Episode 257: ChatGPT Prompting for Sales
Join us on this episode as we are joined by a special guest host, Gunner Hood of WSI. Whether you have been using AI for sales or you are here to learn more about using AI for sales, the first thing you need to understand is that there is an art to getting AI to give you the desired output. Our conversation highlights a key point – AI works like your clients; asking them generic questions will yield generic responses, but asking them specific questions will get you specific responses. So, don’t miss out on this special episode, where we’ll provide you with ChatGPT prompts for sales and show you how and when to use them.
View Transcript
Bob Woods 0:21
Greetings, salutations, and welcome sales and marketing professionals to Making Sales Social Live, coming to you from the Social Sales Link Virtual Studios. I’m Bob Woods of Social Sales Link. Some people call me the LinkedIn Sherpa. Now normally my LinkedIn partner in crime, Brian Tillman, is with me. But today we have a special guest. He’s been making sales social live a couple of times, and he’s back to talk AI with me today. So with that, please welcome Gunner Hood of WSI world how’s it going, Gunner?
Gunnar Hood 0:53
Hey, wonderful, Bob, thanks so much for having me. This is a fun conversation I think we’re gonna have about AI.
Bob Woods 1:00
Yeah, 100% and I’m so looking forward to this, it seems like I’ve been doing nothing but talking about AI lately, which considering the fact that, you know, social sales link in general and myself in particular, where we’re really going to be diving into AI in 2020. For us, and you know, it’s just, it’s kind of the wild west, but at the same time, it’s going to be a lot of fun, just hopefully there won’t be any bullets flying.
So with that writing prompts for generative AI, that’s your Chat GPT, your claws and so on . I view it at least and you know, Gunnar, I view it as as much of an art form as a process to get the kind of output from AI that you need. Would you agree with that?
Gunnar Hood 1:53
I agree. And in fact, I think that’s why we’ve seen companies post, you know, job listings for prompt engineering because there is kind of an art and science element to it. And you know, I think if you look at it at the highest level, one thing that we talked about with our clients is generic questions, get you generic responses, specific questions, get you specific responses.
Bob Woods 2:17
Garbage in, garbage out? Absolutely. Yeah, I did not agree more with that. And man, you know, thinking about being a prompt engineer full time, I’m not a geek, but man, I could geek out to that so easily. It just sounds like a dream job. But of course, you know, with dream jobs, I’m sure that there would be some crap involved with that too. So anyhow, I’m gonna run. I do have some examples on how to use AI and AI in sales.
But first, I want to throw this open to anyone who’s watching this live on LinkedIn, or our other social right now, if you’d like a specific example, though, sometimes, because sales is so wide and broad, and what everyone sells is so wide and broad. You know, it’s gonna be difficult for us to come up with specific examples, but we could definitely guide you on a path to get where you want to go. So drop those in the comments.
Hopefully, our system will pick up on those comments, and we’ll be able to see them. Now, if you’re listening on a podcast platform, it’s at least January of 2024. Well, we’re recorded for you. But hopefully, you’ll still get some good ideas from our examples. So with that, something that can help with your prompting. And this is pretty much brand new, our custom GPT. So GPT, the GPT and Chat GPT actually stands for generative, pre trained transformers. And that’s not like Optimus Prime trapped Transformers or anything like that.
So these essentially help you with specific tasks. And there are a bunch of people publishing a bunch of things on them. Searching for them is difficult right now, there are two main ways that I know that you can use to search for them. One is actually via a Google search, get your pens and pencils out. And we should put this in the show notes too. But it’s going to be you’re going to type in site, colon chat.openai.com/g/ and, then whatever keywords you want to use, that’ll bring things up in a Google search for you.
That’s probably the most accurate way of thinking of bringing it up. GPT store.ai is a potential source, but they’re a third party I believe, so keep that in mind. I don’t know how complete it is, but it’s definitely better than anything that’s out there right now until open AI starts its own custom GPT store which is evidently in the works. It just hasn’t been a bunch of debt. Gunner, what do you think about custom GPT in general?
Gunnar Hood 5:00
In general, I think there’s a lot of potential for these things. And in fact, you know, if people are just wanting to explore them, and they have access to the paid version of Chat GPT, you can use the Explore button and see some examples that they’ve put up there. One is like right now for gift ideas for Christmas. If you’re looking at that, they have one that just accesses the web. And I think it’s to what you mentioned, it’s there about specific tasks. And the potential that I see for people is, you know, you can create your own custom GPT.
And the way to think about that is if you find yourself doing certain tasks repetitively over and over, again, that are knowledge based, it’s a great opportunity to say, “Why don’t I create a custom GPT” because it can have pre trained instruction sets about how I approach something, and then all I have to do is just modify some inquiries. I mean, there’s even one in the example store about, you know, parents helping their kids with ninth grade math, you know, and it’s got four pretrained questions, but you can ask it anything, and it’ll help walk you through the math example.
So I think there’s a lot of potential here for it. And, you know, if you remember the App Store for iPhone, when it came out in 2007, there was very little there except a flashlight to start with. But look how it’s grown over time. And I think the same thing is gonna happen with Chat GPT.
Bob Woods 6:29
Yeah, without a doubt. And, and for those of us who are with us, we live right now. I do have that string that I just mentioned, that string for Google, to look for specific ones in the, in whatever you call those captions, that’s what you call those. So that is in there, it does work. I did a generic kind of one just for sales, and like almost 900 of them came up. So there’s a lot of them out there, folks. So keep that in mind as well. So the next thing that I want to just touch on really quickly on AI is AI in LinkedIn.
So if you have a paid account, there is some AI capability there. Now gunners tested it a little more than I have it sounds like because I’ve tested it on a couple of things in the just in the just in the profile. It’s not really good. I don’t think there yet obviously it’s going to evolve. And LinkedIn and Microsoft are going to make that evolve too. So I’m sure that it’s going to get much better. Gunnar, you’ve done some testing on it, too. What are your thoughts on it?
Gunnar Hood 7:45
Yeah, I think my comment is not quite ready for primetime when it comes to profile enhancement, whether that’s your headline or your about section. But if you don’t have access to other AI tools, it’s a starting point. And we often talk to our clients about what we call the human in the loop. And that means using AI for brainstorming. But don’t make it the definitive answer to things you want to finesse it and tweak it. And Bob, you always encourage people to read it out loud in their own voice and see, does that sound like me.
Because that’s an important element. But I’ve also used LinkedIn as an AI feature when it comes to posting and work done. An okay job is if I’m putting up an event on LinkedIn. And I just give it some details, it will kind of embellish on that for me, then require very little massaging. But for more, I guess content, larger content pieces. I think it’s again, still a work in progress. And I’m not ready to trust it entirely to do those things for me.
Bob Woods 8:55
Yep, absolutely. Absolutely. So, Brynne who is actually with us in, I was gonna say in spirit, but she’s it’s a little bit more than that. And that just sounds kind of creepy, too. But she is. She is with us. And she’s typed. She just typed in LinkedIn plus authentic AI equals 2020 for success that is 100% true. And Gunnar just mentioned what I talked about all the time is just reading stuff out loud. That in and of itself brings so much authenticity into whatever it is that you’re outputting because you don’t want to sound like Chat GPT.
Everyone nowadays is coming up on content, no matter where it exists where we know it’s freaking AI driven. If something if you take something from Chat GPT or cloth or whatever, and you don’t read it out loud, you are doing yourself a disservice not only with that immediate message, but people are also going to be suspect of anything that you put out in the future because they’re going to think that you’re copying and pasting. You can’t have people do that and that’s just that and that’s just very top level too.
So I would absolutely encourage people to be authentic. And that’s something that we’re going to be talking about over and over and over again. So I’m not going to really belabor that thought too much. Something that came in from Chris Branch chain of thought, a chain of thought promoting style is a true game changer. Yeah, so I believe that what he’s talking about is prompting isn’t just one prompt. So you have to go back and you have to, sometimes you have to ask it to clarify, sometimes you need to ask it to be rewarded, sometimes if something comes out perfectly.
But then you have other things based on what that initial prompt was, you go ahead and just have a true chat with it. So keep in mind one thing when it comes to chats, within Chat GPT, every single time you start a new chat, and I use sci fi, because I think it’s an easy example, you’re creating a new universe. So it’s not going to refer back to any other chats that you have done in the past, you are creating a brand new universe when you start a new chat. Now, within that universe, you can build whatever you want to.
But then, to my knowledge, at least you can’t go back and say, “Hey, remember that chat that we had two months ago? Let’s build on that a little bit more?” No, you can’t do that. You need to actually need to go back to that chat that you had two months before? And then add into that what you can do, and I’ve done that before. But you know, just keep in mind that every chat is its own little universe.
Gunnar Hood 11:33
Yeah, when we were talking about this in group coaching the other day, Bob, I made reference to the fact that there’s a reason that’s called Chat GPT and not ask GPT. Yep. Because I think it is, you know, Chris pointed out it is, it gets better with a chain of dialogue. And, you know, their responses allow you to respond back. And if you haven’t tried the voice version on your phone, it’s like having a real conversation. And you know, I think you’ll find that the output just gets better as you have that dialogue.
Bob Woods 12:04
Yeah. 100% 100%. So the next one, this one’s This one’s kind of this one’s a little more specific. So Shaun Dougherty is about prompts for fundraising for a cause. So this one’s interesting. I mean, because fundraising is essentially sales. So but at the same time, there’s a little bit of a different spin on things. So I mean, you know, at its core, its sales, but at the same time, there is much more involved with that. So just like any other thing that you do with Chat GPT, you really need to have a way of asking things.
So before we get into specifics with this one, I just want to encourage people to go to socialsaleslink.com/crisp. See our ISP, we actually have an ebook that I wrote, that I wrote is about the crisp model, that will definitely help you get started with using the best prompts the first time around, so that you know, so that your chance with Chat GPT are always focused, and hopefully giving you exactly the type of output that you would like, and then gunner has any book out as well, that can that can definitely be a benefit.
Gunnar Hood 13:25
Yeah, so our book is called unlocking the potential of Chat GPT and AI. And it includes a lot of examples of prompting for various industries. We’ve got tools listed in there with a lot of resources. And, you know, I don’t know if I can post the link here directly, but I shared it with Bob. And hopefully we can post it up for people who want to, you know, get it. It’s totally free. But there’s over 60 AI tools referenced in there along with a number of great prompts.
Bob Woods 13:54
Yeah, so hopefully, I just posted it. Hopefully that went out. I’m not really sure just because we’re going from restream to things I don’t know if that shows up, if not look out for I will post it into this chat immediately after. I’m LinkedIn immediately after the session. So kindly stick around and I’ll post it in there. And we’ll have it in the show notes as well for the podcast when it goes out into the various podcasting platforms probably in mid January.
Gunnar Hood 14:28
So you can reach out to me directly on LinkedIn as there’s only one of me on LinkedIn, so I’m easy to find. I’ll be happy to share it with you.
Bob Woods 14:35
Gunner hood, G-U-N-N-A-R H-O-O-D. So let’s get back really quick to the question about prompting for fundraising for a cause. How would you start that? I guess probably the first thing would be to me is are they going for corporate donors? Are they going for individual donors and and and kind of taking it from there but what would you think about that guy?
Gunnar Hood 15:00
Yeah, Brynne actually posted a link already in the comments with her asking the question of Chat GPT about how we can use this for fundraising? And the response was really good. There’s a lot of ideas, you know, whether it’s drafting fundraising emails or things like that. But her question alone is the great starting question, How can Chat GPT help with fundraising? Then you take that and you continue the conversation going, “Hey, I like ideas two and four tell me more about that.”
Bob Woods 15:31
And that’s one of the, that’s one of the probably, and this is a word that I overused, but it’s really, really true here. That’s one of the most awesome things about Chat GPT is you can ask it to help you and it will give you the information that you need for it to help you. So it’s like, you know, that classic help me help you type of thing, Chat GPT really does do that. And then, you know, there are there are even some, some extensions, or what are those called that that actually also help you develop prompts as well, but Chat GPT, just in its kind of raw form, can help you with prompting as well, so that you get what you need out of it.
And I do think that with my ebook and gunners ebook, you can definitely take yourself even farther with that. I mean, because even within fundraising, there are all different types of scenarios. And like I said, just starting out with, who is your target audience? Is it individuals? Is it corporate? Are you running dual tracks? If you’re running dual tracks? How are you doing that? I mean, there are so many different things. And permutations as someone who’s in fundraising, I’m sure you know that. So you know, specificity is always very, very welcome. Because if you give Chat GPT general questions. it’s going to run wild.
Gunnar Hood 16:52
So one of the prompts that we share in our ebook is called the what other details prompt. And what that means is sometimes you don’t know exactly what questions to ask or how to structure that prompt. So if we started with the one that I just shared for fundraising, you know, is, you know, how can this help me?
You can augment that prompt with this to say, what other details do I need to provide Chat GPT to ensure maximum success? And what’s going to happen is, it’s going to evaluate that and it’s going to come back and ask you additional questions. And it may say, are you doing corporate fundraising? Are you doing private fundraising? What is it and so it’s asking for information to help it give you a better response?
Bob Woods 17:33
Yeah, absolutely. 100% and Brynne does what I do. So this is one of the reasons why we are LinkedIn partners in crime, and now maybe even AI partners in crime. So I and this is like definitely we’d like starting with a conversation prompt around who I am, and what I do, and what I am looking for specifically from Chat GPT.
And then building on that, and that’s a great way to look at things because like I said, each time you are starting a chat with Chat GPT. It’s an entirely new universe that you’re creating. So it may seem redundant to do this every single time in a new chat. But it’s not. Because otherwise, it’s not going to know who the hack that you are.
Gunnar Hood 18:18
Yeah, and in this case, you could start the conversation with assuming you are a professional fundraising expert, and somebody has come to you looking for advice about raising funds for this type of an event. What suggestions would you have?
Bob Woods 18:33
Right, you, you asked Chat GPT to play a role and that’s actually part of the crisp methodology again, that socialsaleslink.com/crisp I sound like an am DJ at that point, but it actually works out and it’s true at that point. So, just let everyone know crisp stands for the C is for context, R is for role is for inspiration. S is for scope, and P is for prohibition. So all of those are definitely explained in the eBook, but using all those and you don’t even need to use those like each and every single time you can split those up depending on how the chats are going.
But all of those will definitely help you build the very specific prompts that will get the best information for you out of Chat GPT and don’t sleep on the P for prohibition. So sometimes you need Chat GPT to exclude things like in the example in the ebook that I have. This is because the salesperson involved is selling it services, but they don’t sell website design. They don’t sell website development. Some shops do what other shops don’t. So sometimes you need to tell it to exclude things as well as include things.
Gunnar Hood 19:54
Yeah. I see a great question in here that says have you seen AI utilized well, yeah, I want to get back to this roleplay. And it’s a great timing on the question because I was speaking to a group yesterday and I brought up an exact example of this, where if you have your sales practices documented, say, like in a spreadsheet or something like that, and you have the paid version of Chat GPT, you can upload those as a reference and say, these are the components of a sales conversation that we’re looking for.
And then you can upload the transcript from a recorded conversation, and ask it to apply those standards and evaluate that sales interaction and score it for you. So whether you’re the individual looking for just personal coaching, or you’re a sales manager, looking to coach your people, this is a way to, you know, begin doing more or evaluating more conversations. Obviously, if it’s, you know, out in the field, and the conversations not recorded, that’s hard, but if you’re on Zoom or things like that, it’s a very easy process, and it’s a great way to start formalizing, you know, feedback and coaching opportunities.
Bob Woods 21:03
100% 100%. So here’s actually an example from Brian Holmquist, about how he used Chat GPT. So he said, “I used chat GPT to generate a development slash use case account expansion matrix for me yesterday, and was pretty blown away.” And also you sometimes forget to utilize AI for more than email drafting. And I mean, it’s, it’s amazing just how complex of tasks that Chat GPT teaches you just, you know, just get just flying it.
Well, maybe not quite like that, especially if it’s having problems like it did yesterday for a little bit. But still, it’s so much faster than you either doing it yourself or giving it to someone else to do it. I mean, the speed alone is worth 20 bucks a month for GPT, for Dotto and in my opinion, and that’s a great example of a much more advanced use of object GPT for that type of thing as well. What do you think about that?
Gunnar Hood 22:07
I absolutely agree. And I see, you know, Bob’s got a specific example of that, and how it applied to, you know, meal planning. I was sharing with this group yesterday. I actually went to my refrigerator the other day and took a picture of the contents. And I told Chat GPT, I’ve got chicken, I want to, you know, what are some ideas based on what you see in my refrigerator that I could make for dinner.
And it came back with two examples. It says, I see you’ve got honey and mustard, you can do a honey mustard glaze, you know, chicken recipe, or you also have a lot of vegetables. So maybe think about a stir fry as an option. And you know, if I wanted to go either one of those paths, I could say, “Okay, give me the actual recipes.”
Bob Woods 22:45
Yeah. 100%. And, and if you’re with us live right now you can see this, if not, I’ll say it for the podcast audience. But Bob actually has something that’s pretty similar to the crisp formatting in terms of in terms of how he structured the question is, so persona plus context plus task, plus format plus tone, and then he asked a question, you know, he sets it up your mother to preschool children, who is finding it difficult to prepare meals that are both appetizing and healthy for your children.
Liz 10, simple dinner recipes that can be prepared in less than 30 minutes. And then he even goes on to say, present the list in a table format that includes the meal name, preparation, time, cooking time, ingredients, directions and servings. So this is also not not only that fantastic, this is where you can also put the prohibitions into because for someone like me, as you know, depending on the dish, and things like that, you know, I don’t like mushrooms, I’m also allergic to coconut.
So I may say something in there, you know, please do not include coconut as I’m allergic to it, and you know, mushrooms could be eradicated off the face of the earth for all I care, you know, like that type of thing, basically. So, you know, constructing it like that, again, it’s all about the construction of the prompt. And, you know, we’re, we’re, we’re coming up with specific scenarios here, and we’re trying to, but there are so many different scenarios that are out there, there are so many different tasks that are out there. And, and, you know, you just have to play with it.
Gunnar Hood 24:23
But I think what Bob, Brynne is shared is a great example of what could become accustomed GPT, because this way you can include all of those prohibitions that are already known when you ask it okay, you know, here’s what I’ve gotten, you know, create another recipe for me and it remembers all of those things every time you use it.
Bob Woods 24:43
Yeah. 100% 100% So we also have as I was going to call an offer that actually makes it sounds like you need to pay for it. This is free because we are nuts and we give away so much stuff for free. If you use the free man Magical extension at get magical.com, you can import some of the prompts that we use here at social sales link. So really help us out with the tasks that we have.
So you’re gonna want to go to get magical.com first and download the extension, it’s still free for now, they’ll probably start charging one day, but why not use it for free for now, get magical.com, and then go to socialsaleslink.com/chatgpt, to actually get the prompts that we use to load those in there, and then really use them effectively.
So with that, we’re we’re coming up on time here pretty quick, I just encourage you to really just, you know, download and use all of the free resources that we’ve talked about here, Chat GPT, it’s easy to use, but at the same time, you need to be specific. You need to be specific to be terrific. That’s an old BNI phrase, actually, but it definitely applies here. Gunnar, do you have anything to add?
Gunnar Hood 26:08
You know, don’t be afraid to use it, I think it is the best advice. Yeah, you can’t break it. But you know, you test it and just keep having conversations with it and find out what it does well, what it doesn’t do well, or when you give it that much additional information, the difference in the output, you see.
And I think over time, you’re gonna find that there’s certain prompts that you really like that work really well regardless of the scenario. And you’ll just keep referring back to those. And that’s something magical is great to have, because you can just store that and a couple commands strokes, and it brings it back up and you fill in the variables.
Bob Woods 26:47
And the other thing, though, so just on the flip side of that really quick because this has happened to me a couple of times, it doesn’t happen a lot. But it has happened to me a couple times, sometimes the prompts that you used to use were great. Sometimes they don’t work all the time. So it’s not or or you get a different result than what you’re expecting.
So then you may need to play around with it a little bit and then and then change the prompt because as it is a learning model, a learning language model LLM I know that’s not the exact translation of what LLM as it is learning all the time. Things aren’t going to change as it’s learning and as it’s rolling. So also keep that in mind that it’s generally speaking, it’s only getting better as time goes on as well.
Gunnar Hood 27:32
I gotta tell you, my wife laughs at me when she sees me entering prompts, because I use phrases like please, and thank you. She goes like Oh, yeah. I said, “Because this is a learning model.” And we want it to learn to be nasty, or plus.
Bob Woods 27:47
Yep, plus and quite honestly, I joke about this, and this is like 85 to 90% joking, but there’s always like this little bug in the back of my brain. If AI actually does take over, I want it to know that I’m a friendly person. So we’re gonna leave on that really, really, really positive note. And thanks again for joining us on making sales social live. If you’re with us live on LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, or x formerly known as Twitter, God knows when that’s gonna go away right now.
We do this every week, except for the next couple of weeks if you have a slide because we are taking off for the holidays. So you know, don’t don’t expect to see us live while we’re opening Christmas gifts next week. So keep an eye out for our live sessions after the first of the year. If you’re listening to us on our podcast, those are going to keep chugging along and you haven’t subscribed already, go ahead and hit that subscribe or follow button to access all of our previous shows and be alerted to when new ones drop.
More info on our podcast is available at socialsaleslink.com/podcast I have been saying social life.com a whole lot this episode. There’s so much stuff there though. So we do two shows weekly. We do this one and are making sales social interview series where we talk with leaders and experts in sales, marketing business and many more areas.
I’ve been doing a lot of recordings for that lately too. So we’ve got to personally testify. We’ve got some excellent episodes coming up in the weeks and months ahead. So when you are Oh, Gunner, I need you to play Brynne here for the very end. So you’re gonna say social one I stopped so just the word social, Okay? So when you’re out and about, be sure to make your sales.
Gunnar Hood 29:35
Social.
Bob Woods 29:36
Oh my god. That’s an A plus. I love it. Thank you, everyone for joining us. We really appreciate it. Have a great day. If you’re live with us, Have a great holiday season. If you’re listening to us on podcast. We hope you had a great holiday season and for everyone to have a great 2024 Buh bye everybody.