In a previous post, I talked about how to write touch base emails to check in with potential customers and keep a deal moving forward. I also mentioned that I enlist the help of ChatGPT when writing these emails.

It’s true – for me, the power of ChatGPT and AI language models like it, greatly unlock a new level of potential productivity. For example, while writing this blog, I asked ChatGPT for ideas on a title for the blog.

With ChatGPT context matters, so the great part about it is you can prompt the AI model to iterate on a prior answer it has given.

This feedback loop between the human prompter and ChatGPT answering back is so powerful, it feels like you are bouncing ideas with a coworker over Slack or some other communication channel.

The back and forth riffing continues to improve the output and gets ChatGPT closer to what you are looking for, at which point you can take the output and refine it further.

This is what I did as I turned to ChatGPT to help me brainstorm ideas for the title of this blog. But ChatGPT has the potential to help with even more of the day-to-day of a sales person – to boost productivity and ultimately improve customers’ buying experiences.

We’ve all had that afternoon slump where we need to send an email or do a mundane task and it takes longer than it should. It is kickstarting these tasks or getting ideas where I’ve found ChatGPT useful in my daily work as a salesperson at a startup.

One area specifically where ChatGPT shines is suggesting copy for emails to both potential and current prospects.

Take traditional outbound email campaigns sent by sales development representatives (SDRs) as an example. SDRs are responsible for customizing emails for their target audience by the prospect’s name, their company, their role, etc.

However, customization can often look quite lazy to the recipient of an automated cold outbound email.

Services like Reply.io automate email campaigns and enable SDRs and account executives to write generic emails about their software’s capabilities or benefits then automate the filling in of fields via variables like {{First_Name}} and {{Company_Name}}. If you are feeling fancy, you can even make custom fields in emails to prospects to fill in like {{Potential_Challenge}}.

This is a step up from a purely automated, generic email. But ChatGPT is changing the game for customization of cold emails.

For example, rather than simply writing a one-size-fits-all cold email, ChatGPT enables custom email templates to be generated within seconds.

Here is an example of how ChatGPT can be used to help draft a cold email to a data scientist persona. I am pretending in this scenario that I am a salesperson at a data quality software provider, but you can easily substitute in your own industry instead.

ChatGPT took a first pass, which I thought was decent. But it was too long for a cold email. Maybe it would work if you are selling to German clients, who I’ve heard love longer, descriptive emails!

So, I asked ChatGPT to shorten the email draft to 5 sentences or less. The result was a much better email, in my opinion. This suggested wording was clear, to the point and spoke to the target persona (a data scientist) directly.

ChatGPT even left spots for [Your Company Name] and [Your Name] so this email template could either be directly input into an email automation tool like Reply or Outreach in a manual or automated fashion.

I would probably tweak this email a bit. For example, perhaps my company doesn’t offer free trials so maybe I would change that. But as a whole, this email is short, sweet and easy to read for the recipient.

The example above showed how to write a cold email with ChatGPT. However, ChatGPT also works great for ongoing customer interactions. For example, when writing touchbase emails, ChatGPT can be used to make your emails seem more thoughtful and less lazy.

I am guilty of having sent emails in the past checking in with prospects that look something like:

“Hey there – just checking in to see if you are still interested in continuing the conversation around solving [insert the use case or problem]?”

This email isn’t horribly written, but it’s generic, and a bit lazy. Having been on the receiving end of emails like this from coworkers or even sales people, when I see an email like this, I instinctively think it is so low effort that I can ignore it or not respond immediately.

I will eventually respond, but it just doesn’t seem time critical, because I can tell it took the other person less than a minute worth of thought to write and casually send out.

With ChatGPT, I can send a touchbase email that still takes less than a minute to write, but looks like I spent so much more time thinking about it.

All ChatGPT needs is a bit of context from me. In this scenario, I am looking for a check in email with a prospect named Manny in the manufacturing industry.

ChatGPT does a great job here of creating an email based on my prompt. It even does a little bit of scheduling for me! Since I’m trying to move fast, I’d probably cut small bits of the fluff in this email. But I can also ask ChatGPT to do this directly. Maybe I also want to be specific to Manny’s problem that we discussed in a previous discovery call.

ChatGPT nails the first paragraph and even references Manny’s specific challenge like I asked it to. However, it then leaves out the ask to schedule a meeting on a specific date. But that’s OK – this is minor and I can easily correct it myself.

I will not claim that ChatGPT is perfect, but it gets you 90% of the way there in a very short amount of time.

One of my favorite sales influencers Brandon Fluharty talks about how writing is a superpower and good writing makes a salesperson better. Prior to ChatGPT, becoming a better writer took a lot of practice and time. Now the possibilities for drafting up documents and emails for sales interactions are infinite.

Emails are the first place where ChatGPT has added value for me in my sales role, but I could imagine eventually using it to help create sales proposals as well (of course anonymizing specific customer details).

ChatGPT will find limitations around being able to receive specific company or prospect details that are under NDA, but I anticipate ChatGPT eventually coming up with workarounds for this.

Or new language AI models will need to take into account that company-specific and sensitive data will be fed in as inputs, and security will have to be adjusted accordingly.

Either way, for simple, non-sensitive activities like writing emails, I will continue to take advantage of ChatGPT. This technology will soon likely be available directly in Gmail or other email writing platforms like Grammarly. I will keep an eye out, but until then ChatGPT remains a great (and currently free) option to level up your sales game.