.
So, how can ChatGPT serve sales teams? And how can you use it to improve your sales process and crush your sales goals?
That’s what we discuss in this blog. Scroll 👇 to find out how to win more sales in the AI era.
How does ChatGPT work?
ChatGPT is an AI-powered chatbot that uses deep learning to generate human-like responses based on user prompts.
It was trained on over 570 gigabytes of datasets, including books, web pages, and other sources. This explains its broad knowledge base and diverse applications. To start, ChatGPT can write code, generate content, and analyse data.
But its superpower is the ability to hold intelligent, human-like conversations.
According to OpenAI, ChatGPT was taught using “Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF).” So, it has the ability to admit mistakes, challenge inaccurate assumptions, ask follow-up questions, and even decline requests.
The only element of interaction it doesn’t possess?
Emotion.
So why use ChatGPT for sales? Let's discuss 👇
The benefits of ChatGPT for sales
We can sum up the benefits of ChatGPT for B2B sales teams in two words: supercharged productivity.
Sales teams that leverage it well will have better sales performance, while those that deny its relevance will lag behind. It’s as simple as that.
Let’s highlight some areas where ChatGPT sales can impact teams 👇
Improved customer engagement
Many AI tools (especially chatbots) are known for veering off-topic, being bland, and repeating phrases. In contrast, ChatGPT can produce human-like content and out-of-the-box answers.
Furthermore, it has a huge database of information; it can provide responses and context beyond what’s available in your information set.
Now, Chat GPT isn’t a customer-facing chatbot—bummer! However, customer engagement extends far beyond that, and its human-like content output can benefit your outreach, follow-up, and beyond.
B2B sales emails and custom cold calling scripts?
These can quickly benefit from ChatGPT.
If you’re keen on streamlining your sales outreach content - both general and customer-specific - ChatGPT steps in beautifully. Note that certain sales-focused CRMs also provide built-in AI tools to elevate your cold emails.
In lead nurturing, it can serve as a brainstorming partner as you translate customers’ actions into decisions on how to engage.
Oh, and FAQs. Providing ChatGPT with adequate product/service information and common sales objections can generate answers, reducing your team’s workload.
Another strong use case for using ChatGPT for sales is proposal generation. AI-generated proposals can improve your productivity and sales efficiency.
How?
ChatGPT can analyse data on a customer’s previous company interactions, preferences and interests, and even communication style. This information can be used to auto-generate proposals tailored to the customer’s specific needs and interests.
This level of personalisation can help build trust with clients, increase engagement, and ultimately drive more successful sales outcomes.
Overall, AI-generated sales content can be a powerful tool for sales teams looking to improve their efficiency, accuracy, and effectiveness while providing a more personalised experience for clients.
Furthermore, you can take it one step further by using text-to-speech technology to empower your sales calls.
One word of warning:
Just be sure that you review all AI-generated content before it reaches customers. You want to avoid spreading misinformation or off-brand outreach that could damage your reputation.
More efficient lead generation
The use of ChatGPT for lead generation is obvious.
Or is it?
This is all about producing ad copy, email text, SMS text, social media posts, and so on, right?
Not so fast! ChatGPT can also help you qualify leads and predict customer behaviour by digging into large datasets much quicker than you could by yourself.
And yes, ChatGPT can analyse big data, as Analytics Vidhya showed in an experiment.
Once you’ve handed over your datasets (in a clean, well-organised format), you must craft the right prompts.
How best to do this?
Your prompts must be detailed and specific to help you divulge quality lead behaviour and predict results. This will help you get to know your ideal customer.
For example:
- Generate meaningful insights about customer conversion rates.
- What do the customers with the highest CLV have in common?
- Are there any outliers in the dataset?
Keep in mind that ChatGPT can’t search the internet for information. It uses what it learned from training data to generate a response. So, no, it can’t help you find lead contact information.
Good news: Cognism has your back in that department 👇
However, with ChatGPT, you can use your past insights to predict future success, qualify leads more accurately, and hone your lead generation process.
Faster report writing
ChatGPT can help automate certain aspects of the report-writing process, such as data analysis and formatting.
With access to a company’s data and reporting tools, it can analyse trends and patterns in sales data - including website user demographics and conversion rates - and generate insights and recommendations that can be incorporated into sales reports.
To do this:
Set your objectives for the data, organise and format your data (so ChatGPT can interpret accurately), and then ask the right questions.
For example, “How has our conversion rate changed over the last four months?”
You’ll need to review and cross-check ChatGPT’s reports with your own understanding and context; don’t let AI run the show!
Regardless, this can help sales teams save time and effort and ensure they base their sales reports on accurate and up-to-date information.
Additionally, you can use this tool to craft an executive summary of your sales activities or whatever else your report is about. Check this out:
One simple ChatGPT prompt for sales can generate a solid template for your reporting - and you can add as many figures and metrics as you want, either within the AI or during the follow-up interview.
How to incorporate ChatGPT into your sales process
Now that you know the benefits of ChatGPT for sales prospecting, the question is:
How can you incorporate it into your sales process to boost efficiency?
First, remember that developing a sales strategy involving ChatGPT requires carefully evaluating how the technology can improve your sales process. Every company is different in that regard.
For a successful implementation of ChatGPT as a sales tool, we recommend the following five steps 👇
1. Determine ChatGPT’s role and use cases in your sales process
How will you use ChatGPT? Will it primarily be used for customer engagement, lead generation or sales assistance?
To define ChatGPT’s role in your sales process, you first need to have a solid understanding of your own sales process, including efficiency gaps and where your team invests too much (or too little) time.
The right CRM for your startup, SMB, or enterprise organisation, which features robust analytics and activity-tracking metrics, can help you identify these blind spots in your sales process.
Only then can you determine ChatGPT’s specialised purpose in your sales workflow. For example, you might want to use it to make personalised customer recommendations or analyse sales data and provide insights into customer behaviour.
First, understand its role in your unique sales process. Then:
2. Find the right ChatGPT-powered tool for your sales needs
Despite its newness, ChatGPT has already been used to build productivity-boosting sales tools to help resolve your pain points.
For example, WebChatGPT lets you fact-check the responses you get with ChatGPT using web results. This is a great add-on to your AI sales process to keep things accurate.
There are also a variety of ChatGPT-based tools that help you download the chats as PDFs, incorporate them into your SMS messaging, and even respond to (sales) tweets.
You could also build your own ChatGPT-powered tool.
The types of sales tools you build out of ChatGPT will be determined by the role you assign to it. These might be chatbots, data analysis assistants, copywriting assistants, and so on.
If you want to use it for lead generation, you can build a ChatGPT-based chatbot that engages users from the first touchpoint, using it to write ad copy and social media content.
First, you’ll need to train it with information about your product and audience. This will ensure consistency in your brand messaging.
You can (and should) also customise the chatbot’s responses to align with your brand voice.
For example:
If your brand has a friendly and conversational tone, ChatGPT’s sales responses should align.
3. Train your sales team
Now, train your team on how to use ChatGPT for sales effectively. This includes training on how to interact with customers using ChatGPT, how to generate leads, and how to provide product information and support.
If you have the resources and want to provide additional support, you might consider building a ChatGPT-powered app that listens in on sales calls and provides answers. Alternatively, you can adopt ChatSuggest, an existing solution.
If you know your team will need ChatGPT during a live sales call, it’s important they learn how to use it without arousing suspicion.
Imagine if every time a prospect asks a question, there’s an awkward silence before they can answer.
Terrible, right?
Plus, your sales team should never spit out ChatGPT answers without verifying for accuracy. That could easily get you in trouble, causing confusion and damaging the customer experience.
AI is great. Just don’t remove human reasoning from your sales interaction.
4. Train ChatGPT with sales data
To improve the accuracy and effectiveness of your AI, you need to train ChatGPT with your own sales data.
By analysing past customer interactions, ChatGPT can provide more targeted and relevant customer responses. This ensures a consistent brand message across all communication channels.
Remember, ChatGPT was trained on 570 GB of data. However, it still needs to learn your unique sales data to operate effectively on your behalf.
5. Don’t forget the human element
Even with ChatGPT, it’s vital to provide human support to customers as needed. This may include providing a phone number or email address for customers to contact if they need further assistance or have a more complex issue that ChatGPT can’t resolve.
AI should support your human-based sales process, not replace it.
Any customer-facing ChatGPT interface should be designed so that if an issue can’t be resolved with AI, the discussion is routed to a qualified sales rep.
The best ChatGPT prompts for sales
Here’s the part you’ve all been waiting for—real-life, tried-and-tested ChatGPT prompts for sales reps, as used by two of the world’s top B2B salespeople!
Morgan J Ingram, Cognism’s Creative Advisor, and Jed Marhle, Founder of Practical Prospecting, share the best ChatGPT prompts for sales 👇
1. Analysing and copying successful emails
Identify your most successful sales email or LinkedIn message. Then, ask ChatGPT to analyse them for tone, length, and style.
Here’s the initial prompt:
Analyse this email in terms of tone, length, and style with an NLP lens. Give me a breakdown so I can use this example later for the emails I write.
What’s the purpose behind using ChatGPT for sales emails? Over to Morgan:
“The idea is to get ChatGPT to replicate the email’s language so that you can expedite your prospecting and get better results.”
ChatGPT will give your email a psychological analysis:
- What is the length?
- What is the wording?
- What is the tone?
- Why would someone respond to this email?
When ChatGPT has finished, tell it to:
Remember this.
Then:
I’m targeting (job title) and their goals are (goals). Can you make me a table that can be used in Excel and shows their goals and how my solution can help?
Then:
Take the information from my email framework and create 5 emails that address the goal of (goal).
ChatGPT will give you five emails that are optimised for your ICP and focused on their goals.
Of course, you’ll have to manually edit the emails, but the AI tool has you 80% of the way there!
2. Automating company research
This is one of Jed’s favourite ChatGPT prompts for sales!
He said:
“Think about when you’re researching a company. What are all of the things that you’re looking for?”
“You can ask ChatGPT to list those things out. And then give it company descriptions for the accounts you’re targeting and ask it to do all that research for you automatically.”
Here’s the prompt:
Summarise 3 different things for me using the input provided.
1st, I need you to tell me who this company’s ideal customer is. Tell me the specific industry they sell to - do not give me a generalised answer. Keep your answer 8 words max.
2nd, I need you to tell me what this company’s mission is. Summarise in 8 words max what it is that they help with. Again, be specific and use keywords from the input.
3rd, I need you to tell me the usual job titles that would buy their solution. Again, keep your response 8 words max and be specific with the keywords. Here is the input:
The input can simply be the company’s description from LinkedIn or the About page on its website. Copy/paste it into ChatGPT along with the prompt.
What you’re doing here is asking ChatGPT for three things:
- Who is your target account’s ideal customer?
- What solutions do they supply to their customers?
- Who are their ICP job titles?
Jed explained the reasoning:
“The most important thing when writing emails is having a ‘why’ for your outreach.”
“If you can mention things like what their mission is, who they’re selling to, who their ICP is, and tie that into your value proposition, your emails will come across as super-relevant and specific.”
You could extend this ChatGPT for sales outreach prompt by adding more companies and then asking the tool to convert the information into an Excel-ready table.
Or, ask it to write a series of sales emails based on its company research.
3. Reviewing emails through a persona lens
Morgan told us how this ChatGPT sales prompt works:
“Ask it to review an email through your ICP’s eyes and give you an analysis of how that person could potentially respond.”
Here’s the starting prompt:
Review the email I just wrote out as if you are a (job title). Remember the challenges and priorities that we discussed in this conversation to distinguish if this is a good email or not.
This gives you a good summary of whether your email works for the persona or not.
Then:
How would a (job title) potentially respond to my email?
This info can help you out regarding follow-ups to your cold email templates.
ChatGPT for sales: FAQ
Morgan and Jed answer some of the most pressing questions about how to use ChatGPT for sales 👇
How do you assess the accuracy of ChatGPT’s outputs?
Jed:
“Usually, I’ll take the first couple of outputs and spot-check. So I’ll go in, read the data myself and make sure it lines up.”
You can safeguard accuracy by giving ChatGPT output examples, as Jed told us:
“If you give it some examples of what the output should look like, then the AI will get better at knowing what a good output is.”
Can you use ChatGPT to generate great questions to ask your ICP in either a first call or discovery call?
Morgan:
“Tell ChatGPT to think like your ICP and give you a list of discovery call questions they might ask.”
Prompt:
You are a (job title). What questions would you ask on a discovery sales call?
Can you use ChatGPT to analyse cold calls?
You can do a couple of things here.
Similar to Morgan’s email review prompt, copy/paste your cold call scripts into ChatGPT. Tell it to act like your target persona, analyse the scripts, and come up with potential responses or objections.
Jed had another good prompt idea:
“Download your most successful cold call transcripts and upload them into ChatGPT. Ask it to pull out specific keywords, or pain points your prospects discuss on the calls.”
“Then take those language snippets and use them to write your emails.”
With this prompt, ChatGPT translates the language from your best cold calls into a format that works for emails, LinkedIn messages and follow-ups.
ChatGPT for sales: the last word
Using ChatGPT for sales is a true game-changer. Embracing this technology can help to improve customer engagement, generate leads efficiently, and boost revenue. But only if it’s implemented well.
Overall, adapting a sales strategy for ChatGPT requires careful planning and execution. Identify its role, offer staff training, and then analyse and optimise its output. Use the best prompts to engage your buyers.
When paired with other standout sales tools, including your CRM, AI will boost productivity - and elevate your sales outreach - to new heights.
