If you work in tech — and even if you don’t, really — you’ve heard the buzz about a new robotic assistant called ChatGPT.
Created by OpenAI, the free artificial intelligence (AI) content tool is capable of having human-like conversations, answering complicated questions like “what is quantum physics,” and passing parts of licensing exams for lawyers and doctors, along with the final exam for a prestigious MBA program.
ChatGPT is clearly capable of pretty amazing feats. Some even worry that AI tools like this threaten the white collar workforce.
While that debate continues, you can use the product to your advantage to sell your product or service. From writing emails, to creating phone scripts and handling objections, it’s clear that AI tools based on large language models can be used in every stage of the sales process. Here are some examples.
How to Write Sales Prospecting Emails Using ChatGPT
One advantage of ChatGPT is that it can iterate on what it’s already produced. You can tweak wording, length, and meaning by essentially saying, “do it again, but this time, better.”
And big names are getting on board with using AI technology. Microsoft, an OpenAI investor, has begun using AI capabilities in its own sales software to remove roadblocks from the selling process. ChatGPT will pull data from customer records from Salesforce along with Office email software to generate personalized email responses for busy salespeople.
We tried creating some sales prospecting emails with ChatGPT. Here’s what we found.
Prompt: Write me a casual prospecting email selling ZoomInfo.
That’s great, but let’s make the content specific to a certain company. Just write a follow up prompt like so.
Prompt: Can you make the above email specific to a U.S.-based investment banking firm with 500 employees?
Now let’s get even more granular. Imagine you used ZoomInfo’s Scoops to determine that a company was looking for a new database for company and contact information. We can adjust the email to call out capabilities more specific to this topic.
Prompt: Highlight ZoomInfo’s company and contact information with specific data points.
Nice, but it’s getting a bit lengthy. No fear! ChatGPT can summarize content and shorten this a bit.
Prompt: Shorten the above email.
Now you’ve got some emails to send out to prospects, and it only took a few minutes.
But that’s not all. ChatGPT can tackle cold calling, too.
Writing Sales Cold Call Transcripts Using ChatGPT
If you’d prefer to pick up the phone, the AI platform can assist you there, too.
Prompt: Create a cold call transcript based on the above email.
This is an effective framework to go off of, but may need some human tweaking. For example, “may I speak with the decision maker responsible for sales and marketing at the investment banking firm?” is not the greatest way to sound, well, human. But as mentioned above, refining these messages within the platform is an option, or you can edit yourself, but this template gives you a nice head start.
There are other good use cases for ChatGPT’s scripting capabilities. One that comes up often is objection handling.
Objection Handling with ChatGPT
Prompt: Write a response to a prospect that has objections about ZoomInfo’s data decay.
These are just examples, but sales professionals are already diving in to using generative AI tools. Matt Lakajev, co-founder of Tele-Sense Advisory and host of The AI Sales Revolution podcast, recently said that he’s already using ChatGPT to craft valuable follow-up emails.
We think so, too. But it’s important to call out — AI is not perfect.
Even in the process of crafting this article, I had to rephrase prompts to make sure the platform delivered what I was looking for. It’s also important to note that this is a tool, not a salesperson or a content creator. It’s something that can aid in your prospecting, but you need to proofread, fact check, and add human touches where it makes sense.
AI can save you time, but make sure you’re not relying on this “machine” to do it all. Even OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, recently warned that it’s a mistake to rely on the chatbot for truly important tasks, and that it can “create a misleading impression of greatness.”
But if you want to save time on some of the more robotic aspects of building and refining a sales outreach sequence, ChatGPT’s free preview is at least worth playing around with.