My ChatGPT prompts to help Salespeople

This is the second episode of the Newsletter “From The Buyer’s Perspective”.

One of the principles of Selling with the Buyer’s perspective is helping; Selling is helping. As a salesperson, your objective is to help customers grow their business. This is a different mindset than many of your competitor sales reps. But here is the thing: when meeting with prospects, you have more challenges. They want to know if they can trust you. Are you credible enough to give you 20-30min of their time? Read on to see how AI can help you with that.

To gain credibility, you must show that you have done your homework and are prepared. And doing your homework takes time. It is probably the biggest challenge I have heard from salespeople I have trained and coached: THERE IS NOT ENOUGH TIME to prepare for customer meetings!

AI helps you gain credibility.

If you do not embrace AI to help you, then you risk, your lunch will be eaten by another salesperson who does.

Your homework involves knowing key information about your customer’s company, industry, and stakeholders. This is called Situational Knowledge. You may have used ChatGPT or another AI engine to find key customer information. The danger is USING AI like you use Google. Before you know it, you will see too much information, which is not helping. Am I right? You need guidance. You need effective prompts to keep things simple and structured.

AI Situational Knowledge Prompts

Following these prompts equips you with credible situational knowledge. And you save yourself a lot of time. Break Situational Knowledge into three categories:

• COMPANY
• INDUSTRY
• STAKEHOLDER

It is so simple, right? Breaking down Situational Knowledge into these three categories keeps you focused. By the way, AI loves categorised, simple, clear prompts. Have you noticed this yourself already? It’s all about the prompts.

So here we go. The following prompts will give an excellent summary of what you need to know before your customer meeting. You can try these out immediately in ChatGPT.

Copy/Paste the URL of your customer’s company and ask ChatGPT:

Company

1. Help me summarize in three paragraphs the website of [URL]
2. What is their competitive edge?
3. Who are their competitors?
4. Provide me with a summary of their financial performance
5. What are the top countries of origin for visitors to[ URL]
6. Give me a summary of customer experiences of [URL] positive and negative feedback
7. Update me with the latest news articles of [URL]
8. What are the key social media messages of [URL]

Try it. These summaries give you a good idea of what the company does as a business, its vision and its messages to the world. Their financial performance and news articles may hint at their growth strategy and if that is different from their competitors. You also can identify why their consumers buy from them and what they think they need to improve. Top countries visiting their website point to potential growth markets to explore.

Industry

You will never be as knowledgeable about the customer’s industry as they are. After all, they are involved in this every day. However, the world is big, economies are dynamic, competition can be anywhere, and industry disrupters are always identified too late (otherwise, they wouldn’t be disrupting). So,

The industry value you bring to your customer meetings is not so much about “how things are done” but more about “can your goals be achieved differently”?

You want to bring a different perspective. You must know who or what is stirring and brewing the industry. The answers to the below prompts will trigger you to ask your customers what they are aware of and whether they are adapting. Are they laggers or frontrunners? Type in the following prompts:

Provide me with the latest industry trends in which [URL] operates.

This will give you market growth numbers and percentages and what factors drive this growth (or decline). It also will tell you more about consumer behaviour shifts.

What are the top three risks this industry is facing?

Knowing what competitor or macroeconomic risks your customer faces is of enormous value. This can be related to economic uncertainty, consumer spending habits, or regulatory changes, to name a few.

From a strategic point of view, what would you recommend [URL] to capitalize on?

Using this prompt, ChatGPT will give you valuable pointers on what growth strategy would be considered commercially viable, given the risks and opportunities in the market.

Stakeholders

It doesn’t matter what industry you are selling in; you always have a point of contact with your customer. This can be at the Operational, Management or Executive level. As you know, B2B buying decisions are rarely made by one person. Before you meet with your customer’s contact person, you need to prepare who they are reporting to, who are influencers, and who is on the executive level of their organisation. LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a fantastic source. However, AI knows a lot and can tell you the basics. Use the following prompt:

Provide me with the stakeholder names of [URL] on the management and executive levels. Give me their job title and how long they have been with the company.

You will be amazed at what ChatGPT will find for you. This works for me every time.

What’s Next?

Next episode: “AI Insights. Helping You To Nail That Next Sales Meeting”

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