How to Use ChatGPT for Sales Emails

ChatGPT has the potential to streamline your sales email process, but it can also hurt you.

Here’s how not to use ChatGPT in sales: Insert a prompt to generate a cold sales email, copy and paste it into your cadencing tool, and blast the email to a prospect — or a few thousand.

Don’t do this. AI-generated spam is still spam. And prospects still won’t open or read it.

If this is your plan for using ChatGPT in a sales email, you'll unlikely see more replies.

Instead, sales teams today can harness the power of ChatGPT in three key ways: research, first draft generation, and speeding up the editing process.

How to Use ChatGPT For Sales Research

Our favorite use of ChatGPT is as a research assistant*. The more you use the tool this way, the better you’ll get at creating prompts that generate helpful responses. If you use ChatGPT correctly, you could save hours in your day-to-day.

1. Define your target audience: You may already have this information, but if not, use ChatGPT to identify key characteristics and pain points your ideal customers share. The first prompt may generate a generic response, so you may need to try some detailed follow-ups.
   
   Prompt example: Pretend you’re a VP of Sales at Clari and share your top three business initiatives in short bullet points.
   
   Prompt follow-up: Here is the “about section” on Clari’s website and the VP of Sales’ short biography. Based on this info and the previous prompt, give me three specific symptoms of problems you’re trying to solve for each initiative.
2. Research your prospects: Save time navigating multiple tabs using ChatGPT to find or summarize information about your prospect’s role, company, and industry.
   
   Prompt example: I’m writing a cold sales email to the VP of Marketing at ClickUp. Here are a handful of videos and links about her. Read, analyze, and summarize them in a few paragraphs and include what I need to know for my email.
3. Subject line generation: You don’t need to use ChatGPT for this. But if you’re stuck at zero, it can be helpful. Just remember: one to three words are best, keep it short, use title case, and make it sound like an internal email that a colleague would send (not intended to manipulate or sensationalize).
   
   Prompt example: I’m writing a cold sales email to the VP of Growth at UserGems, I eventually want to pitch my product, but my goal is to get the conversation started first. Write ten subject lines that follow these guidelines: no more than three words, use title case, and make it sound like an internal email.
4. Personalization: Step two will get this going. But you can dig deeper to learn more about your prospect to ensure your email resonates.
   
   Prompt example: What are the latest news and updates about [prospect's company name] that I can use to show I've done my homework in a cold email
   
   Prompt follow-up: How can I use the information I've gathered about [prospect's interests, company, pain points, etc.] to personalize my cold email and make it more relevant to them?*Remember that ChatGPT is far from perfect. Triple-check your personalization facts and GPT-driven research.

*Remember that ChatGPT is far from perfect. Triple-check your personalization facts and GPT-driven research.

How to Use ChatGPT for Cold Sales Email

Blank page syndrome is real. It’s that moment of overwhelm, staring at a blank page with a mental block of what to type.

Everyone experiences this at some point. Especially if you've sent a lot of emails and are banging your head against the wall trying to figure out why no one is replying.

You don’t need ChatGPT to write quality emails that get replies. But in these moments, it sure can help.

That’s one of the reasons why we created CATIE. It’s the feature in Lavender (powered by ChatGPT) that helps start your email. You insert a few bullet points to develop the email like a story. Include some commands, and CATIE will craft a draft you can refine and augment with our Email Coach and Personalization Assistant.

Similarly, you and ChatGPT are in a symbiotic relationship. When prompting the program to generate a cold email, keep these best practices in mind:

• Start with an action word
• Be clear and concise
• Provide as much context as you can
• Interact with it as you would a real person
• Be specific about output (e.g., include a subject line and signature, the length should be no more than 100 words, etc.)

Often, it won’t generate a great email. It will sound like a robot wrote it. After Lavender’s ChatGPT tool starts the email for you, use the Email Coach to improve it further and optimize it for positive replies. The Email Wizard will walk you through how to precisely tweak the email until it scores an “A” — meaning it has twice the chance of reply.

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Btw here’s a quick email framework for doing this in a way that’ll get a reply:

1. Observation
2. What’s the problem that the observation leads you to believe exists?
3. Mention what you provide to solve that problem. Open it up for a conversation.
4. Ask if that problem is a priority

Need help with cold email? Check out our Cold Email 101 guide.

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Here’s an example of an email I asked ChatGPT to write:

(ChatGPT feature in Lavender is coming soon!)

Here’s how Lavender scored it. Eek.

In Lavender, your email receives a score. Our users aim to score over 90 — an A.

Before using Lavender, most people wrote like ChatGPT (unnatural, too wordy, too long, etc.)

This AI-generated email scored a 79. It’s an average email.

Not terrible… but definitely not good. It’s a C+.

Lavender’s Email Coach highlights the key areas to improve. It will prioritize what to fix and use AI to help you do it. Once the score turns green, you can hit send.

On average, our users have a reply rate of 20.5% using this process.

Lavender + ChatGPT = Your Best Friends in the Inbox

If you’re like the average sales rep, you spend 30 to 40% of your week writing emails.

That’s about 15 hours, which is kind of a lot!

Lavender is here to help you write more effective emails faster — ensuring they are emails your prospect will enjoy reading and will actually want to reply to.

That’s why ChatGPT on its own is not enough. It can do 80% of the work, but you need to do the remaining 20% to provide the human touch that leads to a positive reply.

If you’re like most sellers who have single-digit reply rates, this is a powerful tool to leverage.

With ChatGPT and Lavender’s Email Coach together, sales reps now have an unstoppable combination they can use to write better emails faster.