Mastering Prompt Writing and Priming

Get the cheat sheet: ChatGPT prompts and tips for sales pros

Transcript

Hello, my name is Awais and I am the head of operations at Superhuman, which is an AI newsletter for 400,000 plus readers. So what does my job entail at Superhuman?

A lot of my job is actually doing sales outreach to potential sponsors who might work with us, but also handling a lot of inbound leads. 

Today we’re going to talk about mastering prompts, which is such a big part of mastering your sales outreach as well as your pitches. So why are prompts so important? Well, for three primary reasons.

The results that you get will only be as good as the prompts that you write. Secondly, prompts are like instructions. They let AI know exactly what you want. And lastly, without effective prompts, AI will provide generic results.

So you want to provide a lot of context, you wanna provide a lot of detail. If you’re not doing those things, your prompts are not effective and you’re not going to get the best results possible. So, I wanna talk about five concrete steps that you can take to ensure that your prompts are detailed and you’re providing a lot of context.

Number one, assign a role to ChatGPT. This is pretty simple in our case. You can just tell ChatGPT to act as a salesperson, and suddenly, you know, ChatGPT will adapt to the behavior of the role you’ve assigned and give you better control over the behavior of the AI. 

Secondly, provide context. Any information you provide to ChatGPT will help it give better results. So don’t just, don’t just say that, you know, make a, make a pitch to, you know, x, y, z person. Tell it what that person does. So the lead you’re reaching out to, what do they do? What do you do? What type of company are you in? So to give you an example, at Superhuman, whenever I try to pitch through ChatGPT if I’m trying to prompt, I will always tell ChatGPT that we’re an AI newsletter, we’re an artificial intelligence newsletter and who am I trying to pitch to? Am I trying to pitch an enterprise? Am I trying to pitch to a customer? No, I’m trying to pitch to other sponsors. And accordingly, ChatGPT actually starts giving me really good contextual answers.

Number three, give clear, precise instructions. Tell ChatGPT exactly what you want it to do. State the task clearly and provide specifics on length. I personally find that the less you know, the shorter you can keep the email or your sales pitch, the better you’re going to do unless the sponsor has asked for a lot of information. So, personally, I think 250 words is like a good limit. You don’t want to go over that, maybe even 200 words. So whenever you give it a prompt, just at the end of the prompt state, make this sales pitch shorter than 200 words, or make this email shorter than 200 words. An example I can give you of a good and a bad prompt is a good prompt is too simple. It’s like saying something like, write a cold email for sales managers about our product – not good enough. Which fields do those sales managers work in?

And who are you writing to? What’s the product about? Not good enough. A better prompt is saying something like using the features advantage, uh, advantages, benefits framework.

Create a 200 word cold email with a friendly tone of voice that targets software as a service sales manager. The goal of this email is to schedule a short call, highlight the advantages of our product, and address the benefits of our sales reader. 

So you see the difference at the second one is you are trying to give it a framework to write your email.

You’re also giving it a length and you’re stating the purpose of the email. So this makes it much easier for ChatGPT to write an effective prompt for you to turn out an effective answer for you. Next, give examples. So this is a really interesting one. What it thinks about a really good sales pitch you had in the past? Just give that to ChatGPT and tell it using the writing style from this pitch. Write me a new pitch that will help me target x, y, or z customer. 

And lastly, test and adjust. So one thing that I hear a lot of people say is, ChatGPT is going to make us less intelligent because we’re outsourcing all of the thinking and we’re just letting it do all the work. I disagree. This is where, this is where you find out who’s a good sales manager and who’s not a good sales manager. If you’re a good sales manager, you’re going to use good judgment to adjust the ChatGPT’s results that you’re getting. So, you know, after you get your results, evaluate what works and what needs improving, you need to have that adjustment. If you’re just taking whichever answer ChatGPT is giving you, you’re going to have a very difficult time. I hope this was helpful and I wish you the best of luck with the rest of the course.

Thank you.