Here Are 5 Ways We Use ChatGPT to Streamline Our Sales

Helpful Summary

• Overview: The article discusses five ways we use ChatGPT to streamline and optimize our sales process.
• Why you can trust us: Growth Forum is a leading provider of sales training, and we’re always experimenting with new tools and strategies.
• Why it matters: Using ChatGPT in sales leads to increased efficiency (15-20% rise in productivity), significant cost savings (up to $15,000 per month), and time savings.
• Action points: Use ChatGPT to automate routine tasks that don’t require much oversight, while focusing on more complex tasks yourself.
• Further research: Check out the Growth Forum blog for more tips and insights on using AI in sales.

Wondering How to Use ChatGPT for Sales?

ChatGPT has taken the world by storm over the past year and a half—and it’s clear that there are tons of potential use cases for sales. 

To help you separate the hype from the reality, Growth Forum is here to share five use cases that, we feel, are particularly compelling for sales teams. These are designed to save you time and boost your effectiveness, without becoming over reliant on AI—because it isn’t quite ready to take over the sales process just yet.

Let’s dive in.

Why Listen to Us?

Growth Forum has helped 12,000+ founders, sales teams, and individuals drive $7.5 billion (and counting) in revenue. Our Sales OS program, intensive workshops, and individual coaching are specifically designed to help companies and individuals achieve their sales goals using a proven methodology. 

So we know a thing or two about using technology to drive sales success.

What Is ChatGPT?

Since there’s a pretty good chance you’ve used ChatGPT yourself, we’ll keep this brief.

ChatGPT is an AI chatbot developed by OpenAI. It uses their GPT large language models to generate human-like responses in natural language conversations. Essentially, it simulates a conversation with a person through text messages.

Use cases for ChatGPT in sales mostly come down to reducing the amount of repetitive, time-consuming work you need to do. Due to the size of ChatGPT’s training set (somewhere between 570 GB to 45 TB of text), it knows a ton—and that wide-ranging general knowledge means there are tons of tasks it knows how to perform.

Benefits of Using ChatGPT for Sales

Boost Sales Productivity

With the ability to analyze vast amounts of data and provide valuable insights, AI has revolutionized the way enterprises approach lead generation, leading to enhanced efficiency and effectiveness in their sales strategies. Enterprises using AI for leads have seen a significant increase in sales productivity by 15%-20%.

Cost Savings

While the exact savings can vary, the use of AI-driven tools like ChatGPT can lead to substantial cost reductions in various business operations. Incorporating ChatGPT into email outreach campaigns, for example, can save companies up to $0.24 per email. 

Time Savings

ChatGPT streamlines processes like lead qualification and initial product education, allowing sales representatives to dedicate more time to high-value activities like cultivating relationships with qualified leads. 

Things to Consider When Using ChatGPT for Sales

• Training Data May Be Outdated: ChatGPT’s training data cuts off in January 2022 (at the time of writing), so it won’t work well for conversations about current events or recent product updates.
• Inaccurate Responses Are Common: In the same way you shouldn’t blindly trust things you read online, you also shouldn’t rely solely on ChatGPT’s responses. ChatGPT is a LLM that doesn’t do any kind of fact checking on the text it generates.
• Language Limitations: While ChatGPT supports multiple languages, its proficiency can vary wildly. If you’re using ChatGPT for translation, use a dedicated translation tool to double-check its work.

5 Ways to Maximize ChatGPT for Sales

1. Summarize Proposals

Sales proposals can be long—20+ pages in some cases. That makes summaries a must when you need to get important information from the proposal across quickly (say, in a short email blast). Well, rather than writing out these summaries yourself, you can use ChatGPT to generate them.

Here’s we use ChatGPT to summarize proposals:

1. Input the proposal: Click the attachment button to upload your sales proposal to ChatGPT (note: you need to be on the Plus plan for this feature).
2. Request a summary: Give ChatGPT clear instructions about the summary you want it to generate. You can specify a tone to use, a word count, keywords to include—anything you think is important.

3. Edit the summary: Read through the generated summary and edit it to make it read like a human (ChatGPT can sound very robotic occasionally). If you'd like, you can instruct ChatGPT to edit the summary rather than doing it manually.

4. Use the summary: Use the summary in emails, presentations, or any other medium to quickly and accurately convey your proposal to potential clients.

2. Quickly Draft Scripts

Scripts are a useful tool for sales. They can give novice and experienced sellers alike a structure to fall back on when they get flustered during a pitch or call. ChatGPT can generate a draft script for you based on your desired tone and key selling points.

Here’s how to do this:

1. Upload key resources: Create and upload documents with information on your company and product and/or service—things like customer testimonials, product specs, and marketing materials. ChatGPT will use these resources to generate a script.
2. Write out a prompt: Explain as clearly as possible what you want ChatGPT to do. Include information about your business and the business your script is targeting. Web’e included an example prompt below.

3. Generate the script: ChatGPT will then spit out a draft script for you to work with. Since its training data undoubtedly included hundreds (if not thousands) of sales scripts, the outputs you get are usually pretty solid. However, it’s important to note that this is just a starting point and you may need to make some tweaks or edits.

3. Research Target Industries and Personas

ChatGPT can also help speed up your research into potential clients and target industries.

ChatGPT Plus can browse the web, making it a great research companion. You can use it to search for industry-specific information, like market trends, company profiles, and potential contacts, as well as a basic analytics tool for breaking down complex information.

Here are a few ideas to try:

Researching Industries

• Ask for recent industry developments: This is a great way to stay up-to-date on the latest trends and changes in your target industries. Simply ask ChatGPT to provide you with recent developments or news articles related to your chosen industry.

• Conduct competitor research: Use ChatGPT to gather information on your competitors' strategies, products, and customer reviews. This can help you identify areas of improvement or potential opportunities for your own business.
• Gather market insights: Ask ChatGPT about market size, growth potential, and consumer demographics within a specific industry. This information can be valuable when creating marketing campaigns or targeting specific audiences.

Researching Customer Personas

• Quickly find demographic information: ChatGPT can provide you with demographic information on your target audience, like age, gender, income level, and location. This data can help you create more targeted and effective marketing campaigns.

• Understand consumer behavior: By analyzing customer reviews and social media posts, ChatGPT can give you insights into the behaviors and preferences of your target audience. This can help you tailor your products or services to better meet their needs.
• Generate content ideas: Running out of blog post ideas? Let ChatGPT help by creating lists of content ideas that resonate with your audience. Simply provide a few keywords or topics, and ChatGPT will generate unique and creative ideas for your next blog post.

Tailoring Sales Strategies

Based on the insights gained from the industry and persona research, you can ask ChatGPT to help tailor your B2B sales strategies. For example, you might ask, “What would be an effective sales approach for IT managers?” or “How can our product meet the needs of marketing directors in the retail industry?” 

Here’s an example of the output:

4. Draft Personalized Sales Emails

Sales emails can take ages to write. ChatGPT can speed up the process (if you give it enough context to understand the nuances of the conversation).

There are a few ways of doing this:

1. Use a third-party tool: There are tons of tools that use OpenAI’s APIs to generate personalized sales emails. They integrate with email clients like Gmail and Outlook to access entire email threads and help you generate responses that sound natural and human-like. An example of this kind of tool is GPT for Gmail.
2. Copy and paste email threads into ChatGPT: A less elegant (but still functional) solution is just copying and pasting entire email threads into ChatGPT. This will give the AI more context to work with and can generate more personalized responses.
3. Just describe the response you want: Finally, you can generate great, personalized sales emails by just describing your ideal response. For example, “Write an email responding to a prospect who is interested in our product. Make sure you provide information on XYZ”.

Whichever method you use, be prepared to edit. ChatGPT isn’t a salesperson—it doesn’t have your instincts when it comes to closing deals or relating to individuals.

That said, the outputs are usually pretty good—here’s an example:

You can specify tone, word count, and more to get the email as close to perfect as you can. Then just make the final edits yourself and hit ‘Send’.

5. Generate Lead Qualification Questions

Finally, you can use ChatGPT to generate lead qualification questions for your sales team. By inputting information about your ideal customer profile (or uploading your IC file, if you have one),  ChatGPT can create a list of questions designed to find the ICP.

For example, you could ask, “What questions should I ask potential leads who are interested in our new software product? Our target market is small businesses with less than 50 employees.”

ChatGPT will then generate a list of relevant and insightful questions that your sales team can use during their conversations with potential leads. These questions can help them gather important information and gauge the level of interest and fit of the lead.

Conclusion

ChatGPT is a powerful tool that (when used strategically) can speed up your sales process and win back hours of your time and boost your revenue.

If you’re curious about other tools and strategies that can do the same, Growth Forum is here to help. We offer founders, sales teams, and individuals a range of sales training resources and tools that can help you accelerate your growth. From networking events to online courses, we have everything you need to succeed in the world of sales.

Book a free strategy call to see how Growth Forum can help.