Maybe you sell furniture. Or enterprise software. Whatever you’re commercializing, you likely face the same challenge as most sales pros: Finding the right words to get folks invested in what you’re offering.
Sending cold emails, leading prospects through sales calls, and following up all take time and articulation. Thankfully, sales teams everywhere are starting to use AI to streamline these processes and craft better pitches. If you’ve been hearing about the iconic ChatGPT platform for sales and want to give it a spin, look no further.
In this post, I’ve compiled step-by-step instructions for how to write a sales pitch with ChatGPT, plus our favorite ChatGPT pitch prompts to get you started engaging prospects in no time.
Table of Contents
- ChatGPT and Sales
- Pitches I’ve Written in ChatGPT [+ Prompts]
- Other Use Cases for ChatGPT in Sales
- Getting Started
ChatGPT and Sales
According to research from our 2024 State of AI for Sales Report, AI usage among salespeople jumped from 21% to 43% in just one year. So, if you aren’t already testing or deploying AI in your sales processes, you’ve got a bit catching up to do, but that’s okay.
In the She Sells podcast, top sales executive John Barrows said, “My recommendation for everybody right now is just start playing around with it. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing, just understand how prompts work because that’s going to be the key. It’s not going to be who writes well. It’s whoever comes up with the better prompts and tells the machine.”
The most popular ways sales reps are using AI include content creation, prospect outreach, and research. Over a quarter (26%) of sales pros are using AI to power stronger sales enablement. That means they lean on AI to craft pitch decks, sales scripts, social media content, and battlecards.
How to Write a Sales Pitch with ChatGPT
Getting started with ChatGPT is easy, but mastering prompts to give you high-quality pitches takes a little more nuance. Learning how to write AI prompts will be an important skill for sales reps moving forward.
Below, I’ll explain how you can start using ChatGPT to write a basic sales pitch and advance to more advanced sales pitches:
1. Set up a free ChatGPT account.
Setting up a ChatGPT account is free and super easy. First, register an account online with just an email address and verification.
Plus, if you hate the password/username creation process (like me), you can also skip signing in with Google, Microsoft, or your iCloud email.
2. Open a chat window.
Once you have a ChatGPT account, log into your account and open a new chat window.
While you can send prompts directly in the chat box from the homepage, there’s an important reason you may want to start new chat windows for each use case.
With each new window, you can train ChatGPT on a persona or use case that you want to build upon. ChatGPT will save the history of the chat windows you open and display them on the left-hand navigation bar, so you can toggle between personas or use cases (the last time I used ChatGPT was when I was a Communications Associate at a nonprofit, so pardon my previous chat history).
3. Write your prompt.
This is the most important part: Writing a good ChatGPT prompt. The ideal ChatGPT pitch prompt should include several items:
Cast of Characters
Simply put, you need to tell ChatGPT who you are and who your audience is. This can be as simple as typing, “I’m a B2B sales rep for a [industry] company.”
For your audience, you can describe them in a line, or you can ask ChatGPT to create a persona for you. Here’s an example of a persona I asked ChatGPT to create of a small business owner.
Pro tip: You can create your own personas by using HubSpot’s free Make My Persona tool.
Tone
Depending on your industry, there can be a wide — and I mean wide — variation in which tone will be appropriate and effective. Take these two sales pitches I asked ChatGPT to write for our small business owner Sarah: one irreverent and funny, and the other professional.
Let’s say that your funny sales pitch wasn’t quite on-brand. You can ask ChatGPT to change the tone.
Other great tone requests are casual, conversational, friendly, persuasive, witty, thoughtful, authoritative, formal, or informal. To make it fun, you can also ask ChatGPT to write “in the style of” a famous person. If your brand has a famous spokesperson, you can also prompt ChatGPT to capture the tone of that individual.
Length
If you don’t specify a length, ChatGPT may give you a letter-length pitch. Of course, your audience won’t read or respond to long sales pitches. To combat this, give a maximum length (like “no more than 100 words”) or simply request a “concise” sales pitch.
4. Edit or redo the prompt if needed.
More often than not, ChatGPT needs multiple prompt revisions to hit the right note. If you don’t like the generated content, you have several different options.
First, you can start over from scratch and rephrase your prompt or add more detail. Use the pencil icon to the right of your prompt (highlighted below) to edit your prompt.
If just one aspect of the prompt needs work, you can respond in the chat, like “Thanks. Can you rewrite this to about half this length?” or “Can you make it more friendly?”
5. Edit your sales pitch before sending.
No ChatGPT sales pitch is perfect. You’ll want to do light editing to each output to make the final message match your own personality, your brand voice, and your prospect’s situation. This is an important step that you can’t skip.
Fortunately, with a good prompt, you can accomplish this in 10 seconds or less to turn a promising sales pitch into a watertight one.
Also, if you’re searching for some extra support with designing pitch templates using ChatGPT, you might want to check out the video below. You’ll get some step-by-step guidance on how to generate, build, and, eventually, send your own sales pitch emails.
Pitches I’ve Written in ChatGPT [+ Prompts]
The quality of your prompt determines the quality of the results you’ll receive from ChatGPT. I’ll say it again: You can’t achieve usable ChatGPT results without a good prompt.
To help you accomplish this, I’ve compiled five prompt examples to guide you on how to craft your first pitches — and beyond:
The Casual Cold Email
A good cold email is, truthfully, really hard to write. When a prospect doesn’t have a reason to give you the time of day, you need to present a compelling case in just a few lines. Here’s an example of a cold email I asked ChatGPT to cook up:
Prompt: Write a concise cold email in a casual and friendly tone where the person we are writing to is named Heather, who is a sales lead at XYZ company. Include a link to book a follow-up meeting.
The Warm Intro
Once you have a mutual connection or interest with someone, connecting with a prospect is a little easier. You may not need a full introduction to yourself or your company and can instead lean on whatever mutual connection you have — a friend, a LinkedIn group, or a mutual interest. With a few details, ChatGPT can draft this personalized message for you.
Prompt: Write a conversational yet formal outreach message on Linkedin introducing me as [insert title] of XYZ company. Include that I am reaching out because we’re in the same LinkedIn group as them. Ask if they are available for a quick call on [date].
The Phone Script
Good news: AI-generated sales pitches aren’t just for email messages. You can put ChatGPT to work writing phone scripts for your sales or lead development teams.
Prompt: I’m a B2B sales rep for an insurance broker trying to convince HR reps to purchase corporate health insurance from me. Their top concerns are saving money while providing top coverage to their employees and retaining employees. Write me a sales script, making sure to: ask if they have time to talk, keep the tone conversational and friendly, address common objections, and ask if they have time for a full consultation later in the week.
If you notice something about the phone script that you don’t like, no problem. For instance, Iedited the prompt to ask ChatGPT to open the conversation with the audience’s pain points. Here’s how it adjusted the call introduction.
The Probing Question
As you’ve discovered, finding the right question can make all the difference in your sales conversations. Rather than asking for just one sales pitch, you can ask ChatGPT for an entire list of questions or talking points that you can use in a sales message or phone call. The example below is generalized, but you can enter more details or a persona for even deeper questions.
Prompt: What key questions can I pose to potential buyers in order to identify their pain points and priorities, and determine whether they qualify as sales leads for my product?
Product-Meets-Pain-Point
As we covered, ChatGPT is great at creating personas, digging into pain points, and matching tones and writing styles. With a little extra effort, it can also write product-led content.
Using a dedicated chat window, you can “train” ChatGPT on specific products or use cases that you want them to elaborate on. For this to work, you’ll need to feed ChatGPT more specific information about your product or service, like benefits and differentiators. Here’s an example of how this might look:
Prompt: I’m a sales rep for a corporate travel management platform. Write a short sales email to an operations manager at a medium-sized company pitching how our tool can benefit them. Keep the tone direct and witty.
Benefits:
- Save employee time shopping around
- Find the best rates from top carriers around the world
- Get direct support when your plans change
Differentiators:
- Seamless, easy-to-use interface
- Unlimited users (only pay for travel booked)
- Manage reimbursements and expenses in the same tool
The Follow-Up
Sometimes you need a full sales pitch; at other times, you just need the right follow-up message. ChatGPT can help you strike the right tone in a few words. You just need to give it a bit of context.
Just a quick note that we had to edit this prompt a few times to find the right balance. The first request we sent was for a “funny” response, and the output was far too long and irreverent (along the lines of “Did aliens abduct you?”). Our second request was for a “professional” response, which came out too stiff and robotic. The “informal” response came out just right.
Prompt: [Lead name] completed a demo call with me for an HR software and has not responded in over a week. Can you write an informal response to see if he‘s still interested in the product? Keep it to 75 words and focus on his company’s growing pains as they scale.
Other Use Cases for ChatGPT in Sales
Now, you’ve probably guessed this already, but ChatGPT can be used for more than just ironing out prospecting materials.
In fact, HubSpot’s recent State of AI for Sales Report revealed that 18% of salespeople are using generative AI tools — yes, ChatGPT included — as their very own personal sales coach. Whether they’re requesting summarized recaps of sales calls to review their prospecting performance or looking to get some feedback on a mock pitch, AI has become quite the handy sidekick for sales professionals who are simply seeking to work smarter, not harder.
In fact, Leticia Henry, a Sales Manager in HubSpot’s Latin American branch, said that AI has fully enabled her and her team to “accelerate sales cycles by reducing the time it takes to complete everyday tasks.” She then added, “We also use AI as a coaching tool. For example, AI summarizes the key points of a conversation. Sales managers then use that summary to quickly obtain deeper visibility of deals in progress, as well as to identify potential areas of improvement for the sales representative.”
Clearly, generative AI’s capabilities are equipped to do so much more than what most folks ever assumed. Here are a few ways you can harness ChatGPT specifically to enhance and strengthen your sales assets:
1. You can use it for research … sort of.
Before I get ahead of myself, here’s a small disclaimer: (Please, y’all) Take any sales research that you do with ChatGPT with a huge handful of salt.
Information provided by AI models can be insightful, but it’s not always accurate … or entirely complete. Be sure to always corroborate any information you find with reliable sources and use your own judgment when making decisions.
Now, you should never be expecting ChatGPT to tell you everything you need to know about everything. However, you can expect it to share baseline details about market sentiments, industry trends, and you can even request that it give you a competitor analysis.
Check out what I was able to learn about the SaaS industry by prompting some information about what the current market looks like:
Prompt: What are the biggest challenges facing SaaS companies today? Include quantitative insights and share names of top-performing companies that are adapting to the changing market.
2. You can use it for role playing (and it’s not too shabby at it, either).
Have you ever thought about testing your sales call skills with ChatGPT? If you haven’t, you should.
Here’s what happened when I did:
Prompt: Roleplay this scenario with me. Below are the details.
- My role: Experienced Sales Representative at HubSpot.
- Your role: A B2B Customer.
- Goal: Sell a [Product/Service] (I put HubSpot’s Sales Hub) to a [Target Industry] (I put B2B) decision-maker.
- Scenario: I’m cold calling you, a potential client, who is [Prospect’s Title] (I put Head of Growth) at [Company Name] (I put “medium-sized company” for purposes of this example).
- Identify Pain Points: Ask open-ended questions to uncover the prospect’s specific challenges.
- Highlight Benefits: Emphasize how my [Product/Service] can solve the prospect’s problems and add value.
- Handle Objections: Practice overcoming common objections and concerns.
- Close the Deal: Develop effective closing techniques to secure the sale.
Here’s what I got in exchange:
3. You can use it for notes summarization. It’s pretty swag.
You can also use ChatGPT for notes summarization, too. Since I “hopped off a call” above, I asked ChatGPT to provide me with a comprehensive notes summary based on the conversation I previously had.
Prompt: Provide me with a comprehensive notes summary based on the call script above. I want to know where I can improve with making my prospecting efforts more personalized and less lengthy.
Here’s what I received:
Getting Started
No matter if you’re selling candy or insurance plans, and no matter your audience, ChatGPT can be your wingman. Keep practicing and experimenting to find the right prompts, and you’ll find the right words to meet your sales targets and future-proof your sales career.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in July 2023 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.