Everyone wants a slice of ChatGPT - marketers, programmers, writers, and journalists alike.
If you're looking for ways to include it in your sales workflow, you've made the right choice. Today's business ecosystem demands maximum speed, and ChatGPT is arguably the world's leading productivity improvement tool.
However, beyond content creation and chatting, the use cases for ChatGPT in sales are relatively unknown. Why? Probably because AI can't meet multifaceted sales needs with just a few smart prompts to go by.
So, how can ChatGPT really serve sales teams? And how can you use it to improve your sales process and crush your sales goals?
In this blog, we'll discuss its impact on your team and how to integrate it into your sales workflow.
Scroll 👇 to find out how to win in the AI era.
How does ChatGPT work?
ChatGPT is an AI-powered chatbot that uses deep learning to generate human-like responses based on user prompts.
It was trained on over 570 gigabytes of datasets, including books, web pages, and other sources. This explains its broad knowledge base and diverse application. Just to start, ChatGPT can write code, generate content, and analyse data.
But its superpower is the ability to hold intelligent, human-like conversations.
According to OpenAI, ChatGPT was taught using "Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF)." So, it has the ability to admit mistakes, challenge inaccurate assumptions, ask follow-up questions, and even decline requests.
The only element of interaction ChatGPT doesn't possess? Emotion.
The benefits of ChatGPT for sales teams
We can sum up the benefits of ChatGPT for B2B sales teams in two words: supercharged productivity.
Sales teams that leverage it well will have better sales performance, while those that deny its relevance will lag behind. It's as simple as that.
Let's highlight some areas where ChatGPT can impact sales teams 👇
Improved customer engagement
Many AI tools (especially chatbots) are known for veering off-topic, being bland, and repeating phrases. In contrast, ChatGPT can produce human-like content and out-of-the-box answers.
Furthermore, it has a huge database of information; it can provide responses and context beyond what's available in your information set.
Now, Chat GPT isn't a customer-facing chatbot. Bummer! However, customer engagement extends far beyond that - and its human-like content output can benefit your outreach, follow-up, and beyond.
B2B sales emails and custom cold calling scripts? These can quickly benefit from ChatGPT.
If you're keen on streamlining your sales outreach content - both general and customer-specific - ChatGPT steps in beautifully. Note that certain sales-focused CRMs, like Close, provide built-in AI tools to elevate your cold emails as well.
In lead nurturing, it can serve as a brainstorming partner as you translate customers' actions into decisions on how to engage.
Oh, and FAQs. When you provide ChatGPT with adequate product/service info and common prospect objections, it can generate answers - reducing your team's workload.
Another strong use case for ChatGPT in sales is proposal generation. AI-generated proposals can improve your productivity and sales efficiency. How?
ChatGPT can analyse data on a customer's previous interactions with a company, their preferences and interests, and even their communication style. This info can be used to auto-generate proposals that are tailored to their specific needs and interests.
This level of personalisation can help to build trust with clients, increase engagement, and ultimately drive more successful sales outcomes.
Overall, AI-generated sales content can be a powerful tool for sales teams looking to improve their efficiency, accuracy, and effectiveness while providing a more personalised experience for clients.
One word of warning:
Just be sure that you review all AI-generated content before it reaches customers. You want to avoid spreading misinformation or off-brand outreach that could damage your reputation.
More efficient lead generation
The use of ChatGPT in lead generation is obvious. Or is it? This is all about producing ad copy, email text, SMS text, social media posts, and so on, right?
Not so fast! ChatGPT can also help you qualify leads and predict customer behaviour by digging into large datasets much quicker than you could by yourself.
And yes, ChatGPT can analyse big data, as Analytics Vidhya showed in an experiment.
Once you've handed over your datasets (in a clean, well-organised format), you need to craft the right prompts.
How best to do this?
Your prompts must be detailed and specific, to help you divulge quality lead behaviour and predict results. This helps you get to know your ideal customer.
For example:
- Generate meaningful insights about customer conversion rates.
- What do the customers with the highest CLV have in common?
- Are there any outliers in the dataset?
Keep in mind that ChatGPT can't search the internet for information. It uses what it learned from training data to generate a response. So, no, it can't help you find lead contact information. (Good news: Cognism has your back in that department.)
However, with ChatGPT, you can use your past insights to predict future success, qualify leads more accurately, and hone your lead generation process.
Faster report writing
ChatGPT can help automate certain aspects of the report-writing process, such as data analysis and formatting.
With access to a company's data and reporting tools, it can analyse trends and patterns in sales data - including website user demographics and conversion rates - and generate insights and recommendations that can be incorporated into sales reports.
To do this:
Set your objectives for the data, organise and format your data (so ChatGPT can interpret accurately), then ask the right questions. For example, “How has our conversion rate changed over the last four months?”
You'll need to review and cross-check ChatGPT's reports with your own understanding and context; don't let AI run the show! Regardless, this can help sales teams save time and effort and ensure that they're basing their sales reports on accurate and up-to-date information.
Additionally, you can use this tool to craft an executive summary of your sales activities, or whatever else your report is about. Check this out:
One simple prompt can generate a solid template for your reporting - and you can add as many figures and metrics as you want, either within the AI or during the follow-up review.
How to incorporate ChatGPT into your sales process
Now that you know the benefits of ChatGPT for sales teams, the question is:
How can you incorporate it into your sales process to boost efficiency?
First, remember that developing a sales strategy involving ChatGPT requires you to carefully evaluate how the technology can improve your sales process. Every company is different in that regard.
For a successful implementation of ChatGPT as a sales tool, we recommend the following five steps 👇
1. Determine ChatGPT's role and use cases in your sales process
How will you use ChatGPT? Will it primarily be used for customer engagement, lead generation or sales assistance?
To define ChatGPT's role in your sales process, you first need to have a solid understanding of your own sales process, including efficiency gaps and where your team invests too much (or too little) time. The right CRM for your startup, SMB, or enterprise organisation - one that features robust analytics and activity-tracking metrics - can help you identify these blind spots in your sales process.
Only then can you determine ChatGPT's specialised purpose in your sales workflow. Maybe you want to use ChatGPT to make personalised recommendations to customers, or to analyse sales data and provide insights into customer behaviour.
First, understand its role in your unique sales process. Then:
2. Find the right ChatGPT-powered tool for your sales needs
Despite its newness, ChatGPT has already been used to build productivity-boosting sales tools that will help resolve your pain points.
For example, WebChatGPT lets you fact-check the responses you get with ChatGPT using web results. This is a great add-on to your AI sales process to keep things accurate.
There are also a variety of ChatGPT-based tools that help you download the chats as PDFs, incorporate them into your SMS messaging, and even respond to (sales) tweets.
You could also build your own ChatGPT-powered tool.
The types of sales tools you build out of ChatGPT will be determined by the role you assign to it. This might be a chatbot, a data analysis assistant, a copywriting assistant, and so on.
If you want to use it for lead generation, you can build a ChatGPT-based chatbot that engages users from the first touchpoint, using it to write ad copy and social media content.
First, though, you'll need to train it with information about your product and audience. This will ensure consistency in your brand messaging.
You can (and should) also customise the chatbot's responses to align with your brand voice. For example:
If your brand has a friendly and conversational tone, ChatGPT's responses should align.
3. Train your sales team
Now, train your sales team on how to use ChatGPT effectively. This includes training on how to interact with customers using ChatGPT, how to use it to generate leads, and how to use it to provide product information and support.
If you have the resources, and to provide additional support, you might consider building a ChatGPT-powered app that listens in on sales calls and provides answers. Or, you can adopt ChatSuggest, an existing solution.
If you know your team will need ChatGPT during a live sales call, it's important they learn how to use it without arousing suspicion. Imagine if every time a prospect asks a question, there's an awkward silence before they can answer. Terrible, right?
Plus, your sales team should never spit out ChatGPT answers without verifying for accuracy. That could easily get you in trouble, causing confusion and damaging the customer experience.
AI is great. Just don't remove human reasoning from your sales interaction.
4. Train ChatGPT with sales data
To improve the accuracy and effectiveness of your AI, you need to train ChatGPT with your own sales data.
By analysing past customer interactions, ChatGPT can provide more targeted and relevant customer responses. This ensures a consistent brand message across all your communication channels.
Remember - ChatGPT was trained on 570 GB of data. But it still needs to learn your unique sales data to best operate on your behalf.
5. Don't forget the human element
Even with ChatGPT, it's vital to provide human support to customers as needed. This may include providing a phone number or email address for customers to contact if they need further assistance or have a more complex issue that ChatGPT can't resolve.
AI should support your human-based sales process, not replace it.
Any customer-facing ChatGPT interface should be designed so that the discussion is routed to a qualified sales rep if an issue can't be resolved with AI.
ChatGPT for sales: the last word
ChatGPT is a true game-changer for sales teams in 2023. Embracing this technology can help to improve customer engagement, generate leads efficiently, and boost revenue. But only if it's implemented well.
Overall, adapting a sales strategy for ChatGPT requires careful planning and execution. Identify its role and offer staff training, then analyse and optimise its output.
When paired with other standout sales tools, including your CRM, AI will boost productivity - and elevate your sales outreach - to new heights.
Author bio
Ryan Robinson is the Head of Content at Close, the CRM built for growth. He also teaches 500,000 monthly readers how to grow a profitable blog, at ryrob.com.
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