Can ChatGPT write your sales emails? Sort of.

Sales reps send hundreds of emails every week, struggling to find new ways to hook their prospects’ attention. It’s a tedious, repetitive part of the job that takes time away from other, more direct sales activities. I receive hundreds of cold emails every week, and I only open maybe 1% of them at best.

Could ChatGPT, the generative text tool making headlines since December, eliminate email-writing from reps’ to-do lists? It’s already proven to be capable of professional tasks like writing real estate listings and debugging code. In January, it reached 1 million users in record time.?

But sales is a role that requires a human touch, relationship building, and knowing your prospect. I’ve been listening to a handful of early adopters in sales and marketing roles about what they’ve learned and how you can use it. Here’s what they said.

Conquer the blank page

I’ve heard hundreds of sales reps talk about how the hardest part of writing emails or a sequence is the first sentence. Many reps beat themselves before they ever get started simply by throwing in the towel and never doing their due diligence. ChatGPT conquers it for you, churning out several paragraphs based on whatever prompt you choose. It won’t win any literary prizes, but it doesn’t have to.

“It’s an efficient and lazy way to be mediocre,”

said Thomas Miller a vp of sales at a manufacturing company. Miller has been experimenting with ChatGPT since hearing about it at a Christmas party and he’s been impressed with the results. He recently prompted the tool to write an email announcing the departure of a team member to colleagues and clients. The results, he said, were adequate.

“A mediocre first draft is a lot better than no first draft.”

In essence, it seems like this initial version of ChatGPT could be a good way to frame out the initial outline of an email, but reps will need to proof, edit, and build off of this foundation.

Come up with new angles

AI-enthusiast Ben Plomion, CMO of Dibbs, challenged ChatGPT to write a series of blogs about NFTs based on his own prompts. When Plomion asked the machine, “Will NFTs become popular in rural America?,” ChatGPT speculated that limited internet access would impact NFTs popularity there. The rest of the article was thin at best.

But when he asked ChatGPT, “Can ChatGPT write 111 blogs about NFTs,” it turned out 111 editorial ideas. Sales reps might get similar iterative assistance from ChatGPT when looking for reasons a prospect might need their solution or, as McQuilliams has done, with email subject lines and taglines.

“A lot of our open rates and conversions have dramatically gone up,”

he said. It may not be the end solution to completely remove writing from your sales team, but in its current iteration, it could be used as a lucrative tool for creativity, ideation, and brainstorming pains.

Switch up your style

Sales reps write so many emails that speed is usually preferred over style. As a result, they tend to include the same words and phrases over and over again.?

“Most sales reps use the same words over and over…it almost feels like a robot is writing for them,”

said Jeff McQuilliams, svp of sales and marketing at Clear4, a health and safety optimization software company.?

Reps who want to move beyond “best practice” pitch formulas can count on ChatGPT to introduce some new hooks, phrases and sentence structures.

“Its helping them to rethink how they communicate,”

McQuilliams said.?

Add your own personal touch

Miller said that while ChatGPT churned out serviceable emails, they were too generic to cut, paste and send. In addition to personal details like names and titles, Miller edited the text to better reflect his tone of voice.?

More importantly, he added details needed for sensitive communications that demonstrated his clients were getting personal attention.

“Those personal connections you establish with people are hugely valuable. That’s been a cornerstone of sales forever,”

Miller said. To forge and preserve those,?

“you don’t want to be generic. You want to be targeted, personal and coming in with a lot of nuance.”

All in all, ChatGPT is a tool worth exploring, especially if your sales team complains about outreach, sequences, or writing best practices, which let’s face it, is basically every sales team. ChatGPT still has a long way to go before it is a comprehensive sales solution, and it has it’s robotic moments, but there is a lot of potential to explore.