How to Use ChatGPT for Sales Prospecting: 7 Prompts to Get Started

Imagine if you could understand your ideal customer better, educate yourself about new industry trends faster, and brainstorm conversation starters all with the help of AI. Sounds too good to be true?

Welcome to the world of AI and ChatGPT. In this blog post, we'll share 7 prompts that can help you leverage this powerful tool for your LinkedIn sales prospecting

ChatGPT and AI for Sales? What’s all the hype about?

AI tools like ChatGPT are advanced language models that can generate robust responses to questions you ask. But be aware that sometimes the responses are incredibly inaccurate, misleading, or both.

It’s the questions you ask, called “prompts,” that make all the difference and separate real, useful responses from all the hype.

Can ChatGPT make sales calls for you? Find your ideal customers all on its own? Write all your emails and LinkedIn outreach?

No. And you should avoid this at all costs. 

You can’t automate a relationship. Your prospects will see through it. Or worse, be baffled by the nonsense in “your” message – here’s an example of a message I recently received.

And a completely automated message you haven’t customized is no way to build a real relationship.

Yet, the power of the latest AI tools present an opportunity to be more efficient and effective in your sales prospecting and outreach. And that’s why I put together these examples.

We’ll share several prompts and tools you can use to help you to:

• Better understand your ideal customer and their challenges
• Educate yourself about a new industry and trends
• Quickly summarize call transcripts and articles
• And, importantly, brainstorm ways to start a conversation with a prospect

Before your start: A framework for LinkedIn prospecting success

Based on a recent report from TrustRadius, virtually 100% of buyers want a self-service option in their buying journey; which is a major increase from 13% in 2021. 81% want to find pricing information on their own, and 40% are less likely to buy if they have to contact sales for a demo or free trial.

And here’s a really scary stat. 64% of buyers “named cold calling as the reason they’d be LESS LIKELY to buy a product from a vendor.”

So what does success look like for sellers on LinkedIn in 2023?

It doesn’t look like sending a bunch of messages to strangers with a pitch about your product or offering. This is called a “pitch slap” and instantly turns off your prospects.

Based on our experience and data here at PropelGrowth, to be a successful seller for today’s buyers, you need to be a trusted partner who takes time to understand a potential customer’s challenges. And care about helping them solve them, ideally, but not necessarily, with your offering.

Your framework for success includes three things:

1. Increase your visibility by demonstrating value consistently over time.
2. Build relationships by starting genuine conversations with your ideal customers and demonstrating your interest in their needs and challenges.
3. Build relationships by starting genuine conversations with your ideal customers and demonstrating your interest in their needs and challenges. 

Starting a conversation is one of the most meaningful things you can do to start building a relationship. But how do you do that? We recommend that you “find a nugget,” a small piece of information about your prospect’s interests that you can use to get a conversation started.

For example, is there a topic that your prospect has been posting about consistently over the past few weeks? Does their profile highlight an experience you share? Starting a conversation with these small details show you’ve taken the time to understand a little bit about them. That’s the way you start conversations with cold leads on LinkedIn.

This is also where ChatGPT can help. With the right prompts, the AI tool can very quickly summarize lots of information, generate talking points about a topic, and more.

Let’s dive into how you can boost your productivity and effectiveness with ChatGPT and other AI tools and explore sample prompts to help you see the power of the technology.

Below is a sort of “cookbook” for how to use ChatGPT and other AI tools for specific sales use cases. In each example, we provide the goal, important ingredients needed for the prompt, sample prompts and images of the output provided by the AI tool.

Sample ChatGPT Prompts for Sales Prospecting

Review Posts for Nuggets
Review Profile for Nuggets
Review a Blog Post or Article for Takeaways
Enrich Account Data
Research a Target Niche for Trends and Business Issues
Do Deeper Research in an Industry
Summarize a Video or Podcast Episode

Review Posts for Conversation Starters

Goal: Find nuggets from a series of LinkedIn posts that we can use for conversation starters. 

What’s a nugget? Something small you can use to start a conversation; something that your prospect is interested in based on their profile, posts, and recent activity.

Ingredient: Open the prospect’s posts, click “see more” on the 5-6 most recent posts, then select and copy the sequence to your clipboard. 

Prompt: “Review these posts and give me 10 topics that this person would be interested in discussing. The topics should be related to {topic you are interested in discussing}, {another topic you’re interested in}, {third topic you’re interested in}.

[paste in your copied posts]

Example prompt:  Please review these posts and identify 10 topics this person is interested in that I can use to start a conversation with them. These should be related to sales strategies, business growth, lead generation and LinkedIn.

Review Profile for Conversation Starters

Goal: Find nuggets from a detailed profile that we can use for conversation starters. 

Ingredient: click “see more” on the prospect’s “about” section and on each item in their job history. Copy the screen. You can also export the profile as a PDF, then copy the content.

Prompt: Take this profile information and give me 10 topics this person would be interested in discussing that I could use as conversation starters. The topics should be related to {topic you are interested in discussing}, {another topic you’re interested in}, {third topic}.

[paste in the copied data from the profile]

Example prompt:  Review this profile and provide 10 topics that this person might be interested in and that I could use as conversation starters. The topics should be related to business growth, entrepreneurship or sales.

Review a Blog Post or Article for Takeaways

Goal: Quickly get a summary of an article or blog post that you can use to start a conversation. 

Ingredient: Find a blog post that you’d like to review and copy the entire article. (Note: if you are using the paid version of ChatGPT, you can select the “search with Bing” option and ask it to find the article. No need to paste it in. I’ve even successfully used this to have it summarize entire books!)

Prompt:  Review this article and provide 5 brief takeaways. Provide conversation starters I can use to engage the author in a conversation on LinkedIn. Include quotes from the author. 

[paste in copied text from the blog or article or the article URL]

Example Prompt:  Review this article and provide me with a synopsis of the article and its conclusions. Look for relationships between the article's content and the need for successful sales strategies. 

Follow-up Prompt: Provide me with the top 5 takeaways from the article and connect them to growing your sales pipeline.

Enrich Account Data

Goal: To gather information about accounts to enrich your CRM data. 

Ingredient: Copy a list of accounts (Note: I pasted in 100 accounts, but found that ChatGPT will only process 25 at a time. After it provides the results, you can ask it to “process the next 25, and it will keep going. I don’t know how many it will allow you to process). 

Prompt:  Take the list of companies below and provide in table format the company name, the industry, website URL and the types of products or services they offer. This should be in a table format that I can easily open in or paste into Excel. Include columns for company name, industry, website, products and services. Use a pipe as a delimiter. Organize the list in alphabetical order sorted by company name. (You can also ask it to give you a delimited file, but don’t use a comma as a delimiter, because it will include commas in the content. It is able to provide any delimiter and even suggested using a | (pipe)).

Research a Target Niche for Trends and Business Issues

Goal: Learn about a target market and get insight into topics you can use to start conversations with people where you can’t find a good nugget in their profiles. 

Ingredient: Name of a niche and details you want to dig into about that niche.

Prompt 1: Tell me about the challenges that {your target audience role} in {your target niche} companies are facing right now. 

Prompt 2: Tell me more about {specific challenge it listed} and explain current trends in this area for {your specific niche}. 

Notes: 

The more specific your niche, the better your results will be. So instead of asking for information about manufacturers, ask about US cheese manufacturers. 

I recommend having a conversation with ChatGPT to dig deeper into the issues it brings up. 

If you use the paid version of ChatGPT 4.0, you can ask it to search the web for further details. It will look for research papers and scan them within minutes to pull out the salient information. It will cite its sources so you can review for relevance.

You can also ask it to give you a synopsis of the articles it cites. 

Example Prompt 1: Tell me about the most common challenges that small and medium US ERP resellers and ISVs face, focus on technology, analytics and data issues (ISV stands for Independent Software Vendor).

Example Prompt 2:  How can ERP and supply chain management software support the needs of small and medium scale businesses?

Do Deeper Research in an Industry

Goal: Get more in-depth insight into an industry so you can come up with interesting questions to ask your prospect.

Ingredient: This approach will take some digging. Using ChatGPT 4, you can ask it to browse the web. Below are some example prompts I used to dig into a specific industry. 

Example Prompt 1: Browse the web and identify the top 5 research studies that are related to critical issues for selling ERP systems to small and medium sized enterprises. Provide a synopsis of each article with the top 5 takeaways. Cite your sources. 

Example Prompt 2: Do an in-depth search for challenges and strategic responses within the ERP industry. Specifically address the current state of small and medium sized enterprises and success factors.

[and a fun one related to cheese!] Example Prompt 3: Browse the web and identify the top 5 research studies that are related to critical issues US cheese manufacturers. Provide a synopsis of each article with the top 5 takeaways. Cite your sources. 

Summarize a Video or Podcast Episode 

Goal: Find nuggets and talking points from a podcast interview or video without needing to spend the time to listen to the full episode. 

Ingredients: You will need a transcript of the episode. There are a few ways to obtain this. If the episode is on YouTube, you can download a transcript (look for the 3 dots next to the “share”, “clip” and “download” buttons. 

Some podcasters publish a transcript on their site. Or you can load it into an auto transcription tool like Otter.ai. 

ChatGPT is not able to handle large files like a transcript. So you’ll need another tool to handle this. I use Notion AI for this purpose. You can also expand ChatGPT capabilities by using plugins if you have a paid account with access to ChatGPT 4.0.

Notion Prompt: Review the transcript I’ll paste below and provide a summary of the podcast episode including takeaways and quotes from {prospect’s name}. 

[Paste transcript]

Example Notion Prompt: Review the transcript I’ll paste below and provide a summary of the podcast episode including takeaways and quotes from Chuck Ingram.

Advanced ChatGPT 4 Prompt with Prompt Perfect and Video Highlight Plugins:
'perfect'  Review the Youtube video I’ll paste below and provide a summary of the podcast episode including takeaways and quotes from Candyce Edelen. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmD63Gw1n1U 

A note of caution: Don’t Lose the Human Touch

It can be tempting to take the results and try to automate your outreach using results straight from ChatGPT or another AI tool.

I strongly discourage this. Use it as inspiration, but put your LinkedIn connection requests, messages, posts, and comments into your own words. You can’t use AI to create a relationship. You can’t automate a relationship. It’s all about human-to-human interaction. Your voice, your tone, your word choice matter. AI cannot replace you…and that’s a good thing!

Remember, you should be trying to start a conversation with your prospect. Don’t try to sell or talk about your offering or your company. Don’t pitch (even if what you’re offering is free). You’ll just turn them off before you have a chance to get acquainted.

We’ve published several blog posts about automation and LinkedIn. Understand there are risks you need to be aware of. Trust me. You don’t want to land in LinkedIn Jail and lose access to your LinkedIn account.

Download: 7 Free ChatGPT Prompts for Sales Prospecting

Get started right now trying out ChatGPT to boost your sales prospecting. Download our free workbook with prompt examples. Find conversation starters for your ideal customers, research industry trends, and more.

Put our ChatGPT prompts to the test for yourself and let us know how it works for you.

A Sales Prospecting Strategy That Works For You

You might be thinking, “Is this for me?”

You can be successful in your sales prospecting efforts without spending all day cold calling.

And ChatGPT and AI tools can help you be even more effective at starting conversations and booking meetings with your ideal customers.

Especially if:

• Have an average contract value of $5,000 or more
• You want to build relationships with your ideal customers
• Need to consistently and predictability meet and exceed your sales targets

We help you predictably and consistently book sales meetings with your ideal customers using our human-to-human approach.

When you're ready, here are 3 ways we can help you:

1. If you're just getting started using LinkedIn to grow your pipeline, I recommend an affordable and proven course.

→ Prospecting Mastery shares my 3-step approach to generating qualified leads using LinkedIn. You'll have everything you need to optimize your profile, target your top prospects, and predictably build your pipeline.

2. If you're ready to take your LinkedIn prospecting to the next level, I recommend our accelerator program.

→ Our Prospecting Accelerator is built around live training and coaching in a small group cohort. We'll give you step-by-step guidance, peer discussion, and accountability to your goals.

3. Need help right NOW? Want to connect with one of your top prospects? Not sure which approach is best for you?

→ Personal 1:1 coaching with Candyce is for you.

What ChatGPT prompts have been working for you? Connect with me on LinkedIn and let me know.

About the Author: Candyce Edelen is founder of PropelGrowth, where she teaches B2B entrepreneurs and sales professionals to build authentic, human-to-human relationships on LinkedIn. Her strategies have helped clients shift from spammy automation to genuine outreach, resulting in higher-quality leads and increased sales. Candyce is passionate about helping professionals build trust and create a reliable, predictable sales pipeline. She's also a firm believer that you can't automate a relationship.