By David Lichtenstein, CEO of Superhuman Sales

Email is the undisputed champion when it comes to helping businesses of all sizes win more sales. 

But with the breakout success of AI tool ChatGPT, there could be another important piece of armoury to add to your business’ sales game plan.

AI tools like ChatGPT can be used for almost any task you can think of: from writing poetry, to improving coding and much more.

But if you’re thinking about how to meaningfully use this tool to improve your email sales approach, there are some serious do’s and don’ts to consider. At Superhuman Sales, we’ve been experimenting a lot with OpenAI and ChatGPT, and we’ve already learnt the following lessons:

Do utilise ChatGPT as an aide

When it comes to writing your next sales email or proposal, you might want to consider using ChatGPT to get your writing process started and even speed it up. If you provide ChatGPT with carefully thought-out prompts, it can provide you with a better way of writing that sales pitch. We’re all creatures of habit, and seeing things in a different way can help make us become better at how we go about selling. 

When using ChatGP, you’ll also want to develop your own playbook. For example, whatever prompt you put into ChatGPT, you should always be asking the AI bot to adjust the final output for whoever your specific audience might be, and even the tone (business-like, friendly etc). If your industry uses technical jargon, consider including a request for this in your prompt. Think carefully about the personality type that you may be talking to and their role within their business. In the end, it might still take you 4-5 prompts before you get close to a final result that you can edit… .

Don’t rely on AI too much…

While it’s useful to use tools like ChatGPT, you also need to remember that using it can risk annoying any recipients of your emails. 

Any copy that it produces must be carefully checked and edited, especially if it is repetitive or meaningless content. 

The ‘GPT’ in ‘ChatGPT’ stands for “Generative Pre-Trained Transformer”. A GPT is a language model, and this language model performs the task of predicting the next word in a series of words. This means that it’s more predictive than ‘intelligent’, and requires quality prompts.  

It’s all about ‘TQ’ or technical intelligence, and just like hi-tech planes need experienced pilots, your sales copy will need an experienced and careful editor.  

Do use it to better organise your data

Not only is ChatGPT a powerful text generation tool, but it’s also incredibly adept at helping you better manage your data. For example, say you have a large email list of leads and you’d like to clean and filter it for your next company update newsletter. By using ChatGPT, you can find a way to implement a company merge variable, and then remove the “Pty (Ltd)” from your lists. ChatGPT is also great for quickly finding excel sheet formulas that can save you hours from scouring Google.

Don’t lose that personal touch

Using too much AI or automation can be off-putting to customers, as it risks coming off as impersonal or robotic. Rather strike a balance between personalised content and automated content, so that customers feel like they’re talking to a real person. 

Do look at how to integrate into your processes

The likes of OpenAI and many other AI companies today have APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) that you can use as part of your customer relationship management tools. Getting your developer team to integrate these APIs could help you to better listen to and respond to your customers’ feedback and queries in, say, a chatbot feature on your website. AI can also help you to identify warm or hot leads, saving time for your sales team. 

Finally, don’t forget human contact

While email has become a preferred medium of communication in the world of business, the reality is that you still, from time to time, need to make that phone call or meet up with the client. It’s easy in a world of AI and video conferencing to lose sight of that.

Effective business communication today is a melody of innovative automation and authentic personalisation. We believe that the dance between AI and humanity is where the optimal sales tactic lies. 

- David Lichtenstein is the co-founder and CEO of Superhuman Sales. Helping B2B businesses grow their leads, sales and revenue is what Superhuman Sales does best by using a targeted lead email generation approach.