How to Use ChatGPT as an SDR

If you’ve not seen anything about how ChatGPT can work for salespeople, you’re following the wrong people on LinkedIn. If you’ve not seen anything about ChatGPT at all, where have you been?

The fact that you can’t move (or scroll) without the mention of this pesky or powerful robot (you decide) on your newsfeed shows just how useful of a tool it is, but it’s also confirmed the fact that – unlike what our initial fears were telling us – it cannot do our job for us.

Instead, ChatGPT empowers so many people to work more efficiently in their roles – and sales is most definitely included.

While it is a super advanced language model, there are a few areas where ChatGPT falls short, including:

• Common sense, like recognizing sarcasm, irony and jokes
• Emotional intelligence so tones and moods might not be picked up
• Originality and creativity because, after all, it’s getting its info from things already published
• Physical interaction… obviously

But that’s where you come in.

ChatGPT for SDRs

Whether you’re an SDR, BDR, sales rep (or whatever you call yourself), or you’re a sales manager that looks after a team, you’ll understand the everyday pain points…

The admin side of things, the thorough research to no avail, the seemingly endless stream of sales emails and follow-up emails being sent out, the lack of or painfully slow responses…

But wait, there’s a common thread to these pain points, isn’t there? They all take up time that could be spent working with an ideal customer, and ultimately, moving prospects down the sales funnel.

Let’s look at how ChatGPT can help sales development reps work smarter – prompts included.

How to use ChatGPT as an SDR

1) Lead generation

Understanding your ideal customer is crucial to effective lead generation, otherwise you’re going to spend a whole lot of time generating, and pushing forward with the wrong sort of leads. Or, pushing forward in the wrong kind of way with the right kind of leads. ‍‍

To avoid wasting time here, use ChatGPT to truly get to know your ideal customer. Ask it questions, look into stereotypes and buyer behaviors that fit into your ideal customer profile, and form your outreach around what you learn.

Let’s go with an example:

You work for a payments platform. Ideally, you’re looking for a CFO (decision-maker) of a small-to-medium sized company who is looking to streamline your payment processes, so they can scale globally in the most streamlined way possible. 

How can you work with ChatGPT to guide you towards the right kind of leads, and the right kind of content for those leads?

There we have three important pieces of information:

1. The role itself – what CFOs do and how they work
2. How they determine value in a product, using current pain points and concerns
3. How you can best communicate with them and grab their attention

This information will set you up nicely to find the leads that are right for you and your business, so avoid gathering contact information that’s never going to get your team anywhere. Next stop: lead enrichment and lead qualification – just to make triple sure.

2) Research phase

So, we know that ChatGPT is good at providing quick and (mostly) accurate answers and information. This can really help you in your research phase, and contribute to lead enrichment.

All too often, we’re found trawling around websites to work out what a company or client is all about, only to confirm that their ‘About’ page needs some serious work. Use the ChatGPT tool to save yourself that time, and ask questions about a prospect’s product, service, pricing or company policies.

Typically, you’ll get a simple answer back. But if not? Adapt your prompt to make sure the description is in its most simple form.

ChatGPT can offer you the most stripped-back descriptions, which clients are unlikely to put on their own websites, so you don’t miss a thing.

No shame here, folks. The more you know, the more you learn, and the less time you waste.

With such rapid information, you can also find out more about the industry or current markets you’re working in. Any trends or news that you should know, or can help in each of your sales journeys.

One quick, big reminder: ChatGPT was last ‘trained’ or updated by OpenAI in September 2021, meaning it isn’t always up to scratch in terms of real-time knowledge and trends. Any concerns, always double check – or use Similarweb’s fresh data to tell ChatGPT what’s what. Show ‘em who’s boss.

3) Lead qualification

SDRs or sales development reps are also responsible for lead qualification – on top of identifying leads – for the sales team.

Now, we’re big advocates for combining automated processes with the human touch for the most effective way to qualify leads, and ChatGPT can bring that automation.

For inbound leads, you can plug in the prospect’s message or inquiry to make the most of the tool’s natural language processing. This involves breaking down the customer’s message into words, phrases, and sentences to analyze grammar, syntax and vocabulary.

Its capabilities include:

• Language translation: A real winner to those global or scaling businesses out there.
• Sentiment analysis: Recognize and understand the exact needs and pain points from the message, as well as spot trends between inbound messages.
• Text classification: Categorize your leads based on interest, budget, location and other criteria.

Using the right prompts, you’ll be able to save a bunch of time in your lead qualification process, and further down the line too.

You can gain a lot of insights and information about your prospects’ specific needs and interests at speed, helping to develop your sales strategies and your understanding of the ideal customer. Not to mention the positive impacts all this will have on conversion rates and customer experience.

On to the next lead.

4) Personalized responses

And with all those insights and information? Comes the ability to customize content to suit – and stand out – to your specific prospects.

Load your ChatGPT prompt with all the information you’d like to include, including context behind what you’re asking (eg. that you’re a sales rep, what you’re selling, and your company).

Okay, this is the real basics (and entirely made up, by the way – although Sales Signals is legit fire) but you see what we mean. Now, for ChatGPT’s grand response:

We’d give this sales template a solid 6/10 as there is some work to be done – as with all content copied and pasted from ChatGPT because…

Take that template, take your own knowledge, and take that keyboard of yours and start whacking out some content that sounds good to your prospects, and sounds like YOU – not a robot.

That non-robot, personalized touch will do a lot of good for those engagement rates of yours. Trust.

5) Training and coaching

When you join a new job in sales, there’s an inevitability that you’re going to almost drown in sales training material and other sales collateral within the first week.

As you continue your job in sales, there’s an inevitability that this pile you’re already part-drowning in will grow and grow as a sales strategy adapts or changes, and more material is created or thrown at you. With so much floating around you, you start to forget what’s there and where to find it.

That’s another thing ChatGPT is great for: refining information, down to its most digestible (and useful).

There’s no need to wait around until your next training session or Sales Kick Off, or rummage through a whole history of documents and slides. Get simple and on-demand training for things like:

• Sales techniques
• Objection handling
• Product knowledge
• Best practices in sales

The basic information you need is attainable through ChatGPT, but don’t forget to ask follow-up questions on topics or sentences you don’t quite understand or want more explanation in.

And hey, for the days you’re feeling particularly uninspired, you can even ask it to be a salesperson and try to sell you something.

Disclaimer: As you can see, ChatGPT is very much the old stereotypical type of salesperson – something which is a bit (read: a lot) of a no-no these days. You want your outreach to be more customer or pain focused. Find out other things you should avoid in sales (and what you should do instead).

6) Customer support

Building a good relationship with prospects is a big part of being a salesperson, as it pays to sell value than sell features. That being said, you’re going to want to – and should – help out your prospects along the way, wherever you can.

To save yourself time on going back and forth between your customer support or engineers, ChatGPT might be able to help you get quick answers in some cases.

Leaving out the super technical questions and queries here (because ChatGPT’s product knowledge ain’t all that), you can get instant answers and sound like a whizzkid to your prospect – winner.

Here’s an example:

ChatGPT, ready to give you the tea

So there we have it. How you – yes, you – can use ChatGPT as a sales rep or SDR to help you work smarter, not harder.

It’s not a tool that can do your job for you; it’s a tool that empowers you to spend more time where it’s most important. In this case: getting engagement, building rapport, and moving prospects down the funnel.

That’s right, this little robot isn’t about to steal your job – you might want to remember your “please” and “thank you”s, in case that time does come, though.

ChatGPT Similarweb Sales Intelligence

One thing ChatGPT is missing (amongst having a personality, original content and other things we’ve mentioned) is data.

The content is very surface level, which isn’t helpful when you’re really trying to grab a prospect’s attention.

Similarweb Sales Intelligence, on the other hand, cuts to the core of the prospects you’re working with or want to be working with. It gives you raw data and highlights pain points that your clients have maybe never even noticed themselves.

…and you can take those data points and insights, and put them straight into ChatGPT to either find out more or inspire your outreach content and sales emails.

As a sales intelligence platform, our features include:

• Lead generation: A database of over 100m companies that you can filter down to get a list of your ideal customers.
• Contact information: In the click of a button, you can turn this list of websites into a list of contact details for those websites (and download it straight to your CRM).
• Insights generation: Gain and use specific insights into pain points and areas of opportunity to create engaging and effective outreach.
• Account overview: Full transparency into each of your accounts, including website performance and technologies they use.
• Sales signals: Stay way ahead of the competition with our smart sales signals, helping you to spot upsells and cross-sell opportunities.

If that powering up your sales process sounds interesting to you, find out EXACTLY how Similarweb Sales Intelligence would work for you and your company by booking a demo now:

FAQs

What is ChatGPT, and how can it benefit sales teams?

ChatGPT is a conversational AI technology that uses natural language processing and machine learning to simulate human-like conversations with customers. Sales teams can use ChatGPT to automate lead qualification, provide personalized responses to potential customers, and improve customer engagement and satisfaction.

How can ChatGPT help SDRs in particular?

ChatGPT can help SDRs by automating the initial stages of the sales funnel, including lead qualification. This frees up time for SDRs to focus on higher-value tasks, such as building relationships with prospects and closing deals.

How can ChatGPT ensure data privacy and security for sales teams and customers?

ChatGPT is built with robust security and privacy features to protect sensitive data. It encrypts all communications and stores data in secure servers with access controls and monitoring systems.