ChatGPT for Sales and Business Development—Benefits, Use Cases, and More

ChatGPT is making professionals’ lives easier across business functions. As its capabilities grow, the tool can assume an increasing number of everyday tasks, helping teams focus on high-impact work.

If you’re thinking about leveraging ChatGPT, sales and business development are likely among the top functions you wish to streamline since they involve various manual activities. Using AI to automate these processes is an excellent decision, as evidenced by the results many proactive businesses have seen so far.

Take us as an example—we’ve leveraged AI in our email campaigns, which allowed us to halve the number of emails we send while doubling positive responses. 🚀

In this guide, you’ll learn how to achieve similar results. We’ll show you how to use ChatGPT for sales and business development to simplify numerous tasks and scale your business more effortlessly.

How ChatGPT Works in the Business Environment

The general mechanism behind ChatGPT is the same for personal and business use—the tool operates through a few steps:

1. Prompting—You include the instructions for ChatGPT to follow, preferably alongside ample context
2. Analysis—ChatGPT analyzes the prompt using natural language processing (NLP) and advanced AI algorithms
3. Response—The chatbot generates a response based on your prompt
4. Continuous learning—Using machine learning (ML), ChatGPT continuously learns from your interactions with it to finetune future responses

Now, in the business context, you can implement ChatGPT in various functions through different integrations. This way, it can streamline and automate your workflows, which brings numerous benefits.

Why Use ChatGPT in Sales and Development Workflows

ChatGPT is an automation powerhouse. In 2023, OpenAI’s data showed that over 80% of Fortune 500 companies had adopted ChatGPT in some capacity, which speaks volumes about the tool’s usability.

There are several reasons ChatGPT has seen such outstanding adoption among businesses, most notably:

• ⚡ Increased efficiency—The most obvious benefit of implementing ChatGPT is a considerable productivity boost. By outsourcing simple but time-consuming tasks to AI, your teams can spend more time on work that moves the needle
• 🦾 Data-driven decision-making—ChatGPT offers outstanding research capabilities, letting you crunch high volumes of data effortlessly. This expedites decision-making and improves confidence in the moves you plan on taking
• 🎨 Enhanced creativity and problem-solving—While ChatGPT is primarily aimed at streamlining mundane tasks, it can also support challenges that require critical thinking and creativity. It’s an excellent brainstorming companion, helping you come up with ideas you haven’t considered before
• ✅ Workload optimization—Sales pros and business developers have plenty of work on their plate, so burnout is neither uncommon nor surprising. By supporting your teams with ChatGPT, you can offload some of that work to make it more enjoyable and sustainable
• 📈 Improved bottom line—Statista’s research showed that 24% of businesses that implemented ChatGPT had saved between $50k and $75k since adopting it, while 11% had saved over $100k. This makes the tool a solid investment for businesses in most niches

Common Uses of ChatGPT for Sales and Business Development

ChatGPT can be implemented in many sales and business development processes, most notably:

1. Lead generation and qualification
2. Market research
3. Sales training
4. Internal and external communications
5. Outreach content creation
6. Real-time customer support
7. Upselling and cross-selling

We’ll cover these use cases in more detail below to show you the specifics of implementing ChatGPT for these processes.

Lead Generation and Qualification

Outbound and inbound lead generation are processes that never stop. They require a lot of consistent work, which makes them prime targets for automation with ChatGPT. 🎯

The following table discusses some key lead generation and qualification tasks ChatGPT can streamline:

Market Research

Staying on top of market trends is essential to successful business development. While you can follow everything that’s going on manually, doing so might waste too much time. A much better solution is to have ChatGPT inform you on what you need to know.

For example, you can give ChatGPT a list of sources you typically follow and tell it to summarize the most recent developments in your industry. You can also use it to gather market intelligence through other activities, such as:

• Competitor research
• Performing a SWOT analysis for a new product
• Discovering new product/service development opportunities

Sales Training

Effective sales training is the cornerstone of long-term success, and ChatGPT can improve your program in many ways, such as:

• 🧑‍🏫 Training development—You can tell ChatGPT to brainstorm a training program for a specific topic or activity, and it will help you make sure you cover all important aspects
• 📃 Training material creation—Thanks to its generative capabilities, ChatGPT can create plenty of text and visual content you can use to train new employees
• 🗣️ Role-playing—ChatGPT can play an active role in your training sessions by simulating interactions with prospects, which helps your SDRs navigate meetings and overcome common objections

These tasks are typically the responsibility of team leads or high-performing SDRs, whose time can be better invested. By outsourcing low-value activities to ChatGPT, you can free up the time of your top performers to ensure adequate training without sacrificing growth.

Internal and External Communications

ChatGPT can tighten your communication channels by streamlining everything from meeting minutes to important announcements. Your teams can use the tool to generate reports more efficiently, enabling clear and up-to-date insights into the data you need.

You can also use the platform for external business communications like emails to stakeholders, press releases, and more.

Still, you’ll need to make sure there’s proper oversight of ChatGPT’s output because all AI models are prone to errors (more on that a bit later). Use ChatGPT to get the first drafts, and then review and revise as needed. 👓

Outreach Content Creation

Besides lead generation outreach, ChatGPT can be immensely helpful for generating content for various outbound efforts. Some of the main ones are mentioned in the following table alongside the ways ChatGPT helps:

You can also use ChatGPT to write inbound marketing content, from landing pages and lead magnets to articles and blog posts. It allows you to scale content production without exorbitant investments so that you can fill your pipeline more effortlessly.

Real-Time Customer Support

Effective customer service helps you create positive experiences and increase overall customer satisfaction. If you look at common complaints customers have when it comes to a business’ support, you’ll notice a few recurring issues, such as:

• Delays
• Inadequate help
• Poor availability

You can avoid these obstacles by integrating ChatGPT with your customer service system to create a powerful chatbot that can serve your customers 24/7. 

The downside of doing so is that it requires a more comprehensive and demanding implementation level. You need to make sure ChatGPT is integrated seamlessly and train it on robust data specific to your business and common customer feedback.

Still, the effort should be more than worth it—you can significantly streamline your customer support systems so that your reps can serve customers more effectively and efficiently.

Upselling and Cross-Selling

If you offer multiple service tiers or product versions, ChatGPT can be an excellent upselling assistant. It can help in two main ways:

1. 🤔 Prospect research—ChatGPT can help you find prospects interested in upgrades and collect their key data
2. 🖼️ Campaign creation—You can use ChatGPT to ideate and execute upselling campaigns thanks to its brainstorming and generative features

You can also considerably improve your cross-selling efforts with the help of ChatGPT. For example, the tool can analyze the data of existing customers and match complementary products/services to those who might benefit from them the most.

By using ChatGPT for upselling and cross-selling, you can increase the average customer lifetime value and boost profits more effortlessly.

How To Implement ChatGPT in Your Workflows

To enjoy ChatGPT’s benefits across its many use cases, you should take a methodical approach to its adoption and implementation. Specifically, you should follow these steps:

1. Review your current workflows
2. Master ChatGPT prompting techniques
3. Train your team
4. Set up oversight and reporting workflows

1. Review Your Current Workflows

While you can implement ChatGPT throughout your sales and business development processes, you can’t—and shouldn’t—use it across the board. Trying to overhaul entire functions in one go is bound to backfire, so you should start by identifying the activities with the highest automation potential.

Such activities may include:

• Everyday data management (prospect data, sales report data, etc.)
• Summarizing research
• Meeting minutes
• Email writing

Ideally, you should have an implementation plan before you start using ChatGPT to avoid directionless adoption that disrupts your workflow. Start small, and then expand ChatGPT automation to other tasks as your teams get accustomed to the new process.

2. Master ChatGPT Prompting Techniques

Getting the most out of ChatGPT is all about effective prompting. If you provide vague, generic prompts, the output will match—and it most likely won’t be particularly usable. 🛑

To prompt ChatGPT successfully, make sure to do the following:

• Include as many details as possible—ChatGPT needs sufficient context and details to provide accurate and precise responses. For example, if you’re writing an outreach email, your prompt should include as much data as you can about your company, product, and most importantly, the prospect
• Assign a role—By assigning ChatGPT a role, you can narrow down its thinking patterns to match your needs. For example, you can tell ChatGPT it’s a business development manager at a fintech company, and it will adjust its tone and style to match the role
• Use negative prompting—Negative prompting tells ChatGPT what it shouldn’t do. You can use it to exclude specific research resources you find unreliable or omit specific words and phrases from the generated content
• Set the right temperature—ChatGPT offers temperature settings that determine its creativity and freedom when it comes to response generation. The temperature can range from 0 to 1, with higher values corresponding to increased creativity. You can include a specific value (e.g., 0.2) in the prompt to adjust the output for different purposes and audiences

💡Bonus read: If you want to learn more about effective ChatGPT prompting and see some examples, read our guides on ChatGPT prompts for sales, email prompts, and prompts for different lead-scoring techniques.

3. Train Your Team

While getting the hang of ChatGPT’s general features isn’t too challenging, it changes the way your sales and business development teams do their work. To ensure a smooth transition, set up a comprehensive training program that will ease your teams into the new workflow.

The program can include the following:

• ChatGPT interface navigation and features
• Prompting tips and best practices
• Relationships between ChatGPT and the rest of your tech stack (e.g., your CRM or email sequencer)

For the best results, give your team the time they need to master specific tasks, and be open to any feedback or concerns.

4. Set Up Oversight and Reporting Workflows

No AI tool is fail-proof, so you shouldn’t rely on ChatGPT to create accurate output all the time.

Whether you’re using ChatGPT for research, writing outbound emails, or creating content you plan on publishing or using internally, make sure someone verifies the results are trustworthy. In most cases, this will be the responsibility of team members who directly interact with ChatGPT in their work, so make sure they understand the importance of firm oversight.

It’s also a good idea to set up a reporting process so that your team can bring up any recurring or urgent issues related to ChatGPT’s performance. Keep communication lines open so that you can react swiftly and resolve any issues. 🙋

Limitations of ChatGPT To Keep in Mind

Besides potential inaccuracies, ChatGPT comes with several notable limitations, such as:

• ⛔ Potentially narrow process automation—As you saw, ChatGPT mainly automates tasks related to research and content creation. While this covers many sales and business development processes, you can’t use it to fully streamline tasks like data entry transfers and ongoing campaign tracking, so you’d need to look for additional solutions
• 😠 Biased output—ChatGPT relies on reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF), which means it can adopt users’ bias with time. In the long run, this can impact the quality and objectivity of its responses
• 🆎 Limited prospect data—While ChatGPT can gather essential prospect data, it may not have all the necessary details. You might stumble upon incorrect or outdated contact information, and you may not be able to uncover in-depth data like buyer intent signals

Because of these limitations, it’s best to pair ChatGPT with dedicated sales automation software. If you need a tool that leverages ChatGPT’s best features while going far beyond them, Clay is an effective solution. 🌟

Expand Automation Beyond ChatGPT With Clay

Clay is a cutting-edge data enrichment and sales automation solution that harnesses the full power of AI to enable effortless workflows. The platform seamlessly integrates with OpenAI, letting you get the most out of ChatGPT’s research and generative capabilities.

Some of the key actions you can perform directly from Clay include the following:

• Generating text within your workflows
• Analyzing images to find data beyond text formats
• Generating images based on prompts and Clay’s inputs

Thanks to Clay’s OpenAI/GPT integration, you can get a sales-focused tool that effectively simplifies workflows while avoiding ChatGPT’s main pitfalls.

Want to see how Clay and ChatGPT work together? Check out this detailed tutorial:

Generally, using a third-party app for ChatGPT might not make much sense when you can access the tool directly. But this isn’t the case with Clay because its OpenAI integration is only one of the platform’s many AI-enabled features that go beyond ChatGPT’s native functionalities. 🧠

Combine ChatGPT With Clay’s Powerful AI Tools

If you want to use AI to streamline various workflows ChatGPT might not be able to handle independently, Clay’s got you covered. For advanced prospect research, you can use Claygent—a robust AI assistant, web scraper, and researcher that answers countless prospect questions, such as:

• “When was this company’s last funding round?”
• “What’s the last podcast this prospect appeared on?”
• “Does this company allow remote work?”

With Claygent, you can understand your prospects down to the finest details. And if you have lots of data to crunch, the assistant can do it for you so that you’re left with actionable information.

Clay is also equipped with content generation features thanks to the AI message writer. When you collect prospect data, the AI writer automatically pulls it to craft hyper-personalized emails in seconds. You can automate entire email sequences and push them to your sequencer platform in no time thanks to Clay’s robust integrations.

For additional automation, Clay also offers various templates designed for tasks like writing emails or generating target ICPs. This means you get a considerable head start instead of building your workflows from scratch.

All the Data You Need Right at Your Fingertips

As Clay’s OpenAI integration and other AI features rely on quality data, you may be wondering where this data comes from. The answer is simple—Clay’s comprehensive data enrichment capabilities. 📑

Clay integrates with over 50 major data providers, letting you enrich people and companies in no more than a few clicks. Using waterfall enrichment, you can scour numerous data sources directly from Clay without creating separate accounts. All you need to do is choose the data you need and your preferred sources, and Clay will scour them one by one until it gets a hit.

Clay can find everything from emails and phone numbers to intent data, giving you all the info you need to launch successful outreach campaigns. 🤝

Don’t take our word for it—here’s what one user had to say:

Use for Free or Pay for What You Need

Clay’s robust free plan gives you access to the platform’s AI features and additional functionalities without time limits. You can use 100 monthly credits to prompt ChatGPT, find prospects, and write personalized emails at scale.

If you need more credits and want to expand Clay’s usability, you can choose one of the following paid tiers:

Each tier comes with several credit options, so you can choose the amount you need to ensure you don’t overpay for ones you don’t use. This way, Clay helps you get the most out of every dollar you invest. 💰

Get Started With Clay Today

To fully leverage ChatGPT and use plenty of additional AI features for free, you can get started with Clay in three steps:

1. Go to the signup page
2. Enter your name, email, and password
3. Browse Clay’s many features

You can explore Clay University for additional information and tutorials and join the Slack community to see how other teams are using Clay. For additional resources on how to build powerful workflows, check out Claybooks.

💡 Keep reading: Want to learn more about using ChatGPT and other AI solutions throughout the sales cycle? Check out these articles:

• How to use AI in sales
• AI for sales and pipeline management
• Gen AI for presales
• AI lead follow-up