Can ChatGPT Improve Your Next Sales Pitch?
If you are a sales pro, you love when this happens: You schedule a 30-minute introductory meeting with a new lead. Let’s call her Barb. There is some introductory chit-chat. During these moments of mutual discovery, you find a couple of places where you share common ground, establishing a comfortable atmosphere for communication.
You move from introductions to discovery and ask Barb questions about her current solution, what she wants to fix or improve, and what she has already investigated. Twenty minutes fly by. Finally, Barb looks you straight in the eye and says, “So ... what can you do for me?”
It is time to make your pitch, and it needs to accomplish three tasks:
- Offer proof that you listened when Barb talked — and that she hasn’t wasted time answering your questions.
- Get Barb excited about your offering by connecting your solution to her needs.
- Briefly explain what you offer so you can gauge Barb’s interest.
When you pitch, you want to see Barb’s eyes widen with interest. You hope she will sit up straighter, lean into the conversation, and say, “This is exactly what we have been looking for!”
Okay ... that is a little dramatic and maybe too much to hope for in the first call. However, when you have a good pitch, a more realistic outcome could be that the sales conversation continues because Barb sees value in your offering and wants to explore her options.
A good sales pitch makes that happen, and ChatGPT can help you improve your pitch in the following ways:
- Identify the buyer’s challenges and potential pain points
- Create lists of questions targeted to a specific audience
- Come up with language to communicate your value proposition quickly and persuasively
- Refine your messaging to increase its impact
- Prepare for frequently asked questions or objections
ChatGPT is powered by prompts, an AI term for asking questions or gathering information. This is an example of a prompt you could use to understand the buyer’s challenges: I am a sales professional selling printing services to a marketing manager who works for a franchise pizza chain. What challenges does the marketing manager have related to purchasing printing?
Do you have a minute? Modify this prompt to fit one of your leads and plug it into ChatGPT. Discover for yourself whether AI-generated information would help you improve your sales pitch. If the answer is yes, develop additional prompts to improve your pitch.
If you need more ideas on writing effective prompts, check out my previous Printing Impressions article, “Prompt Wizardry: Cast a Spell to Increase Sales.”
Good selling!
- Categories:
- Business Management - Marketing/Sales
Linda Bishop is the founder and president of Thought Transformation, a national sales and marketing consulting group helping printers and other companies achieve top-line growth through a combination of strategies, tools, training and tactics.
Her expertise includes all aspects of outbound selling and account acquisition, account retention and development, solution selling, marketing, and aligning sales processes with marketing strategies. Most recently, she published The ChatGPT Sales Playbook: Revolutionizing Sales with AI and believes AI will offer sales pros new tools for achieving revenue goals.
Before starting Thought Transformation in 2004, Linda sold commercial printing for seventeen years, working as a commission salesperson for the Atlanta division of RR Donnelley Company. She was one of the top performers in the Atlanta marketplace and had annual sales exceeding $9 million.
Linda has a BS degree in accounting from Purdue University and an MBA in marketing from Georgia State. She has written several books on sales topics, speaks nationally on sales and marketing, and has published many articles.
