October 11, 2023
How To
15 AI Prompts to Supercharge Sales & Marketing Teams
A lesson on writing prompts for generative AI
What are prompts? Prompts are text-based commands that AI can understand and respond to. It’s basically how you describe the desired output—what you want AI to do for you, and how. A prompt may contain any combination of:
- Questions
- Statements
- Definitions
- Instructions
- Input data (or context)
- Role assignments to provide additional context (i.e. asking AI to answer a data security question as a “detailed-oriented head of IT with 15 years experience”)
💡 ChatGPT ≠ GPT.
If you’re new to generative AI, it’s easy to get befuddled by all the acronyms.
GPT—or Generative Pre-trained Transformer—refers to a family of natural language processing (NLP) models developed by OpenAI. It’s basically the engine that runs all generative AI-related platforms, including ChatGPT and Copy.ai. Its latest version is GPT-4, but you’ll also frequently hear about GPT-3 and GPT-3.5.
Prompt best practices
Before you get started with AI prompts, here are a few things to keep in mind:
- There’s no magic prompt. The Internet is flooded with AI prompts, but it might take some trial and error before you figure out which type is most effective for your particular use case.
- Clarify your desired outcome. A good rule of thumb: the response will generally be as broad or specific as its prompt. In some cases, it might actually be preferable to skimp on the details—like if you’re brainstorming blog post topics and want more varied and diverse answers. Something more complex, like a sales playbook or chatbot script, will almost always require more details.
- Garbage in, garbage out. The quality of the output depends entirely on the input. AI enables teams to move a lot faster, but it’s still important to take the time to flesh out your prompts. Otherwise, you could find yourself drowning in responses that are unclear, inaccurate, irrelevant or just wildly off-base.
- Do your homework. AI performs three core functions: processing data, identfiying patterns, and making predictions. It was not designed to fact check its own outputs, which is why it’s important to do your due dilligence and manually verify accuracy.
- ABT: Always Be Testing. If you’ve ever heard someone fret about a potential robot uprising, that’s probably because AI “teaches” itself every time it processes new data. Prompt iteration—tweaking, testing, and refining different types of instructions—will help generate more usable responses over time. Often, it’s just a matter of rephrasing your prompts. If you feel tuck, try playing around with synonyms.
Prompts for marketing teams
AI can make your marketing team more efficient, from generating blog posts to building full-fledged marketing strategies. One area where AI really shines, however, is enabling more efficient content creation—from research through to final edits.
If you’re introducing AI to your marketing workflows, content is a great place to start, considering how much time we spend making content.
In fact, the average B2B marketer spends a whopping 33 hours per week or 82% of their time just creating content. That doesn’t leave a lot of bandwidth for equally important work, like strategy, reporting, and distribution.
Another problem with slow-burn content execution is that it often forces marketers into a vicious cycle, with little to show for their effort. Think about it:
- You have multiple personas you need to create for—at various stages of the funnel—and can’t keep up.
- With aggressive output targets, you sometimes have to compromise on quality. You’re not alone. Just 1% of B2B marketers rate their content as “excellent”, while 43% believe it’s “good”.
- Good enough content fails to impress buyers—or generate pipeline. According to Forrester, 65% of global decision-makers feel vendors provide too much content and 59% think a lot of that content is “useless”.
While AI isn’t going to write ready-to-publish content, it will tackle every content creator's worst enemy: the dreaded blank screen. It can come for any marketer at any time, tanking productivity and motivation wherever it appears. With the right prompts, however, AI can stop blank screen syndrome in its tracks.
Prompts for Copywriters
1. Conducting customer research
As marketing leader Ross Simmonds put it,
“Normalize spending 100 hours researching your audience before creating 100 pieces of content that is meant to influence their behavior.”
Instead of manually pouring through customer reviews, interview transcripts, and call recordings, copywriters can use AI to translate customer interactions into detailed personas.
Prompt:
Act as a marketing expert. Create 3 buyer personas from transcripts of customer interactions pasted below.
For each persona, include:
- Behaviors
- Challenges
- Interests
Give every buyer persona a quirky name (for example Sales Samantha) that corresponds to the persona’s character traits.
TRANSCRIPT: [Paste transcript]
Copy.ai’s response:
2. Generating product descriptions
Crafting persuasive product descriptions that actually convert is hard enough as it is. Now throw in frequent product changes and rollouts into the mix. AI can lighten the load for ecommerce copywriters by generating product descriptions that are consistent with your brand voice.
Pro tip: You can expedite this process in the future when you use Copy.ai’s Infobase.
Prompt:
Write a witty product description in a conversational tone that clearly explains key features and benefits of [PRODUCT].
Copy.ai’s response:
3. Generate landing page headlines
If you’re feeling the heat when it comes to writing effective headlines, you have good reason. On average, eight out of ten people will read headline copy, but just two out of ten will stick around and read the rest of the landing page. AI can help ease some of the pressure by quickly generating suggestions for you to work your magic on.
Prompt:
Write 5 persuasive headlines for [web page URL].
Act as a senior copywriter. You are an expert in conversion copywriting. Each headline should be up to 20 words and clearly convey the main benefit of [company or product name].
Copy.ai’s response:
Prompts for Content Marketers
4. Writing a blog post intro
A lousy intro can drive readers away from an otherwise excellent blog post. While an AI-generated intro might sound generic, you can always use it as a starting point, and then tweak for tone consistency and adding in a unique point of view.
Prompt:
You are a senior content writer. Write an introduction for a blog post titled “[blog post title]” that clearly states the purpose of your blog post.
Copy.ai’s response:
💡 Pro tip: AI doesn’t always get it right on the first try (case in point: Nicholas Braun, who plays Greg on Succession, is literally 6′ 7″—not exactly “short stature”). Sometimes, it doesn’t get it right at all. Be mindful of “hallucinations” or outputs that may sound plausible, but are factually incorrect or misleading. So basically, AI just making things up, based on what it thinks you want to see in the response.
5. Generating examples for thought leadership content
Did you know 54% of decision-makers spend more than 1 hour per week reading thought leadership content? Additionally, 63% of buyers think thought leadership content is important in providing proof that an organization understands or can solve their specific business challenges.
Thought leadership content is no joke, but speaking with authority—especially to C-Suite readers with decades of experience—usually requires deep research or extensive SME interviews. AI can help speed things up by generating examples that resonate.
Prompt:
You’re a CFO with an MBA. You’ve spent 10 years learning from experts in INDUSTRY.
You’re writing a blog post on TOPIC.
Give me 3 case studies of TOPIC in action. Please find real companies and describe the results they got with the strategy.
INDUSTRY: Corporate finance
TOPIC: Enterprise risk management
Copy.ai’s response:
6. Creating a content guide for freelancers
Freelance content writers can help scale content operations—but they can just as easily create more work for you. Often, it’s just a matter of not knowing your brand well enough—especially if they only have a short brief or list of targeted keywords to reference. If you want to avoid sinking hours into editing or rewriting unusable work, a content guide can help ensure outsourced contributors have equal clarity around messaging, positioning, tone of voice, and value propositions.
Prompt:
Create a tone of voice guide for COMPANY. To do that follow this procedure:
- Enlist tonal cues that apply to different marketing channels
- Write best practices for tone of voice examples
- End each section with examples of tone of voice in action.
While creating the tone of voice document, stay true to our core values and vision (pasted below). Show the results in a table format.
COMPANY: [add description]
[Paste core values and vision]
Copy.ai’s response:
7. Bonus prompt:
Create a unique value proposition and key benefits framework for [PRODUCT]. Do this using features mentioned on [PRODUCT]’s website and tie them into challenges TARGET AUDIENCE is facing.
This document will be used to inform marketing efforts for the entire quarter. End each section with actionable advice that corresponds to different marketing activities.
Prompts for Demand Gen Marketers
8. Analyzing customer feedback
Building campaigns can take just as long as content creation, and similarly requires deep insight into customer behavior, motivations and pain points to be effective. Customer reviews can contain a wealth of information—or not. Instead of investing hours combing through G2 and Trustpilot, where meaningful insights aren’t always guaranteed, use AI to analyze and compile everything for you in seconds.
Prompt:
Analyze customer reviews from [COMPANY]’s G2 page: [LINK]
In a table format, share the following information:
The 3 most common customer pain points
The 3 most frequently mentioned product features
3 frequently used sets of phrases
Copy.ai’s result:
💡 Pro tip: With Copy.ai, you can keep the conversation going. To take this data further, you can:
- Use more prompts to gather new information
- Use the resulting content to further create content (I.e. “Write a response to combat the top 3 customer pain points mentioned).
9. Scoping out the competition
Sometimes, you stumble on those golden customer reviews that give you exactly what you need—whether they shared why they picked a competitor over you (or vice versa), or wrote down the perfect complaint for your battlecard research.
This doesn’t need to be a happy accident, or require hours of research. AI can analyze customer reviews that mention competitors and highlight favorable comparisons you can leverage in your sales process.
Prompt:
You are a Head of Marketing with an MBA from Harvard University.
Analyze reviews from G2 and TrustPilot for all products in [INDUSTRY]. Find common customer complaints, feedback, and recommendations.
Structure your analysis according to:
- Features
- Market share
- Pricing
- Marketing
- Differentiators
- Strengths
- Weaknesses
- Geography
In your final review also compare how [PRODUCT] compares to competitors.
Make sure you prioritize recent reviews.
Copy.ai’s result:
AI can also make suggestions to refine messaging around market differentiators:
10. Generating email subject lines
Subject lines are critical to email nurture success. Nearly half (47%) of recipients open emails based solely on the subject line, while 69% report email as spam, also based on the subject line. Understandably, marketers sometimes get stuck coming up with the right one. AI can be an invaluable tool, generating subject lines to use in A/B testing and conversion rate optimization. This prompt can also come in handy for SDRs building cold outreach campaigns.
Prompt:
Write 5 options for a gripping subject line that introduces my PRODUCT to a potential CLIENT.
Make sure they’re human-sounding and valuable. Don’t sound pushy or salesy.
PRODUCT: Copy.ai, a generative AI tool
CLIENT: Content agency owner
Copy.ai’s response:
Prompts for sales teams
Time sinks interfere with sales teams just as much as marketing. Chew on this:
- Sales reps spend only a third of their time (35%) actually talking to prospects. They spend 21% of their day writing emails, 17% entering data, another 17% prospecting and researching leads, 12% going to internal meetings, and 12% scheduling calls.
- The average sales rep responds to 2,000 emails during a month-long cold outreach campaign.
- Nearly half (42.5%) of sales reps take at least 10 months to become productive enough to contribute to company goals.
- Companies lose at least $1 trillion every year from lost sales team productivity, wasted marketing budget, and poorly managed leads.
AI can eliminate or significantly accelerate manual, cumbersome processes that get in the way of selling.
Prompts for SDRs
11. Personalizing cold outreach
“Hello [Name]” doesn’t count as personalization anymore—not when 73% of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations. By scraping profiles on LinkedIn, AI makes it easier and faster to cater outreach emails to individual prospects at scale.
Prompt:
Write a friendly introduction to PROSPECT. In the body, include 3 ways PRODUCT can help with PROSPECT’s exact pain points, derived from the PROSPECT’s LinkedIn bio, pasted below:
PROSPECT: [Paste the prospect’s LinkedIn profile]
PRODUCT: [Write a detailed description of your product]
Copy.ai’s response:
12. Improving calls to action (CTAs) in outreach emails
CTAs can be a tough nut to crack. You need to hit the right balance of personal and persuasive, without sounding too sales-y. Leaving the wordsmithing to AI means more time prospecting, and ultimately more leads in the pipeline.
Prompt:
Write 3 calls to action for this outreach email. Make sure they’re human-sounding and valuable. Use a friendly, but assertive tone. Keep the writing concise and clear. Each CTA should be up to 5 words.
Outreach email: [Paste]
Copy.ai’s response:
Prompts for AEs
13. Generating talking points for sales calls
Great conversations don’t just happen—at least not with prospects, where prepping can take even longer than the actual call. AI can accelerate the research stage by generating a list of customized talking points.
Prompt:
You’re a thorough, detail-oriented, and customer-focused sales rep. You’re about to get on a sales call with a prospect whose BIO is pasted below. Use this information to create 6 talking points for the call highlighting use cases of PRODUCT.
BIO: [paste bio]
PRODUCT: [product description]
Copy.ai’s response:
Prompts for sales leads and managers
14. Writing sales scripts and playbooks
An effective sales script or playbook requires an exhaustive amount of input, like customer pain points, historical data trends, and brand voice guidelines to ensure consistent interactions. This is a major ordeal that can take several weeks, even months. Can AI generate a complete script that you can use immediately? No. But the time you’ll spend reviewing and modifying the output is still drastically less than building the entire thing from scratch.
Prompt:
You’re a highly-organized sales rep who’s been in the technology industry for 10 years. You studied customer psychology during your time at Harvard university.
You want to use customer data and product information to make your sales process more efficient.
Using the data shared below, create a 300-word sales script that asks insightful questions, gives options to highlight PRODUCT, and employs relationship-building tactics.
DATA: [paste data]
PRODUCT: [Add your product’s description]
Copy.ai’s response:
15. Creating sales battle cards
When you’re on a sales call, every minute matters. The average rep gets only 5% of a customer’s time during a B2B buying journey, which means they can’t afford to stumble over objections or questions about competitors.
Battlecards are an invaluable resource in guiding these conversations—but also deceptively simple. They need to provide enough detail for reps to effectively respond to customer queries and concerns. But they can’t be so overloaded with information that it’s impossible to scan or reference.
AI can help fast track the research and provide laser-focus on the big takeaways.
Before we dive into the prompt below, check out Copy.ai in action to see the end-to-end process of creating sales battlecards.
Prompt:
Create a competitive analysis on COMPETITOR. Include their products and who they sell to. Compare COMPETITOR to our PRODUCT. Show the results in a table format.
COMPETITOR:
PRODUCT:
Copy.ai’s response:
Back to you!
AI is changing the game across sales and marketing. But it needs to be used in the right way. Don’t think of AI as a replacement for your team, but an invaluable tool to support them—so they can offload the drudgery and preserve their brainpower for high-value work.
