Sales Team Management

Sales Operations

8 Ways B2B Sales Teams Can Use ChatGPT: A Complete Guide to Getting Started

Michaela Mendes

Head of Content & Strategy

Table of contents:

ChatGPT is powerful – it’s true. But there is zero chance ChatGPT takes anyone’s job away anytime soon – especially in sales.

There is no tool that can strategically sell the way a smart, experienced, well-spoken sales professional can.

But ChatGPT can certainly help sales professionals do their job more effectively and efficiently. The power of GPT can help revenue operations professionals accelerate growth. And it can also help revenue leaders get greater insight into what’s working in their sales process – and why.

In this blog, we’ll explore eight exciting ways you can upgrade your sales process using the power of ChatGPT.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

How does ChatGPT work?
8 ways to use ChatGPT for enterprise sales
ChatGPT integrations with your sales tech stack
6 tips and tricks to implement ChatGPT in your sales process
6 ChatGPT prompts to share with your sales team

How does ChatGPT work?

ChatGPT is a language model developed by OpenAI. What this means is…

Actually, you know what? Let’s have ChatGPT explain itself to us:

“I am ChatGPT, a large language model developed by OpenAI. I was trained on a massive amount of text data using a deep learning algorithm called the Transformer architecture. As a language model, my purpose is to understand and generate natural language, which means that I can carry out a wide range of tasks, such as answering questions, providing recommendations, and engaging in conversation on various topics.”

This is interesting, but it’s still a lot of tech speak for me. ChatGPT, can you explain this in simpler terms?

“Sure! I'm a computer program that has been trained to understand and generate language just like humans do. I've been trained on a lot of text data, which means that I've learned a lot about how words are used and how sentences are constructed. You can ask me questions or talk to me about anything, and I'll do my best to understand and respond in a way that makes sense.”

Right now, ChatGPT is free. You can sign up here. OpenAI recently announced ChatGPT Plus – subscription for $20 per month. This gives users access to ChatGPT even during peak usage times and also will put you first in line for new features and improvements.

Once you sign up for an account, you’ll reach an interface that looks like this:

You can start typing questions or requests into the search bar at the bottom of the screen. Once you hit enter, you’ve created a prompt.

ChatGPT will begin generating a response, and you’ll see it type an answer for you in real time. Once it completes your answer, you can ask additional questions based on this answer. Each answer builds upon itself, unless you want to start a whole new prompt.

In this case, you can hit the “new chat” button in the far left corner of your screen.

Every prompt will show up on the left side of the screen once you’ve entered it. You can return to these prompts later and retrieve ChatGPT’s answers.

What ChatGPT can do

ChatGPT was trained on the vast amount of knowledge available for free on the internet, books, and more. Because of this, it’s very good at writing text that closely resembles the way a human would communicate. In some cases, it’s better – more clear, concise, and engaging.

One of the top ways to use ChatGPT is to conduct research on a new topic. You can ask questions in the course of your research, using ChatGPT as a companion helper.

You can also use ChatGPT to help you refine the way you’ve written something. You can ask it for creative ideas on how to do something. You can use it to practice a new language. You can even ask for a movie recommendation.

What ChatGPT can’t do

Don’t use ChatGPT as the final, factual source for important questions. While it likely gives you a closely accurate answer, it’s pulling information from data publicly sourced on the internet prior to 2021. That means you aren’t going to always get an up-to-date response.

ChatGPT’s output quality is also highly dependent on the inputs, or the prompts. It’s essential to clearly explain what you are looking for and add enough detail that ChatGPT is able to fully answer the question. Otherwise, you may get a disjointed, nonsensical response.

8 ways to use ChatGPT for enterprise sales

So how do you use ChatGPT in your everyday sales process? Here are eight possible ways sales executives, sales development representatives, sales managers, revenue operations and revenue leaders could use ChatGPT:

Research your target industries and personas
Build your sales team members’ personal brands on social media
Generate cold outreach messaging
Come up with lead-qualifying questions
Do quick competitive research
Role play with a prospect
Summarize notes from a sales call
Query your sales data for instant answers on what’s working (with SetSail)

#1: Research your target industries and personas

According to Salesforce’s State of Sales report, sales reps spend 9.3% of their time every week researching prospects.

ChatGPT can help sales reps get a holistic view of a target persona, within a target industry – faster. This is especially helpful for reps who are new to the company. They can use ChatGPT to get a better understanding of who they’re selling to, and what they care about, as well as the larger market they are operating in.

First, identify your target persona. Ask ChatGPT questions such as:

What are the top three things [job title] cares about?
How does [job title] measure success in their role?

You can drill down even further. Ask:

If I’m going to sell [solution] to [job title] how should I talk about it?
What are some common personality traits of [job title]?

Next, you can use ChatGPT to research the industry. Ask questions like:

What are the top trends in [industry]?
What companies are the top players in [industry]?

Why can’t you just ask ChatGPT for information about the company you are trying to sell to? Well, remember – ChatGPT is only trained on information up to 2021. Any updates to the company’s website or message since then won’t be captured in the response it gives you. And you definitely don’t want to try to sell to a prospect with inaccurate information. However, you can input a company's website and ask for a summary of what they do, as long as the link is publicly available so ChatGPT can access it.

Larger, more evergreen topics such as the top success factors for a VP of Marketing, or macro trends in the biotech industry – ChatGPT can help you learn more about these, quickly, without opening 20 internet tabs. It’s a great way to warm up to using ChatGPT in your sales process.

#2: Build sales team members’ personal brands on social media

Social selling is effective. LinkedIn’s 2022 State of Sales report shows that sales reps who exceeded their quota over 50% were twice as likely to have expanded their LinkedIn network in the last year versus those who didn’t.

One of the best ways to do this? Show up in conversations that are happening about problems your solution solves. But one of the biggest challenges is coming up with things to say on social.

If your sales team members are struggling to figure out what to post on LinkedIn or Twitter, here’s how they can use ChatGPT to inspire some ideas:

Identify a piece of content you’d like to use for inspiration.

This could be a blog post, a case study, or any web page that is publicly available that ChatGPT can crawl.

Enter: Can you write a LinkedIn post based on [link]?

If you don’t like the first version, ask ChatGPT to rewrite it in a different way. For example, you could ask:

Can you rewrite this and include a statistic from the blog?
Can you rewrite this and include a quote from the case study?
Can you rewrite this in a friendlier tone and include bullet points?

Here’s an example.

I asked ChatGPT to write a LinkedIn post based on our blog, “4 Ways Accurate Sales Data Helps Generate Revenue.”

Not bad! But I really wish the post contained a stat – that always catches the eye on LinkedIn. Here’s ChatGPT’s second attempt:

Now we’re talking! But this is a lot of text. And it’s a pretty formal tone. I asked for another rewrite:

This is an ideal way for salespeople to spend less time thinking about what to write, and more time refining ChatGPT’s output – and posting.

#3: Generate cold outreach messaging

According to Hubspot, salespeople spend 21% of their time writing emails. That’s almost ¼ of their workweek.

While some of these emails may be ongoing conversations with prospects, a large percentage is likely cold outreach. And personalized, targeted outreach takes time.

ChatGPT can help.

First off, here’s one thing you should know: ChatGPT cannot crawl LinkedIn profiles, since these aren’t publicly available on the internet without an account.

However, you can feed it with the right information to make it as tailored as possible. Here’s how:

First, identify who you’re emailing and ask ChatGPT what’s most important to that person.

Example: What are the top three things [job title] cares about?

Then, build on this by asking how you can talk about your company’s solution as it relates to one of those pain points.

Example: I want to email [job title] and introduce [company]. Here’s what my company does: [description]. Write a short email to [job title] introducing how [company] can solve [pain point].

Keep drilling down with additional follow-ups, such as:

Rewrite this and include a statistic from this blog/case study [link].
Here’s the bio of [job title]. Here’s a description of what their company does: [add description]. Rewrite this email based on this.
Can you rewrite this to be more attention grabbing?
Can you help me develop a catchy email subject line?

Here’s my honest review of ChatGPT for cold email development: it’s not going to be perfect, but it’s going to accelerate the path to a polished finished product.

#4: Come up with lead-qualifying questions

Working on refining your sales process and developing better lead-qualifiers? Use ChatGPT to help you figure out what SDRs should be asking during their outreach calls.

Here’s what to input:

[Company description]. We want to sell our solution to [target audience/persona, type of company]. What questions should we be asking to see if a company is a good fit for our solution?
ChatGPT will give you a list of questions on various topics. Dig deeper by asking, “What additional questions can we ask about [topic]?

We tried this for SetSail with some impressive initial results:

However, I wanted to drill down a little more into the sales data issue we solve for our customers.

Not bad, ChatGPT!

#5: Do quick competitive research

Ever been on a call and a prospect brings up a competitor you’ve never heard of?

This is where your sidekick, ChatGPT, can lend a hand. You don’t have time to review the entire competitor website or figure out the individual solutions they offer. But you want to get at least a high-level understanding during your sales call.

Simply ask ChatGPT, “what does [competitor website] do?”

Follow it up with, “what individual solutions do they sell?”

And maybe, “who is their target audience?”

‍Note: in my experience, ChatGPT is not skilled at comparing two websites and grasping their nuances. Maybe this is an area it will improve on, but the deeper level understanding you need to have in order to help a customer evaluate two complex products goes beyond its abilities (for now.)

#6: Role play with a prospect

Picture this. A sales rep is ramping up and needs to practice being prepared for questions. Or, you’re trying to develop FAQs for your website. Or, you’re trying to gear up for a big pitch, and you want to spend extra time prepping.

You can use ChatGPT to role play all of these scenarios. Here’s what to type in:

Here’s what we do: [description of your company]. As a potential customer of [company], what questions do you have?
Once ChatGPT gives you a list of questions, pick one to dive deeper on. Type in [question answer]. Based on this, what other questions do you have about [topic]?

We tried it out for SetSail. Here is the initial list of questions:

I decided to test ChatGPT’s question-formulating ability further.

Wow. As you can see, ChatGPT has no shortage of ideas on questions you can practice answering. These are highly intelligent, relevant questions that we definitely get on SetSail sales calls.

Tweak this flow as necessary based on what you’re trying to accomplish. For example, you could input your cold call script, and ask ChatGPT to ask follow up questions based on what you talk about. It’s highly useful both for reps and for anyone in charge of developing training materials.

#7: Summarize your notes

Meeting notes contain a wealth of information – don’t miss anything. Use a tool like Tactiq to integrate your existing meeting recorder with ChatGPT.

It will synthesize the call’s transcript and give you clear next steps with action items.

No need to rely on your half-baked notes or your memory (or weed through a call transcript).

#8: Query your sales data for instant answers with SetSail

You know ChatGPT can process and generate text. But did you know SetSail has made it possible to use the same technology that powers ChatGPT to get insights into your sales data?

As you’ve seen, ChatGPT is most effective when it is given a clear prompt. However, the examples above only show GPT’s capability to deliver answers based on the information it’s already been trained on or that is publicly available on the internet.

What if you could take the natural language processing capabilities of GPT and pair it with SetSail’s ability to capture and centralize complex sales data from your entire revenue tech stack?

Now you can with SetSail.

By integrating SetSail with GPT’s powerful language models, SetSail makes it easy to ask questions about your sales data and get immediate, visualized answers.

For example, you can get answers to questions like:

How many meetings does my team have with VPs this week?
What are my top performers doing better than anyone else?
Which deals in late stages don’t have any recent activity?
What accounts are most likely to churn?
How many meetings does it take to win a deal?

Users type their question into a simple text box, and SetSail returns answers based on the data it’s pulled from across the sales organization and tech stack. Users can then ask follow-up questions, save threads, or pin dashboards.

Here’s a video on how it works:

The entire process is secure and private — no sales data is ever shared with OpenAI. Request access here.

Can ChatGPT integrate with existing sales tools?

The market is exploding with use cases for integrating ChatGPT into existing tools, and since Open AI’s announcement on ChatGPT’s open API, the wave is just beginning. Here are a few highlights of current integrations:

ChatGPT and SetSail

We’re biased, but SetSail’s GPT capabilities are unlike any other integration on the market for enterprise sales teams. Why? Because SetSail is using your own sales data as the basis for its answers — not just what’s publicly available on the internet.

SetSail centralizes and structures your sales data first, and then uses GPT to turn plain English questions into complex queries that generate insights totally unique to your sales team.

Request access here.

ChatGPT and Slack

Spend a lot of time in Slack updating your colleagues and answering questions? Slack’s ChatGPT integration makes it so you don’t have to do all the writing alone. It will also summarize longer messages for you so you can quickly get the important information you need.

Check it out.

ChatGPT and Salesforce Einstein

Salesforce just announced Einstein GPT, the first generative AI for CRMs. This capability allows Salesforce users to generate content across the CRM in different capacities. For instance, salespeople can use Einstein GPT to craft a personalized message to a prospect, and customer service people can use it to respond to a customer support inquiry.

ChatGPT and Hubspot

Hubspot announced the launch of ChatSpot, an integration with ChatGPT designed for marketing, sales, and service teams. Using ChatSpot, Hubspot users can ask questions like, “how many website visitors did I have last month?” or even “can you generate a picture of a sailboat on rough seas?”

You can join the waitlist here.

6 tips and tricks to implement ChatGPT in your sales process

Maybe one or two salespeople on your team are already beginning to integrate ChatGPT into their everyday workflow. But to take advantage of the full value of this technology, here are six tips to roll it out across the team:

Tip #1: Identify the best use cases.

What is your team struggling with right now? Is outbound prospecting the biggest challenge, or is it call readiness? Choose one, and start using ChatGPT to help, either with writing cold emails, or helping train up reps on how to best anticipate and answer prospect questions.

Tip #2: Give your team a starter pack of prompts.

Below, we’ve outlined 6 prompts discussed in this blog to help your team get started using ChatGPT. Remind them that they’ll get a higher quality output when they focus on a high-quality input.

Tip #3: Encourage your team to add detail to their prompts.

ChatGPT is smart, but it doesn’t know everything. You could create a ChatGPT resource page that includes key facts about your company and your target accounts to help your sales team quickly get the information they need to feed ChatGPT the right detail.

Tip #4: It’s all about the follow-up.

Your sales team already knows: you need to follow up! ChatGPT is like a prospect in that way. Keep building on its answers, and you’ll train it to give you better outputs as you go.

Tip #5: Always, always, always: fact check.

ChatGPT gets a lot of facts wrong. It’s essential to always double check the information is accurate.

Tip #6: Share and learn from each other.

There’s an art to writing a great ChatGPT prompt. Encourage your team to share their usage of the tool and anything they learn along the way so everyone can get more value out of it.

Summary: 6 ChatGPT prompts to give your sales team

To recap, ChatGPT works most effectively with high-quality inputs.

Here are the prompts discussed throughout the blog for you to pass on to your team:

Audience and industry research

What are the top three things [job title] cares about?
How does [job title] measure success in their role?
If I’m going to sell [solution] to [job title] how should I talk about it?
What are some common personality traits of [job title]?
What are the top trends in [industry]?
What companies are the top players in [industry]?

Personal brand building

Can you write a LinkedIn post based on [link]?
Can you rewrite this and include a statistic from [blog link]?
Can you rewrite this and include a customer quote from [case study link]?
Can you rewrite this in a friendlier tone and include bullet points?

Cold outreach

What are the top three things [job title] cares about?
I want to email [job title] and introduce [company]. Here’s what my company does: [description]. Write a short email to [job title] introducing how [company] can solve [pain point].
Rewrite this and include a statistic from this [blog/case study link].
Here's the job description of [job title]. Here’s a description of what their company does: [add description]. Rewrite this email based on this.
Can you rewrite this to be more attention grabbing?
Can you help me develop a catchy email subject line?

Lead qualifying questions

[Company description]. We want to sell our solution to [target audience/persona, type of company]. What questions should we be asking to see if a company is a good fit for our solution?
What additional questions can we ask about [topic]?

Quick competitive research

What does [competitor website] do?
What individual solutions do they sell?
Who is their target audience?

Role playing

[Description of your company] As a potential customer of [company], what questions do you have?
[Answer the question.] Based on this, what other questions do you have about [topic]?

Get AI-powered insights from your sales data

Use the power of GPT and SetSail to get answers from your sales data that matter for your pipeline – without creating yet another dashboard. Join the beta launch of SetSail’s GPT integration by requesting access here.

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