How to Use ChatGPT for Sales Development (+ Ready-to-Use Prompts)

Generating subject lines

Coming up with unique and effective subject lines for each email is exhausting. It has to be catchy and intriguing while also feeling personalized and non-salesy. That’s a pretty tough challenge, even if you have some proven formulas at hand!

That is why this is the first ChatGPT use case for sales reps I have tried. 

The results varied greatly depending on my prompt – from straightforward and salesy, e.g., “Get More Responses and Appointments with [Product Name]” to a safe bet like “​​[Name], Quick Question About [Topic of Interest].”

Here’s a prompt that gave me the best outcomes: 

Act as an SDR and write 5 cold email subject lines to sell sales engagement software to lead generation agencies. Make them sound personal and less salesy.

And here are the results:

• [Name], I noticed you focus on lead gen – want to chat?
• [Mutual Connection] suggested I reach out to you about [Product]
• [Name], curious if [Product] could help your agency?

Not bad for a robot! One more thing that I would recommend is limiting the number of words/characters (up to 4 words, based on our research).

Writing new email templates

Now, let’s increase the difficulty a bit and try to create a whole cold email template ????

For this purpose, we need a bit more work with the prompt. Namely, it’s absolutely necessary to provide as much context as possible to get a truly tailored message template.

For example, here’s the prompt I’ve used:

Act as an SDR and write a cold email template targeting a VP of Sales at a growing SaaS business. Use their recent new hires as a reason for outreach and offer our sales engagement platform as a way to ramp up their sales team’s productivity. Make it feel personal and keep it short (up to 5 sentences).

As you can see, I’ve specified the target ICP, intent (reason for outreach), value proposition, and length.

And here’s the output:

Hi [First Name],

Congratulations on your recent new hires at [Company]! As a fellow player in the SaaS industry, we understand the importance of having a productive and efficient sales team, especially when growing at such a rapid pace.

At [Your Company], we specialize in helping SaaS businesses like yours streamline their sales engagement process and ramp up their sales team’s productivity.

I’d love to chat with you more about our sales engagement platform and how we can help your team drive more revenue with less effort. Are you available for a quick call this week?

Thank you for your time and consideration. Looking forward to hearing from you soon.

That’s a decent result (a lot better than most cold emails I get daily!). But there’s always room for improvement. For example, we can try and make it less salesy/formal and shorten it a bit.

Hey [First Name],

Congrats on the new hires at [Company Name]! As someone in the SaaS industry, I know how important it is to have a productive sales team, especially when growing fast.

At [Your Company], we specialize in helping growing SaaS businesses like yours streamline their sales engagement process and boost productivity.

Interested in learning more? Let’s chat on a quick call this week.

Cheers,

You can really tweak the template to your taste, giving more context for personalization or adding more specific requirements. And it will still take only a couple of minutes to get a good template.

Pro tip: Apply the same approach to creating call scripts, LinkedIn messages, or whatever other channels you use in your outreach.

Improving current email templates 

If you don’t want a completely new template and want to freshen up your old ones (or customize the one you’ve found online), ChatGPT can help you make the desired changes.

For example, if we take the template we generated earlier and ask to improve it, ChatGPT will first share some of the common cold email best practices along with the “improved” copy.

And while I personally didn’t like the result it suggested (it was a bit too fluffy and formal for my taste), one thing seemed pretty legit. ChatGPT offered to add a specific benefit and social proof to the template, i.e.:

Our platform has helped companies like [Customer 1] and [Customer 2] increase their revenue by [Percentage] while reducing their sales cycle by [Number] days.

It’s up to you to decide if you want to include this kind of info in the first email, but it’s a nice touch if you’re into more pushy messaging. So this use case is definitely worth a shot.

Pro tip: ChatGPT can help you adjust the value props in your messaging to resonate with different buyer personas, industries, etc. You can provide some more information on your ICP or specific use case you’re going to address, or simply upload positive feedback from the customers in the relevant niche and have it distill the info into a short and appealing value prop.

Prospect research and personalization

A similar (but slightly different) use case for ChatGPT in sales development suggests template personalization. Thibaut Souyris, the CEO & Founder at SalesLabs, has recently shared this GPT-4 hack that could help SDRs save a lot of time on prospect research and email personalization.

The process is pretty simple: Export the prospect’s LinkedIn info as a PDF and feed it to ChatGPT. Make sure to specifically ask it to skim the resume for personalization elements and give some context as to what you intend to do with it. 

Here’s the prompt Thibaut used:

Here’s the LinkedIn profile of a prospect. I’m trying to get this prospect to reply to my LinkedIn messages and I need to mention an element of his profile that is relevant to problems I help solve:

• {problem 1}
• {problem 2}
• {problem 3}

Now find me 5 elements from his resume that I could mention to catch their attention. Here’s the resume:

{PDFcontent}

To put this approach to the test, I uploaded my own resume. As a result, ChatGPT indeed provided a relevant personalization element that I could use in a cold email.

That is indeed relevant and fits nicely with the value proposition of our product. I assume, with a more informative LinkedIn profile, you can get even better results.

Side note: Of course, it’s hard to use this approach at scale, but it’s a great way to save your time personalizing outreach to Tier 1 prospects ????

Building outreach sequences

Another way to use ChatGPT for sales development is to create complex, multi-touch sales engagement sequences for any business case. 

While it’s a bit trickier than a subject line or even a template, this is still doable (and a huge help when you don’t want to waste too much time mixing and matching different steps. For example, I’ve tried the following prompt: 

Act as an SDR and build an outreach sequence with emails, LinkedIn touchpoints, and calls to connect with a prospect regarding their demo request. Make it 5 days long with the first day being the most intense one.

Here’s an inbound sequence for handling demo requests I was able to get out of ChatGPT on my 5th try (including adjustment requests).

Day 1: Email, LinkedIn message, phone call

• • Email: Thank you for requesting a demo with us! We’d love to schedule a call to discuss your needs and show you how Reply.io can help.

• • LinkedIn message: Hi [prospect name], just sent you an email about your demo request – looking forward to connecting!

• • Phone call: Attempt to reach prospect and leave a voicemail if they don’t pick up.

Day 2: Email. Just wanted to follow up on our previous email and see if you had any questions about our platform. Let me know if you’re still interested in scheduling a demo.

Day 3: Phone call. Attempt to reach prospect and leave a voicemail if they don’t pick up.

Day 4: LinkedIn message. Hi [prospect name], wanted to reach out and see if you’re still interested in learning more about Reply.io. Let me know if you have any questions!

Day 5: Email. Final follow-up – if we don’t hear back from you by tomorrow, we’ll assume you’re no longer interested. Let us know if you’d like to connect in the future.

What’s great is that ChatGPT also provides some extra hints for each touchpoint (which you can use in your templates).

If it still seems too hard, you might prefer our new “magic” sequence experience in Reply where you can get a ready-to-go sequence drafted right in our sales engagement platform.  

As mentioned above, we combine the capabilities of ChatGPT with the algorithms trained on tons of our own data. As a result, Reply can create tailored multichannel sequences for any purpose or business case.

Handling objections 

If you think that the job of ChatGPT is done once you launch that sequence, wait till you start getting responses! While it might be exciting to hear back from your prospects, most people only enjoy handling positive replies.

When it comes to handling sales objections or negative responses, ChatGPT can come in handy. Namely, you can provide the initial email (or some context about the previous interactions) along with the prospect’s response and phrase your ask as “act as an SDR and suggest an appealing and polite response to handle this objection.” I’ve tried this prompt and here’s what it suggested.

Hi [First Name],

I appreciate your response, and I understand that you may not be interested at the moment. However, I believe that our platform could provide real value to your sales team and help boost productivity.

If you have any specific concerns or questions about our platform, I’m happy to address them and provide you with more information. Alternatively, if you think that we might be a good fit in the future, I’d be happy to keep in touch and follow up with you in a few months.

Thank you for your time, and I hope you have a great day.

As a follow-up request, I’ve asked ChatGPT to try to find out the reason for the prospect’s negative response.

Hi [First Name],

Thank you for your response. I’m sorry to hear that you’re not interested in learning more about our platform at this time. I completely understand if you have concerns or questions about our solution, and I’d be happy to address them if you’d like to share.

Alternatively, if there’s another reason why our platform doesn’t interest you, I’d love to learn more about it. Your feedback is important to us, and it can help us improve our offering and better serve businesses like yours in the future.

Thank you for your time, and I hope to hear back from you soon.

Similarly, you can use ChatGPT to handle any other objection, be it regarding price, preferred competitor, etc. As for the latter, you can use this prompt: 

A prospect asked how [Product] compares to [Competitor]. Act as an SDR and address this objection in an email (100 words max) explaining how our product is better.

Pro tip: Building on this use case, you can even use ChatGPT to create competitor battle cards to use during the calls or for SDR onboarding and training!

Summarizing call notes

Sales calls take up a huge part of an SDR’s day. Whether it’s cold outreach or a discovery session, there are always some notes you take during your conversation. 

Of course, you might already be using some conversational intelligence tools to decode and analyze the calls, but in most cases, you just need a short note to update your prospect record in the CRM or SEP. And it’s often hard to put everything you’ve discussed into a comprehensive call resolution comment.

In this case, simply task ChatGPT to “summarize the following call notes” and paste your comments. If your scribbles aren’t that clear, you might need to edit the final output, but it’s still much faster than rewriting everything from scratch.

Similarly, you can use ChatGPT to generate a post-call follow-up email reiterating the key points discussed during the call and the next steps you’ve agreed on.

Pro tip: This very approach works for both prospect calls as well as team meetings you might be holding.