What is Chat GPT?
Chat GPT (Generative Pre-Trained Transformer) is a Natural Language Processing chat bot developed by OpenAI. It uses Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence for answering common questions in a similar way to how a human would answer a question.
It was recently described as a calculator for writing and will likely become a trusted source for many businesses and transform the way that businesses interact with people. It may even usher in a new era of productivity similar to the way that the introduction of the computer changed the way people live and work.
If you’d like to try it, you can sign up for a free preview account here: OpenAI
Chat GPT has already proved itself to be useful for computer programming, finance, business intelligence and the accounting field. However, it may have the biggest impact on Sales and Marketing.
How can Sales Teams Leverage Chat GPT?
There are a lot of ways that Chat GPT can help sales teams close more deals from improving marketing efforts. It has the ability to improve customer satisfaction by reducing the amount of time it takes to respond to customer inquiries, can be leveraged to create engaging content, streamline the market research process, and act as an administrative assistant to help your team handle more sales leads in a workday.
Using Chat GPT to Generate Leads
Generating quality leads can be incredibly time consuming and can require a high volume of content to be generated. Think about all of the e-mails that need to be sent out to get an average 2% response rate?
While Chat GPT answers common questions, it can also be used to generate text-based content. For example, you can ask it to create an e-mail template that focuses on a specific target market for product or services offered by your business.
The following screenshot has been trimmed, but the e-mail goes on to explain various relevant features and includes a specific call to action.
Using Chat GPT Powered Chat Bots to Qualify Leads
Chat bots are very common on the internet today. They’re those inconspicuous little popups in the bottom corner of your screen asking if you need some help or if they can answer a customer’s questions.
Behind the scenes most chat bots are elaborate decision trees. Prompting users to input specific information and returning a pre-programmed response. Most are little more than another way for customers to enter their contact information into a web form. A more effective way to collect information would be from an interactive chat bot that reacts to questions with helpful answers similar to a human would. A solution like this would allow a company to give customers a better experience and could also allow the chat bot to start qualifying leads even before your sales team starts a conversation.
Customer Service Chatbots are About to Get Much Smarter
As this new tool gets deployed and more companies, we expect to be interacting a lot more with chat bots. A Customer Service Chatbot would be able to answer common questions similar to how a human would. The real benefit is that a Chat Bot can work 24/7 around the clock to provide relevant information and solve problems prior to a customer needing to reach out to a contact center.
How You Can Start using Chat Bots at Your Business today
Sales Chat Bots have gotten better in recent years and have become increasingly easy to implement. Microsoft’s Power Virtual Agents are one such solution. Chat GPT technology will likely be integrated into Power Virtual Agents to make interactions with customers more seamless. Chat GPT synthesizes questions and answers in ways that are more natural for people meaning that it could greatly reduce the chat bot bounce rate, collect customer information, and even begin the sales qualification process on its own.
Use Chat GPT to Analyze Sales Transcripts for New Insights
Many modern Customer Management Systems (CMS) can be setup to record transcripts of sales calls. Even a small sales team can generate a vast amount of data. It’s difficult for a marketing team to really understand their customers, but through text analysis of sales transcripts they can discover key words that may lead to better product descriptions and provide more relevant content in their advertising or product development efforts.
Through analyzing all of this text data, you may even find that specific language works better with different customer cohorts. Valuable insights such as these can be a powerful tool to help train new Salespeople, or to focus your own sales techniques.
There could also be an opportunity some day in the near future to incorporate real time voice to text transcripts that are fed into a large language model such as Chat GPT that allow it to work with Predictive Analytics to prompt a human sales person on possible phrases to say that result in more favorable outcomes.
Text transcripts can already be captured if you’re running Sales Force or Microsoft Dynamics 365. Configure call recording, transcription, and real-time translation | Microsoft Learn
Other existing solutions will summarize large amounts of conversational data such as Microsoft Azure Sentiment Analytics and Microsoft is also building the technology into Power BI Cognitive Services but neither allow you to ask questions about your customers in real time like a Chat GPT based solution could.
Leverage Contact Center data to Provide Valuable Insights
The initial sales process is only the first part of a customer relationship. Voice to text transcripts can also be generated from customer service inquiries. A business could use a Chat GPT style technology to analyze the text data and identify specific needs of customers that are not currently being met. These insights can then be used as a form of lead generation. If you already know that a customer has a pain point, maybe there’s a way to offer a complimentary product or service that they are interested in. Even cold calling can be more effective if you already know that there’s a need.
Using Chat GPT for Report Writing
Most salespeople will agree that writing reports is not their favorite thing to do. Unfortunately, it’s a necessity if you want to have an e-mail list or contact list to work off. It becomes even more cumbersome. We’re optimistic that more AI powered features will be coming to CRM’s soon that allow you to ask questions about your data.
If you’re working with a smaller dataset, you could try this today by asking Chat GPT something like, which of these customers bought product A and product B, then copy and paste a table of sales data into the prompt. There are some limits on how long a question can, but the results may surprise you!
Improve Productivity with AI Generated Sales Proposals
Similar to report writing, Chat GPT can be used for all kinds of content creation work. Ask Chat GPT to create a sales proposal, and it will generate a template that can be easily customized with your own information.
Improve Customer Engagement with Custom E-mail Responses
Sales People can also improve their efficiency by asking Chat GPT to write e-mails on their behalf. If you have a sales proposal for example and want to add that human touch but on a large scale you can feed Chat GPT information about a client, the proposal information and ask it to draft an e-mail on your behalf.
Small tasks like this can really add up over the course of a day or week. Your team can increase productivity and improve customer engagement by using Chat GPT to streamline a lot of the mundane tasks that aren’t necessarily time consuming on their own but add up over time.
The full e-mail generated is over a page long and ties the benefits of the product to the needs of the customer. It took about 10 seconds for the software to generate it.
Chat GPT can be a Technical Advisor to Help you Sell More
Keep Chat GPT up on a computer screen while you are on a Zoom or Microsoft Teams call. When a potential customer asks you a technical question or an in-depth question about a competitor’s product, prompt Chat GPT with the question. You do have to be a bit cautious as the answers are not always correct and there is often nuance to technical questions but it’s a good starting point when you don’t have another resource available.
You can also ask Chat GPT to compare different products for you and ask who the biggest competitors are in a space. It will help you look like more of an expert in your field and prevent you from being caught off guard when unexpected questions arise.
Using Chat GPT to Write Sales Scripts for Cold Calls
Chat GPT can generate full cold call scripts, or be asked to provide several different options. AI generated content creation can save you a lot of time and brain power. Having several different cold call scripts on hand can also help your team A-B Test the outcomes to find the optimal introduction and increase conversion rates.
Using Chat GPT to Improve Marketing and Advertising
Marketing teams will find that Chat GPT is incredibly useful. Creative work is no easy task. It takes a lot of careful thought and effort to create content for a specific industry or target audience. Then think about all of the possible industries and markets where a product could be sold. There is no human being on the planet that has the time to create such a large amount of engaging content that’s customized to every group that may be interested.
Chat GPT can be leveraged to brainstorm new ideas and save time. The time saved can be used to create better online content, produce more precisely targeted campaigns, or even come up with personalized recommendations for individuals or companies within a target market. The technology enables people to accomplish more with the same amount of resources.
What are the Limitations of Chat GPT for Sales Today?
There are some massive limitations of AI and Chat GPT for sales. Most obviously, sales occur person to person. There is power in the ability to quickly make connections with another person and an intuition that comes practice.
Whil Chat GPT answers a lot of common questions, and even some more obscure ones it would have to be trained on data from your specific business about the specific products and services that are offered.
Sales teams themselves gain a lot of valuable insights in how to talk to people and who their target audience is by having a lot of conversations with a wide range of people. While advanced data analysis and predictive analytics can surface a lot of great insights, you would not want to take away the opportunity for your salespeople to engage with people. It’s said that many sales are not made on the first call, but it can take many subsequent interactions with the same person to be truly effective.
The more that chat bots are used across the sales process, the less opportunities a Salesperson has to build a relationship with a Prospect.
What is the Future of Chat GPT for Sales?
It’s safe to say that the sales process will never be fully automated. Humans enjoy interacting with each other, and a robot would be awkward at best for most sales conversations. There is a lot of nuance in being able to read a person’s body language, know when to talk and when to be quiet.
Businesses that embrace new tools like Chat GPT are going to have an edge over the competition in the future. By improving back office efficiency, or using it to generate mor focused content, companies will be able to convert prospects to closed sales. The more efficient your process is, the more targeted your sales team can be, the faster the sales process can go. This means that you will be able to handle more customer inquiries from potential customers and the more interactions you have, the more sales you can achieve.
Bloomberg.com recently published an article from Erik Brynjolfsson, professor of economics and information technology at Stanford University made the observation that Chat GPT will likely become a calculator for writing. We see this as only the starting point for this super versatile technology. It will be disruptive across many industries and wide range of use cases going well beyond text generation.
While Chat GPT can’t make sales itself, it can be a helpful tool to improve efficiency much in the same way that the telephone, fax machine, computer, internet, e-mail, and Zoom calls have done throughout recent history. We’re excited to see where this new technology takes us and to watch it evolve over time.