Everyone and their brother is talking about how AI can help improve sales and marketing efforts, but exactly which AI tools and prompts should you be reaching for in 2024?
From analyzing a prospect's LinkedIn profile to helping you understand your target audience, AI has endless uses in sales. But it needs to be leveraged intelligently, or your prospects will feel it's disingenuous and will write you off faster than chatGPT can spit out a response to your prompt.
As a service-based business owner, my inbox and LinkedIn DMs have been hit with many poorly executed AI sales pitches. I'm not alone here, either: we've all seen businesses leveraging AI for sales in a way that makes us cringe.
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There have also been countless times we've engaged with sales processes that were using AI seamlessly.
Like it or not, AI is here to stay (per ourAI stats guide):
- More than 80% of surveyed industry professionals say they're already using AI in their marketing.
- The AI market is expected to grow twentyfold by the year 2030.
- Adoption rates are skyrocketing.
I talked to founders, sales reps, and CEOs about how to use AI prompts to make the sales process more efficient. This is what they had to say.
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Table of Contents
- How do sales teams use AI?
- Tips for Writing AI Prompts for Sales
- AI Prompts for Sales Research
- AI Prompts for Social Selling
- AI Prompts for Sales Emails
- AI Prompts for Sales Videos
- AI Prompts for Sales Scripts
- AI Prompts for Sales Training
How do sales teams use AI?
How are real sales professionals using AI to lighten their loads and improve productivity? Industry-leading sales tools have already integrated AI into their platforms, but what money is being left on the table?
No fluff. No vague descriptions that raise more questions than they answer. I asked sales reps and marketing teams to share exactly how they're using AI in their sales process. Here are AI success stories and insights for you to apply to your sales process.
AI-Powered Chatbots
“One of our frontline sales tools is our customer service chatbot,” shares Soumya Mahapatra, CEO of Essenvia. “It's capable of answering basic questions about our products and services, and directing interested queries to the representative who can best help them.”
Soumya isn't alone: in one survey, more than 25% of participants said that chatbots helped grow their lead generation by 10-20 volumes (source).
Basic chatbots can handle predictable consumer concerns, like booking a meeting or offering support. More advanced chatbots (like ours) can even help qualify leads and gather lead information.
You can build a chatbot for your website with HubSpot's free chatbot builder:
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Analyzing Customer Data
Since founding DealA, an online saving platform, CEO and Founder Oleg Segal discovered using AI has taken sales to the next level.
"One of those has been implementing customized AI prompts – these prompts are generated based on the shopping habits and preferences of our users. By utilizing these prompts, we are able to suggest relevant deals, which in turn results in higher conversion rates and higher customer satisfaction,” says Segal.
Oleg Segal shared his best advice for novice users of AI looking to increase sales: understand your audiences’ ecommerce journey. Analyze customer data so you can offer tailored website suggestions.
"Knowing where the gaps in satisfaction lie will help clarify where AI will be most useful. This is because AI is the most useful when it augments an already successful strategy. Profiling your customers by observing their habits and preferences is the best first step when looking to fulfill a need in the shopping experience,” Segal says.
Statistic: 73% of surveyed sales professionals said that AI helps them find insights from the data they would've otherwise missed (source).
Drafting Email and Phone Communication
“The most common way we use AI right now is to help draft good email and phone call content,” shares Marty Bauer, director of sales at Omnisend. “We test other ways to use AI but they are currently producing mixed results.”
Bauer’s team is using AI to:
- Help generate answers to common questions potential clients may have.
- Pick the most compelling subject line or email structure.
- Help write personalized proposals to potential clients.
- Write cold emails and call scripts.
Bauer noted that AI is very useful for drafting of any kind, but "it's a tool to enhance our outcomes, not a replacement for great team members who can connect with prospects and customers."
Personalizing Ad Placement
“At Ultimate Kilimanjaro, artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the way we engage with prospective climbers,” shares Michael Sawyer, operations director at Ultimate Kilimanjaro.
The AI works through algorithms for targeted advertising, Sawyer says. These highly developed algorithms look at user preferences and data to find possible climbers who want to summit the mountain.
“Through careful placement of our advertisements based on these findings, we attract a specific population that is most likely to be enthralled with the mountain's charm, thus raising our conversion rates,” Sawyer says.
At first, you may only think of money saved with improved ad placement. Another huge benefit is improved lead qualification, which can be improved in other ways with AI.
Qualifying Leads
“We use AI to analyze lead and prospect data such as age, geographic analysis, purchase intent, acquisition cost analysis, and more,” shares Randy VanderVaate, CEO and founder of Funeral Funds of America. "AI helps us assign scores to leads and prospects to help our agency prioritize the most promising leads."
Investing in lead qualification will help your sales team know exactly where to focus their time, while also improving their ratios and results. Lead more in our comprehensive guide to sales qualification.
Summarizing Meetings and Creating Action Plans
Not all AI tools handle high-level tasks — some can be used to free us up from mundane tasks that used to be done manually. All sales teams can implement AI in meeting summaries.
“Earlier, it was quite time-consuming to note down all the minutes of whatever you’ve pitched to your prospective leads. However, thanks to AI now, this process is no longer time-consuming but rather raises your efficiency levels as well,” shares Sofia Perez, content manager and owner of CharacterCounter.com.
Let AI listen to your meetings, transcribe the conversation, and then summarize key points. Then use that to:
- Quickly send a meeting summary to your team or the potential client.
- Prompt AI to take the transcript and draft follow-up emails.
- Compare your conversation transcript to your sales playbook and see which selling points you haven't discussed yet.
“This saves a lot of time and effort that could be invested into priority areas, such as thinking about how to pitch and convert even more,” Perez says. “AI not only streamlines the work processes for salespersons but makes their future course of action easier.”
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Tips for Writing AI Prompts for Sales
Finding the best AI sales tools is just step one - now you have to learn how to use AI correctly. Use these tips from sales teams to help you get started now.
Leverage your ideal client persona.
“I've tested pretty much every AI tool that claims to help you in sales. Most of them are terrible and too generic and won't help you at all,” said Mario Lucas, owner of ListBuilders.io.
However, Lucas found that AI helped him drill down into ideal client personas (ICP).
“I use ChatGPT to talk about my ICP, and build it out, and then integrate it. It really helps me understand the language the customer uses and the different challenges that person might face in their role, which I can help with,” he says.
Lucas also shared this warning for beginners: “Trying to use an AI tool to take shortcuts in your prospecting is just not going to work. Your prospect can tell a mile off if you've used AI, and you'll just get ignored.”
Giving Feedback
When you‘re underwhelmed by AI’s content, or you see that it went the wrong direction with your prompt, provide feedback and keep tailoring the response.
I consider every initial response from an AI tool to just be “draft 1.” Consider tailoring the feedback with prompts like these:
- Reconsider the below data and rewrite the response to incorporate that information.
- Change the tone of this response to [business professional, etc.].
- Make this response [more actionable, time-sensitive, etc.]
- Keep that response but reformat it [in a table, etc.].
- Rewrite that for my target audience [description].
Generative AI tools are meant to be dynamic. Be sure to refine what you receive.
Providing Enough Context
“No matter how much you train AI, a bad prompt will lead to an underwhelming sales copy,” warns Mark Gadala-Maria, co-founder and CEO of Post Cheetah.
Mark shared that AI prompts should consist of intrinsic details, including:
1. Parameters.2. Examples.
3. Targets.
4. Expectations.
“With more information and understandable prompts, a beginner can get a sales pitch worthy of social media engagement and increased sales,” Gadala-Maria says.
Inputting Data to Train AI Systems
Invest ample time in training your AI model using high-quality data.
“When working with AI tools, especially in sales where customer behavior history is essential, it’s important to remember that your results will only be as good as the data your AI model is trained with,” shares Baidhurya Mani, CEO and founder of SellCoursesOnline.com.
For salespeople who are first-time AI users, Mani suggests that you start by using tools like Resolve Tech Solutions to gather enough data or help you clean up any existing data you’re working with.
“I've had the most success with this approach when using chatGPT,” Mani says. “I create a custom chatGPT using OpenAI’s API model training tools, so I can feed it with the specific datasets I want. This way, the answers it generates are fine-tuned using the unique context of my business data.”
Exploring Need-Specific AI Tools
ChatGPT can do a lot, but it‘s just a general AI tool. There are many AI tools that can serve specific tasks better. Take HubSpot’s AI tool ChatSpot, for example.
ChatSpot is specifically built to help you use popular HubSpot tools, like HubSpot CRM, and to solve problems that businesses have. It relieves the pain points of business building, like creating a mission statement, analyzing competition, writing sales emails, and more.
It‘s not always essential to an AI tool that’s customized to the exact tasks at hand, but it can improve ease and accuracy. I like that ChatSpot guides you through completing essential business tasks and that it's trained on HubSpot tools. It saves time compared to general tools like chatGPT.
My favorite function: the incredibly detailed templates. The template library is full of fill-in-the-blank templates created by leading industry professionals. The templates are even customizable based on how much data you have.
Let's get into 50+ AI prompts that you can use right now to further your marketing efforts.
AI Prompts forSales Research
All good sales processes start with research, and so will we.
1. "I sell [product] that [solves this problem]. Help me develop a buyer persona by asking yes and no questions to lead to an ideal customer avatar."
2. "What does the buyer's journey look like for the below product and target audience? My audience typically invests [$X] on my brand."
3. "I'm a business that [offers this] to [target audience]. Help me find my brand voice. It should have a [professional/friendly/funny/etc.] tone."
4. "Below is a description of my company, product, and target audience. Make a list of pain points that I can market towards."
5. "You're doing market research for [company name], a business that offers [product summary]. What public research and statistics from the last five years are relevant to [industry]? Include sources."
6. "I sell [product description] to [target audience]. What kind of user experience considerations should I have for my sales page?"
7. "Do a competitive analysis between my brand [name] and [competing brand name]. Gather strengths, weaknesses, and marketing opportunities. Display these in a table."
8. "I sell [product] to [target audience]. What are some objections buyers might have?"
9. "You are conducting pricing research. Compare [my company] pricing to other competing [business type]. Include company name, features, pricing tiers, and plan names. Compile data in a table and include a summary of what features my company is missing versus my competitors."
10. "I work for [company name] selling [product] to [target audience]. Help me develop a strategy for cold email outreach. Who should I be targeting? Which companies? Which job titles at those companies? Generate this information in a table."
11. "Develop a customer feedback survey for [product] for [company name], a business that [company summary]. The survey should touch on their purchase satisfaction as well as areas for improvement."
This is a simple customer feedback form prompt.
Dig deeper: Use HubSpot's free ChatSpot AI tool for your customer feedback survey. It's specifically designed for sales and comes with plug-and-play templates.
AI Prompts forSocial Selling
Social media can be used for the entire sales process, from product awareness to closing deals. Use these AI prompts to get started with social selling.
1. "I sell [product description] to [target audience]. Generate ideas for viral TikTok content based on industry trends."
2. "Turn the below blog post text into social media posts for Facebook. Include the hook for each post, a detailed summary of the content, and end with the call to action to learn more on our website."
3. "Generate a list of Instagram video ideas and scripts for [audience description] with the call to action to book a sales call. Make five ideas for each product listed below. Highlight [your unique value proposition].
4. "Below is my sales playbook for [brand name, description]. Pull 20 points and make a list of potential social media posts that help sell [your product]."
5. "Create an outline for a LinkedIn post that summarizes the key takeaways of the below industry news article for [description of your LinkedIn connections]."
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6. "You are creating a YouTube video showing how your product works for potential customers who are considering buying it. Use the product description below to write a video script that answers viewers' questions."
7. "I want to publish content on X that establishes me as an authority in the [your niche] niche to sell [product]. Below is a list of my authority points. Come up with a list of X threads that build my personal brand and end with selling my product."
8. "Do a competitive analysis between [competing brand name] and my brand [name], then come up with a table of social posts that market my brand's strengths over [competing brand name]. Include five ideas per platform, and include a hook and summary for each post."
9. "Below is an Instagram post by [your job title] for [target audience]. Pretend you're a social media manager and write a list of potential questions that I can pin in my comments section to inspire easy audience engagement."
10. "Using direct messaging on social media is a delicate balance between genuine conversation and discussing business. I sell [product] for [company]. What are some ideas for engaging with [target audience] authentically in the DMs without immediately selling?"
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AI Prompts forSales Emails
Love it or hate it, email is an essential part of every sales strategy. Try these prompts to help potential customers engage.
1. "You want to build rapport with a potential client. Below is the information from the “about” section on their LinkedIn profile. Come up with 10 conversation topics that you can discuss on a get-to-know-you call. These topics should be specific to what this person shared on LinkedIn. Also write the email invitation to the call."
2. "My product description is below. Write a cold outreach email sequence targeting [description of lead]. It should have five emails with the CTA [your CTA]."
3. "Generate a snappy subject line for the below sales email for [target audience]. This is the second follow-up email in a series of cold outreach."
4. "I work for [company name and description] and sell [product] to [target audience]. I want to send emails that generate responses from recipients. The goal is to foster a genuine connection with readers and get them to engage with my email marketing. Generate a list of email subject lines, hooks, email body outlines, and closing questions that will inspire a response and build a genuine email community. Format in a table."
5. "You're doing sales prospecting for [target audience description] selling [product description] by [company name]. Generate 20 email topics that can be used to introduce our product to potential new leads. Include a brief and catchy subject line, plus a summary of the email body text."
6. "Help me A/B test email subject lines. Compare the email subject lines below and tell me which one will get better open rates for my audience."
7. "Below is a cold sales email that didn't receive a follow-up when sent to [prospect description]. Write a catchy, concise follow-up email trying to get a response out of the recipient. The email CTA is [CTA]."
8. "You're developing an email sales strategy for Black Friday. Create an email schedule for pushing my [product]. Include a calendar detailing which emails should go out to email prospects when."
9. "The below cold outreach email sequence to [description of lead] for [product description] didn't generate a response. Craft a final email that includes a down-sell offer of [your down-sell offer] for this lead."
10. "Below is my product description. Come up with creative email freebies related to the product to help incentivize [target audience] to join my email list."
11. "Take the below sales email topic for [target audience] and write and draft an email that creates urgency."AI Prompts forSales Videos
Video is one of the most powerful mediums at our disposal. Simplify the process with these AI prompts for sales videos.
1. "Analyze popular videos on TikTok in the [name] niche. Based on what's performing well on TikTok, come up with a list of video suggestions for me to make promoting [product description]."
2. "Help me optimize my video for YouTube SEO. Take the below video transcript and write a title and video description that's optimized for [keyword]."
3. "Below is a list of our positive customer feedback and product reviews for [product description]. Create a list of short-form video ideas for TikTok and Instagram based on the positive feedback. Include a hook and video script for each concept."
4. "My product description and features are below. List five ways in which life for my [target audience] will be better with my product, and generate video ideas based on each benefit. Display these in a table with video hooks, outline, intended platform, and close with a CTA."
5. "What type of videos about [topic] perform best on TikTok? Looking at what performs best, come up with video scripts for [product] sales videos. Have these topics be genuinely helpful to viewers and not full of fluff or sales pitches."
6. "You are trying to sell [product] on YouTube. What are the most-searched keywords in the [your niche] niche on YouTube? Using this information, give me 10 SEO-optimized video titles targeting popular search terms. Include a detailed video outline for each video title."
AI Prompts forSales Scripts
Sales scripts can be intimidating, but you'll never have to start with a blank page again.
1. "Below is my product description and my target audience. Write a brief, catchy sales script trying to get this [prospect's job title] to try a demo of my product."
2. "Take the below meeting transcript and create five follow-up sales call scripts based on this lead's expressed needs and interests."
3. "You sell [product name and description] to [target audience]. Which pain points should be highlighted in your sales scripts?"
4. "You're a [job title] trying to sell [your product description]. Write a sales script focusing on [your product differentiators]."
5. "Below is my product description. Come up with a list of sales script questions for a call with [job title] at [company description]."
6. "You sell [product] to [target audience]. Create five personalized templates for sales scripts that have fill-in-the-blank personalization options. Each [prospect's job title] who I read this script to should feel like I took time to look at their company and their current [niche/pain point you solve] standing."
7. "I sell [product name], a solution to [pain points]. My prospect's company uses the competing tool [tool name]. Draft a custom sales script that outlines the benefits of using [your company name]'s tool over our competitor."
Did you know you can see which digital tools your prospect's company uses with ChatSpot?
AI Prompts forSales Training
Your sales team is only as good as your training. Here are AI prompts for sales training that you can try today.
1. "My company [company name] sells [product] in the [market/industry/niche]. What are the main pain points that our targets face? Explain these at the beginner level to educate new sales reps."
2. "You're explaining the landscape of the [market/industry/niche] to a brand-new sales associate who will sell [your product]. What points should be covered? Draft a training presentation outline. Start with the basic information and scale up to cover the pain points."
3. "We are selling [product] to [audience]. Some of our new sales reps are brand new to the [your industry] industry. Pull public data, research, and statistics about our niche and summarize it in a table by topic of history, current state, and growth predictions."
4. "Below is a list of poor customer feedback and negative reviews for [product name and description]. Make a list of counterpoints that a new sales rep could reference during a sales call."
5. "Below is a list of great customer feedback and positive reviews for [product name and description]. Make a list of talking points that a new sales rep could reference during a sales call."
6. "Take the below sales call transcript and turn it into a training resource for our new sales reps."
7. "We are training our new sales reps to understand our product. Below is an export of our customer survey results. Pull key data, talking points, and themes from the below customer service results and develop a summary for our trainees."
So, where does AI fit into the sales workflow?
AI chatbots build relationships, but obvious AI emails ruin them. Why?
Because people feel duped when they realize something that should've been human was actually AI.
You don‘t need to have studied customer psychology to understand that your customers and clients don’t want to feel your sales team fading into chatGPT. A sales team that abandons the human touch can toss customer retention right out the window with it.
My biggest takeaway from interviewing sales teams that use AI is this: AI should enhance a system that already works. A lot of people are leveraging AI incorrectly in sales, but those who make it work are reaping the rewards.
Use HubSpot's AI sales tool to start freeing up your time and maximizing your efforts today.
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