Sales. I maintain it’s the hardest job in a business – particularly cold/outbound sales. And for small business owners in particular, it’s often something they have to take on with little experience (in those days of being responsible for every single role within their business) and something that can literally make or break a new start up.
So whether you’re part of a larger sales team or running your own sales operation for your own business, any help is often a winner right? And while everyone is hopping aboard the ChatGPT bandwagon, we’ve taken a look at some of the genuinely practical and helpful ways we can use ChatGPT to speed up some of our sales operations.
Now, I love ChatGPT. But the quality of the output you get really does relate to the quality of what you put in. It’s easy to waste your time here. But we think these prompts (with examples) for ChatGPT activities.
1. Get some background on a prospect company and key information about decision makers
Research. It takes forever sometimes but really can make the difference between failure and success with cold sales campaigns.
If you have a very specific list of prospects you want information on, rather than trawling the web yourself looking for names of key decision makers, background information and all the rest of it, you can use ChatGPT like your personal assistant and get it to the leg work. Let’a take a look at an example prompt and the output based on an assumption that you’re targeting Next Retail:
Generate a summary of Next Retail's recent business activities, key decision makers and current challenges based on the latest news, press releases and Linkedin profiles
Now of course you get more specific here depending on what you are selling. If you’re selling marketing services, for example, you might ask for senior marketing decisions makers specifically.
But anyway, with quite a generic prompt there, here’s the output we got:
Is this something you couldn’t do yourself?
Of course not.
Is it groundbreaking information that you can’t secure anywhere else?
Nope.
But in seconds ChatGPT has searches “7 sites,” and pulled out a summary of business strategy at the moment and some key senior player names.
Granted, the CEO is unlikely to be the key point of contact for most sales teams but this would be something influenced by how specific you make the query.
2. Lead Qualification Questions
If you’re handling inbound leads then amongst your first tasks is going to be qualifying those leads.
ChatGPT can help here by writing you a list of qualification questions.
Let’s say you’re selling HR software that is market leading specifically in the area of managing annual leave, you want companies with a minimum number of employees and your product is a premium product requiring certain minimum budget levels. We tried this prompt:
Create a list of questions to quickly qualify prospects in large UK companies based on their company size, budget, and specific pain points related to HR software and specifically managing annual leave
Now, the output here is detailed indeed:
Still, this would most likely be best used:
- With more specific prompts which you, as the person selling your product or service, is qualified to supply
- To supplement your existing list of questions – ChatGPT is best when contributing as opposed to be the only thing doing the work, I find
3. Identifying Objections
Being able to handle objections often comes from preparation and knowing in advance what people’s likely objections are going to be.
Now, when you have a really experienced sales set up you have tonnes of data about pain points and objections from previous conversations. But when you’re first getting started, you don’t have this benefit.
You will probably have a list of ideas in your head about the kind of objections you’re expecting to get. But you can supplement (and then refine) this with the help of a ChatGPT. We used this prompt:
Could you give me a list of common objections my sales team will likely encounter when trying to sell HR software (with marketing leading annual leave management features) to large businesses in the UK?
Again, you could easily modify that based on your specific offering but try creating a prompt that tells ChatGPT what you’re selling, any key USPs and who you are selling it to.
Our output was this:
Again, human input in expanding, refining and improving these would help and could contribute to training your team on objection handling.
4. Handling Common Objections with ChatGPT’s Help
If you’re consistently starting to see these objections come up (or certain objections in general) you can ask for ChatGPT’s help in overcoming them. Here’s our prompt:
My company sells HR software with market leading features specifically around annual leave management. Our target customer is companies in the UK with 200 or more employees. A common objection we keep getting is that our prospects think their employees will be reluctant to changing the way they manage annual leave. How should we overcome this objection?
Here was the output:
Again, with your own experience and the expertise of sales professionals, this can act as inspiration to fine tune your own objection handling.
5. Competitor Analysis
One of the biggest tasks of a sales team can be to overcome prospect preference for a competitors’ product or service.
And the starting point for this is in truly understanding your competitors’ products or services.
You may well have one or two really close competitors’ features committed to memory. But when a new player arrives on the scene or a smaller competitor keeps coming up in your conversations, a quick way to get up to speed can be to get ChatGPT to do some of the research legwork for you.
Here’s a prompt we tried:
Could you get me a quick feature comparison of sense.hr and Workday HR software platforms? I need a quick summary of what sense.hr does better
Of course, this would be tailored to your own product/service offering and the competitor’s or could even be used to compare several different platforms.
Here was the output we got:
One thing I really like this is it actually points out where the other one is better too and this is an area that you can use to develop into objective overcoming development.
6. Prospect Lists
Building cold prospect lists can be time consuming and with any time consuming process, ChatGPT can be a really efficiency tool.
Here’s the prompt we tried:
Could you provide me with a list of AT LEAST 30 HR directors in UK companies with 50 or more employees? Ideally I would like a table with the name of the company, number of employees, name of HR director and a link to their LinkedIn Profile?
It’s worth noting that as of August 2024, ChatGPT typically can’t provide things like email addresses, so there’s still work to do there. But it can get links to public profiles (like LinkedIn profiles in this case).
Here’s the output we got from ChatGPT from this prompt:
Now you could very much improve this by giving more information in your prompt about the specific types of companies or even setting a maximum employee number. But this really is great time saving versus having an individual pull this together.
It could form the basis for a human then to edit and fact check.
ChatGPT Prompts for Sales Professionals
We think these are handy time savers. But there’ll be so many more ways in which sales teams can use ChatGPT. Let us know how your sales team is using it!
