Best Prompts for ChatGPT for Sales

If you’re not using generative AI to maximise your selling impact, you’re behind the curve. In a recent report on AI trends, more than 80% of salespeople who use generative AI are creating basic content, like sales pitches and emails, and more than 70% said they’re using it to analyse market data, specifically focusing on analysing market trends to identify potential customers and set sales targets. This approach optimises sales team efforts and increases sales effectiveness.

But there’s a catch. Tools like ChatGPT for sales can deliver big productivity wins for sales data and reps, but it isn’t always easy to get exactly what you need. Knowing what to ask in a query — known as a prompt — is an art form in itself. You need to know your target audience, consider the context of the communication, put in effort to personalise and polish your messages — and always, always filter out confidential information.

Keep in mind — many customer relationship management (CRM) tools are adding built-in generative AI capabilities, so you may not even need prompts in the future. For now, I’ll share some of my favourite prompts that are ready to use, and offer guidelines for safe and ethical prompt use.

5 Advantages of Integrating ChatGPT into Your Sales Strategy

1. Efficiency Boost within the sales space, so finding tools that save time is like striking gold. ChatGPT streamlines your sales operations by automating the initial stages, such as: lead generation, screening, responding to FAQs, and introducing products. This automation frees up your schedule, allowing you to concentrate on the human-centric aspects of your role:

• Cultivating relationships
• Interpreting subtle cues and expressions
• Personalising interactions
• Sharing a moment of humour

Essentially, it supports the elements that demand a touch of human sensitivity.

ChatGPT for Sales: Impersonal yet Fast ChatGPT sifts through vast amounts of data swiftly, delivering concise summaries tailored to your preferences, be it step-by-step instructions, bullet lists, or brief overviews.

2. Reliability While ChatGPT may lack a dynamic personality, its consistency is a significant plus. It maintains uniformity in its responses, so you always receive reliable information. This consistency outshines unpredictable human elements, ensuring that everyone gets the same high level of response.

ChatGPT for Sales: Unbiased Support

3. Tailored Interactions Although initially designed for basic personalisation, ChatGPT can lay the groundwork for customised interactions. To truly connect and seal deals with potential customers, it’s vital to add a personal flair to the interactions initiated by ChatGPT.
4. Always on Call Exceptions during maintenance periods.

As a burgeoning tool, ChatGPT occasionally experiences downtime. Nevertheless, its near-constant availability means it can significantly further sales activities and ease daily tasks, especially since sales don’t just happen during office hours.

5. Expanding Capabilities Subject to its operational capacity, ChatGPT can simultaneously manage numerous interactions. This capability is crucial as you scale your business, whether you’re moving into new markets, adopting new business models, or simply expanding your client and customer engagement base. By leveraging ChatGPT, businesses can focus on their growth, scaling their sales efforts, moving upmarket, adopting a PLG motion, or bringing on more clients, with more free time to handle that growth.

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Generative AI creates content, like copy or images, based on simple, text-based prompts. There are many tools that allow you to do this, like ChatGPT, Bard, and Bing, but they all work in roughly the same way: A user inputs a prompt requesting specific content that doesn’t yet exist — like an email draft to a prospective customer. They set parameters, like how long they want the email to be and what they want it to include. Then, the generative AI tool finds elements of publicly available data that match the parameters of the prompt and pieces them together to create the desired content.

This is just a broad-strokes overview. You can read more about how this works in Salesforce’s article on generative AI for sales.

Generative AI security and accuracy: The elephants in the room

Generative AI has the potential to increase seller productivity, but it also introduces security concerns. In the same report cited earlier, about 73% of sales professionals said they’re worried about security risks with generative AI, and 49% don’t know how to use it safely at work. On top of this, generative AI often lacks enough context or background to create accurate responses, also known as “outputs.” So before we dig in, a few notes of caution on using this new tech: 

• Public generative AI tools are not secure. When you input data into tools like ChatGPT, you feed that information into the digital ether. It isn’t encrypted, leaving it vulnerable to unauthorised access and misuse. Exercise caution and refrain from sharing sensitive data such as passwords, financial information, or any personal information.
• Outputs may contain inaccuracies. Public generative AI tools don’t have access to the most up-to-date information (ChatGPT’s latest dataset is from 2021). Also, these tools don’t vet information; they pull from a wide swath of online sources, some of which may contain incorrect information. Before sending any messages created using public AI tools, make it a habit to review the outputs for inaccuracies. 
• AI lacks human contextual knowledge. Generative AI, by its nature, is incapable of human emotion. It’s also not always able to connect the dots between different pieces of information, identify cause and effect, surface motivations, or use the most contextually appropriate language. (A recent sales conversation a Tesla AI salesbot had with a prospect shows this in spades.) Always review outputs to make sure the language is natural, includes sufficient context, and is tone-appropriate for the medium and audience.
• Public generative AI tools lack customer context, too. While generative AI lacks human emotion and struggles to connect information dots, many CRMs now boast AI tools with built-in prompt functionality that pulls from customer information to provide more personalised and relevant outputs. They excel in recognising cause and effect, understanding motivations, and can even mirror the voice of your customer based on previous communications stored in your CRM.

The best prompts for using ChatGPT for sales

In my experience working with sales teams, these three applications of generative AI save the most time while increasing prospect and rep engagement: creating essential sales materials, like pitches and emails; drafting training content; and conducting basic research. The prompts below are the ones I see used consistently.

My recommendation: Have your senior sales reps experiment with these and fine-tune them until they deliver impactful outputs easy to personalise. Once approved by managers, these prompts can be turned into templates for the entire sales team. Additionally, integrating ChatGPT can significantly aid sales reps in preparing for conversations with prospects, ensuring they are well-equipped to handle various scenarios.

Sales enablement (onboarding)

Example prompt: Create a presentation outline that includes {your company’s} mission statement, {your company’s} target customer, the benefits of {your product(s) or service(s)}, and how it addresses customer pain points.

Prompt: Write a 1,000-word guide on {your product or service} including three statistics (with source) with 10 ways it/they will help {a specific role or buyer} identify and address their challenges and pain points.

Customer, product, and industry research

Prompt: Describe the key market trends and factors that influence customer purchasing decisions for {product or service type} in {industry}.

Prompt: Summarise the top three critiques in customer reviews for {your product or service}.

Prompt: List the top three challenges for businesses in {target buyer industry}.

Social Selling

Prompt: Write a 50-word LinkedIn message explaining how {your product or service} can address the challenges of {a specific role or buyer} in {industry}.

Prompt: Write a friendly and engaging {social media platform} comment in response to a message that says {copy of recent social media post}, subtly introducing {your product or service} and offering a unique value proposition.

Call scripts/sales pitch refinement

Prompt: Write a 30-second cold call sales script, designed not only to introduce {your product or service} but also to qualify leads by identifying and focusing on high-quality leads. Highlight three benefits of {your product or service} for {prospect/prospect’s company}, incorporating elements of the BANT framework to ensure your script targets the most promising opportunities effectively.

Prompt: Write a three-minute video script for {title} at {prospect company} summarising the benefits of {your product or service}. The script should also include questions or prompts aimed at qualifying leads, such as predicting customer behaviour and understanding quality lead behaviour. End the video script by reminding them of an upcoming meeting on {date and time}.

Objection-handling and negotiation guidance

Prompt: Act like a {title} in {industry} who is hesitant about the cost of {your product or service}. Roleplay a conversation discussing the value and benefits the product/service offers.

Prompt: Act like a {title} in {industry} who is happy with {competitor solution}. Respond to a sales pitch that summarises the value of {your product or service} and offers discounts for new buyers.

Or skip the prompts altogether and consider opting for a CRM with generative AI capabilities built in. That way you can generate responses not just from public databases, but also from your trusted customer data. The result? More personalised and relevant outputs without any prompt engineering. Here’s a demo of how Salesforce does this.

Guidelines for writing and using your own ChatGPT for sales prompts 

Generative AI’s “open field” format has its pros and cons — you can create prompts for just about anything, but that doesn’t mean you’ll get something useful back. The quality of the response heavily depends on the quality of the prompt. By using a built-in AI tool in your CRM like Sales GPT, you can skip the guesswork and avoid tool-toggling by using out-of-the-box prompts tailored to top sales process use cases. But if you’re using a public generative AI tool like ChatGPT for your sales calls, I recommend being direct and linear with your prompts.  Here are some basic guidelines:

1. Use clear, specific language. Add numbers and dates, concrete adjectives, and any measurable parameters to ensure your prompts generate useful copy. For example, instead of prompting ChatGPT with “Tell me everything I should know about cars,” push for specifics: “Write three short sentences summarising the auto industry’s biggest financial problems over the last 10 years.” This approach can significantly streamline your sales efforts by focusing on the most promising opportunities.
2. Keep it linear. Generative AI tools like ChatGPT like logic and flow. When crafting prompts, frame your asks in a linear format: “Do this, then that, then that.” You can even use bullet points to frame the ask and make your request clearer.
3. Add context and background for more relevant outputs. If you want outputs to address specific information, note that information first. Add in email or social copy ChatGPT can reference, or, if the information is publicly available, note that in your prompt. For example, instead of writing, “Draft a cold email to buyers in the automotive industry,” write “Draft an introductory email to the CEO of Tesla that shows how (your product or service) addresses the top three challenges of businesses in the automotive industry.” This happens automatically in Sales GPT, as every email generated is based on contextual CRM data. Adding context not only makes the output more relevant but also has a direct impact on improving sales performance by ensuring the communication is precisely targeted.
4. Never forget personalisation. ChatGPT doesn’t have access to personal information — and personalisation is how you land prospects, close sales, and generate loyalty. To ensure you get that personal, hyper-relevant hook, make sure you add the right names, titles, and account-specific details to any generative AI outputs. Pro tip: Sales GPT can pull straight from your CRM data to personalise communications with a click of a button.
5. Disclose the use of AI, when necessary. In situations where prospects would reasonably assume a human created the content, be sure to note generative AI tools were used. I like to include these as footnotes on presentations or in small print on email signatures whenever AI copy is added. Doing so will help protect your reputation and build trust.

Stay ahead of the generative AI curve 

Once you’ve picked the prompts that work well for you, test and refine them to improve the outputs — then personalise for that human touch. Also, remember: ChatGPT for sales is not a replacement for relationship-building. It’s a time-saving tool that gets you to meaningful conversations faster. Sales will always be about human relationships — and even the most advanced GPT prompts are unlikely to change that.  

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