5 Ways to Use AI to Your Advantage

Whether you’re worried about generative AI in sales snatching your job out from under you or you’re already using it in your daily work life, one thing is for sure: you’re thinking about it. AI in sales, particularly generative AI tools like ChatGPT have caused quite a commotion in the B2B world and are reshaping the landscape. Whether it’s prompting debate or boosting productivity and helping you churn out a ton of emails, the impact can’t be ignored. 

It looks like generative AI is here to stay. But don’t worry, the rise of AI in sales doesn’t signify a looming job threat; instead, it’s an opportunity to enhance your own skills and efficiency. Let’s put it this way: generative AI isn’t coming for your job. But if you’re not careful, people who know how to use it might be. 

You don’t want to be replaced by someone who knows how to use AI better than you. Plus, it can make your work life a lot easier if you can avoid certain pitfalls. 

Here’s how you can incorporate it into your workflow:

1. Use AI to enhance objection handling and sharpen sales techniques.

Not everyone can have a hands-on sales mentor who’s on-call 24/7 (we wish). Luckily for you, AI like ChatGPT can be a pretty competent sales coach. 

For example: are you coming up against the same objections and need a clever way to overcome them? Then hit up your friendly neighborhood AI for some objection handling advice. Ask ChatGPT or another generative AI tool like Chatsonic to help frame your negatives as positive and come up with creative ways to handle objections. 

You can also ask your AI for advice on certain sales techniques. Into SPIN selling? Then prompt the AI to tell you all the important points. And if you’re using call recording, even better. Input your call transcripts into the prompt and ask it to point out where you followed the techniques well and where you could improve. If you use a tool like Jasper Chat, it can remember your past interactions and continue to build on that knowledge throughout your conversation – almost like a back and forth with a call coach. 

2. Get insights on your competitors. 

You may not be lucky enough to have a coworker whose entire job is looking into your competitors and telling you all the pros and cons of their solution compared to yours. But thankfully, generative AI can help give you a boost in that department. 

Chances are, you know who your biggest rivals are in your industry. With just that as a starting point, you can get some key insights into details like their services, prices, and ideal customers. Ask your favorite generative AI tool to give you answers to prompts like “What are [competitor’s] key strengths?” or “How is [x competitor] different from [y competitor… or your company]?” This technique also works well if a prospect brings up a competitor you’ve never heard of. 

With AI, you can even get a summary of what customers dislike about your competitors. Chances are you don’t have time to comb through review sites like G2 to find repeating themes. But you know who does? That’s right, ChatGPT (and other AI tools like Bezly, which summarizes Amazon product reviews). Prompt it to share common complaints/issues that customers have with your competitors. That instantly gets you a quick list of pain points you can further explore with your prospects. 

There is an important caveat here, though. Currently, ChatGPT uses information that was publicly available on the internet up until 2021. Chances are, your competitors have changed a few things since then. So while it’s a useful starting point, make sure you backup your insights from ChatGPT with some more fresh information from the internet as well. 

3. Gather data-driven insights on prospects and personas using AI.

One of the most basic tenets of sales and marketing is research, research, research. If you want to say something useful, you have to know who you’re talking to. Research allows you to be relevant to prospects and connect directly to their wants and needs, and it’s especially helpful if you’ve never talked to someone in a particular role before. 

Here are a couple of things you can ask your favorite generative AI to help define your personas: 

• What is the most important priority for [job title]?
• How would [job title] use [product]?
• What are the major pain points for [job title]?
• What is a typical buying process in [industry]?
• What are the top priorities for [job title]?

You can also use generative AI to research specific prospects. Want to know more about their company? Ask the AI tool for a summary of what their company does. If they have multiple locations, you can ask about what each specific location is responsible for. You can also use generative AI to source information on other companies in their niche, their customer reviews, and more. 

Sellers should be prepared and do their research ahead of a call, but generative AI can also be a good way to come up with further questions in the moment while you’re on a call. 

4. Provide important summaries.

From internal meetings on key company updates to demos with prospects, there’s no end to important meetings you’ll want to remember key insights from. If you have a way to record those meetings and get a transcript (and just a phone recorder and online transcription service can do the trick in a pinch), then you don’t need to worry about catching all the main points the first time through. 

Run the transcript through your AI chat and ask for a summary and bullet points of key items. That way, you’ll never forget an important talking point from a previous conversation with a prospect. 

You can also use this same technique to keep up with information from  industry blogs or other sources you don’t have the time to read. For example, copy and paste the text into the AI chat and say, “summarize this article into an easy-to-digest paragraph [or bullet points].” 

5. Spruce up your writing for outreach, follow-ups, and social posts. 

Using generative AI to write things for you is the simplest, most well-known way to use the tools. But we’re not suggesting that you plug in a prompt and use exactly what it spits out for you. Especially since we’ve found that it’s super powerful, but needs a little extra editing to really make the writing stand out. Plus, with personalization being the name of the game, you have to make sure that you add that extra special human touch. 

But with that said, there are just about a million different ways you can use ChatGPT, Ryter, or other similar AI tools to make your emails, social posts, and more extra spiffy: 

• Ask the AI to simplify and condense complex ideas you’re struggling to convey in a digestible way.
• Use it like spellcheck, but better. Ask it to look for contradictions, fix inconsistent capitalization, and of course correct spelling errors. Chatflash even has spell check built into the tool. 
• Take your current email drafts (cold outreach, follow-ups, etc.) and ask AI to make them more concise, professional, or informative. 
• Struggling with getting the tone just right? Tell it: “Rewrite this paragraph with a more [adjective] tone.”
• Prompt AI to create a LinkedIn (or other social media) post about a certain topic or event. 
• Keep your emails out of spam by asking your favorite AI to check for anything that spam filters will catch. 

With all of these suggestions, you’ll of course want to double check that the desired personality comes through. Especially with social media posts, you may want to zhuzh it up a bit to sound more “you.” 

Some limitations to keep in mind (a.k.a. how to stay out of the spam folder)

Okay, so this whole generative AI thing can be pretty powerful. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use it carefully. We’ve already mentioned that ChatGPT is limited to sourcing from data that was publicly available before 2021. So if you’re looking for really fresh information, you’re going to have to do a little extra research. 

Also, with all the hubbub about using AI to generate content, there’s also a lot of concern about whether using something like ChatGPT will land you straight into the spam folder. There’s plenty of reasons to be worried about that, too – like the fact that AI could be used to generate some pretty large-scale phishing operations. And while AI companies like OpenAI are trying their best to prevent that from happening, it’s basically a given that determined bad actors can find a way around it. 

But hey, it’s not all doom and gloom. Google is using AI technology to make improvements to its ability to identify low-quality, spammy content. Google has also done a pivot when it comes to their stance on AI- generated content. Last year they publicly dismissed it, but now they’re singing a different tune. As far as they’re concerned, AI-generated content is a-okay as long as it meets the requirements considered most important to rank: high-quality, people-first content that demonstrates “E-E-A-T” (expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness).

So what does that mean in relation to everything else we just talked about? Well, if you’re being lazy with how you use tools like ChatGPT to write emails or blogs, then they’ll probably end up stuck in spam or ignored by your audience. No one wants to read something generic – and even though the latest generative AI tools are powerful, they still creates generic content if you don’t use them well. Plus, ChatGPT can identify its own writing. So it’s pretty likely that security and spam services will probably use a similar capability in the future to identify and downgrade AI-generated content, especially if it seems like spam creators heavily rely on it.

Authentic, high-quality communication is what will ultimately be rewarded. So if you’re using generative AI and worried about your content getting stuck in spam, then take a little extra time to add in key personalization and tweaks that only the extra special human touch can give. Something like Lusha’s intent data can easily support that personalization and help your outreach stand out.

After all, sales and marketing is all about relationships, and that’s something that a robot can never replace. 

Key takeaways

• Generative AI is becoming widespread; and while it’s unlikely to replace your job, you need to learn how to wield it if you want to keep up. 
• There are multiple ways to use generative AI to improve your workflow, including using it for research, training, and of course, writing. 
• To avoid getting caught in spam or ignored, make sure any content you produce with the help of AI is high-quality and authentic.