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The AI revolution isn’t coming—it’s here, and businesses can’t afford to ignore or fear it. Instead of viewing AI as a disruptor threatening to take your or your team members’ jobs, you can see it as another powerful productivity tool to incorporate into your workflows. Just consider a notoriously difficult area like sales. As a business owner, I understand the challenge of moving the needle. Research backs me up—a Harvard Business Review study of over 1,200 B2B companies found that just one in 20 companies consistently grew sales faster than sales and marketing expenses.
ChatGPT and plenty of other AI tools can help talented sales teams to work smarter, not harder, removing some of the busywork from their plates to focus on more meaningful aspects of their jobs—as I call it, the “big stuff.” Or, if you’re a bootstrapper just beginning your entrepreneurial journey, and yet to have a sales team, ChatGPT can be a powerful, cost-effective tool to jumpstart your sales. Here are five prompts to consider.
1. Revamp your sales goals
Revisiting and clarifying your sales goals is the first step in boosting your bottom line. Maybe your company doesn’t have clear sales goals. Or they’ve gradually lost sight of them. Over time, the daily grind tends to blur our long-term objectives, but they should be at the forefront of your mind, guiding your work each day.
Goals should be specific—concrete and measurable. The following ChatGPT prompt can serve as an actionable guide for fleshing out your sales goals:
“My [industry] company would like to boost its sales. First, we want to clarify our sales goals. Can you provide 10 questions to help our sales team create concrete, measurable sales goals?”
A rule of thumb when using ChatGPT: the more context you provide—background information about your company, its products or services, industry, any unique challenges, etc—the more helpful the answers will be.
2. Refine your target market
Understanding your target market is critical for tailoring your sales messaging and communicating more effectively. According to one study, 68 percent of consumers expect personalization every time they reach out to a company. Identifying and continually refining your target audience will help you to connect in a personalized way.
The following prompt can generate a productive brainstorm:
“My [industry] company serves [current target market] in [geographic location]. We would like to clarify our target market. Can you ask 10 questions to help me determine the best target market(s) to boost sales?”
The idea isn’t just to search and find the answers, but to get the wheels turning so that salespeople discover the answers on their own. Once you hone in on your target markets, you can use ChatGPT to edit your messaging—emails, social media posts, etc.—to ensure that it’s sufficiently tailored to them.
3. Unify your customer-facing brand
Nowadays, a company’s voice is integral to its brand. That voice should be consistent, from website content to blog posts to sales scripts. ChatGPT can familiarize itself with your company’s voice and ensure that sales messaging is consistent, presenting a unified front across your company. You just need to submit text that captures the brand voice and ask ChatGPT to tweak your text accordingly. Consider a version of the following prompt:
“I want you to analyze the following text from my company’s [website, blog, etc], beginning and ending in quotes. [“Insert text here”] Then, I want you to review the text below, a [content] from one of our sales representatives, and edit it so that the voice and tone match.”
Once you submit the above prompt, ChatGPT will (politely) request the relevant text. For example, when I tested the above prompt, it replied, “Sure, please provide the email text from your sales representative, and I'll review it to ensure the voice and tone match the quoted text from your company's website. Once I have the email text, I'll be able to make the necessary edits.”
4. Crunch the numbers
When it comes to landing a sale, the more you understand your numbers, the more you can improve the sales process. That means gathering data and analyzing it from as many angles as possible. ChatGPT can step in to analyze your data and help come up with ideas to improve the results. For example, if you notice that prospects are failing to make it past a certain phase of the sales funnel, you can submit an organized data set to ChatGPT to understand where they’re falling off and why that might be happening. The prompt could be:
“I want you to analyze the following data set showing my company’s leads throughout the sales funnel. Can you generate ideas about why leads are not converting into customers?”
Be sure to explain the data you’re submitting and the specific insight you’re after.
5. Ongoing training
Learning and development are critical parts of any sales job in today’s quickly evolving, increasingly AI-fueled workplace. But the buck doesn’t stop at teaching employees how to use AI—that would give short shrift to the technology’s full potential. As Harvard Business Review notes, you can make training sessions a live practice.
For example, give sales reps customer scenarios and have them brainstorm potential solutions. Then, you can use ChatGPT to understand what objections a potential customer might have. So, rather than using generative AI like an editor or a search engine, you’re engaging in hypothetical dialogues, potentially expanding and sharpening your thinking.
Here’s a template for this type of prompt:
“I’m a salesperson at a [description] company, looking to offer a potential customer a solution for their [issue]. The customer is [insert description]. Their issue is [description]. Please review the following proposed solution and generate any objections the customer may have.”
In mere seconds, ChatGPT will generate a list of potential concerns that a salesperson can think through and prepare for.
Generative AI is the mainland, not the frontier. Sales teams can integrate tools like ChatGPT into their workflows to tackle busywork, spark creativity, and experiment with potential uses as AI capabilities continue to expand.
