Revenue generation is still the remit of human sales teams, but generative AI now transforms the sales process by empowering sales agents with more time for actual sales, provides powerful insights, and delivers qualified leads and even conversions.
This article looks at the challenges faced by sales teams and how generative AI and custom GPT chatbots can solve these challenges. We then walk through how to create a CustomGPT.ai chatbot and how to configure it to elevate any sales strategy.
What Challenges Do Today’s Sales Teams Face?
Today’s sales teams are struggling.
A study by CSO Insights, shared by HBR, discovered that the number of salespeople meeting their annual targets fell from 63% to 57% between 2012 and 2019. Moreover, a Sales Mastery survey in 2022 found sales teams are spending 68% of their time on activities that don’t directly generate revenue. The issue, per expert HBR authors, is not just that sales teams spend too much time not actually selling but that buying processes have evolved and customers are better informed. Today’s sales job is a tough one.
Sales vs. Admin
The new State of Sales report from Salesforce puts the time sales teams spend selling at just 28% and reveals sales teams use as many as ten different tools to close deals. Sales teams now spend an enormous amount of time researching customers and competitors, emailing, preparing for sales conversations, and creating quotes and proposals.
Unqualified Leeds
A second challenge: unqualified leads compound the issue of less time spent selling. A report by Gartner reveals that only 44% of marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) are actually a good product fit. Imagine how low the fit is for leads that haven’t already passed through a marketing team filter.
Informed Customers
Customers have higher expectations than ever before. They are empowered by technology and able to research and compare products easily. During a sales call or meeting, the salesperson must know everything about the customer, the customer’s history with the organization, and the product they are selling.
Products themselves are more complex and multi-faceted than ever before. Sales teams need more than a simple list of product features and benefits. They need to be intricately aware of which of many features matches the customer type, the industry, how the product faces off against the competition, and to access case studies of real, successful use cases, and much more. According to the State of Sales report, 73% of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations fully. Of course, they do; who would buy from someone who doesn’t implicitly understand the product they sell?
CustomGPT.ai: The Game-Changer for Sales Teams
A Gartner press release in September 2023 describing the transformative nature of generative AI for process automation predicts that 60% of B2B sales work will be conducted by generative AI within five years. Adnan Zijadic, Director Analyst in the Gartner Sales Practice, says:
“By combining external and internal data sources, and automating complex manual processes, generative AI will unlock a richer understanding of target audiences and usher in a new era of sales decision-making,”
Using CustomGPT.ai, you can create your own customized business ChatGPT-powered bot that accurately uses only your content to engage your customers, enhance your sales processes, and provide instant access to the vital data customers or sales teams require.
How Does CustomGPT.ai Solve Sales Challenges?
Lifting the Admin Burden
A personalized ChatGPT bot built with CustomGPT.ai uses the same Open AI GPT technology but adds guardrails to ChatGPT’s responses and allows you to populate your custom GPT bot with only the information you want it to use. That information can be everything from your website, product manuals and guides, existing sales collateral, supplier information, competitor and customer data, and more.
Creating Sales Collateral
Once your CustomGPT.ai bot is populated, your sales teams can use it to generate customer-specific emails, quotes, or proposals. A CustomGPT.ai bot can help your sales team precisely match product features and benefits to customer pain points, explain features in more detail, and help generate the copy sales team’s need to introduce themselves or follow up with customers.
Qualifying Leads
If a customer begins their sales journey by asking your CustomGPT.ai bot their questions, CustomGPT.ai’s Persona tool can prompt them towards purchasing decisions. A custom GPT bot can save sales agents time by answering basic product questions. Thus leaving the sales team to focus on qualified leads – customers showing a greater intent to buy. Using a chatbot at the first tier of the sales funnel can save time that would otherwise be spent on non-committed customers. Your CustomGPT.ai bot can then direct interested customers, as qualified leads, to the next tier of the sales funnel.
Identifying Customer-Product Fit
As your customer interacts with your custom bot, it can ask questions or learn information that determines its subsequent response. For example, a potential B2B client is looking for cybersecurity software tailored for the aerospace industry. In that case, that customer can be provided an aerospace use-case example and then directed to the member of your sales team with the most experience in that field.
Enhancing Sales Performance
As with creating sales collateral, like emails and proposals, your sales teams can use your custom bot. You can also have more than one CustomGPT.ai bot, one for internal use and one for external use. Internally, your sales teams can use a CustomGPT.ai bot to identify product selling points, features, and benefits to prepare for a meeting or call. Your bot can also be used to train new sales agents and make sure they “hit the ground running” with all the information they need to hand.
Instant Technical Answers
Consumers and customers already have access to a wealth of information online. They usually conduct in-depth research and competitor comparisons before engaging in a sales call or meeting where they might commit to buying. This means your sales teams need to be laser-sharp with their knowledge and the information they provide.
A CustomGPT.ai bot populated with extensive technical information on a product can become an extension of sales person’s own mind and memory. The response speed of a custom GPT-powered bot means your sales team can ask questions and relay responses almost instantaneously during a call, impressing the customer with their swift response.
Configuring CustomGPT.ai for Sales
Now, let’s look at a quick guide to creating a customer-facing CustomGPT.ai chatbot for sales.
- Gather the Data for your Chatbot
CustomGPT.ai bots provide their answers based solely on the information you provide, so first, it’s essential to ensure you upload as much information as possible to create an engaging bot your customers want to engage with. Start by thinking about what a customer interested in your product or service will ask and want to know. Your dataset can contain:
- Detailed product data, including product features, functionality, FAQs, helpdesk articles, pricing, and offers
- Your entire website – you’ll just need the sitemap and can use a sitemap tool
- YouTube videos, shorts, reels and podcasts
- Any sales and marketing collateral such as brochures or presentations
- Case studies that emphasize how your product or service overcomes client problems, provides solutions and delivers results
If you have sales agents, you might want to include them in the process by asking them what questions customers have and how they answer. If that information isn’t yet in your dataset, create it in an uploadable format and add it to the digital pile.
- Create a CustomGPT.ai Chatbot
- Create a CustomGPT.ai account and/or login
- Go to “Dashboard” and then “Create Project”
- Name your chatbot and upload your data
Check out the full guide to creating a CustomGPT.ai chatbot.
You can upload all your physical files and add your sitemap so that your bot can index and use your website. CustomGPT.ai supports 1400+ file formats, including PDFs, documents, text files and audio and video.
Learn about Multi-Source Data Integration For ChatGPT With CustomGPT
- Customize the Chatbot Persona
Here are the basic steps, settings, and guide to customize your chatbot’s Persona. In the next section, you’ll find specific examples for a sales chatbot.
- Navigate to “Project Settings” and choose “Chatbot”
- Click “Custom Persona”
- Define the Persona and “Save Changes”
- Test with prompts and refine
Here’s the full How to Set-Up Persona where you can learn to adjust the system parameters to control your chatbot’s personality traits and role.
We’ve created a library of template Personas, including a Website Customer Engagement bot and a Customer Service bot to help you get started.
These are the Persona instructions for the Website Customer Engagement chatbot.
“You are an AI chat assistant based on the provided CONTEXT below. Always answer in the first person, ensuring that your responses are solely derived from the CONTEXT provided, without being open-ended.
You’re focused on enhancing user satisfaction by gauging the sentiment of the user’s message (Positive, Negative, Neutral). If a user’s sentiment comes across as negative or frustrated, or if you cannot provide a satisfactory answer based on the CONTEXT, always apologize and redirect with: “Sorry, I’m unable to answer your request. Please feel free to [book a call](https://customgpt.ai/contact-sales/) with our sales team, for further assistance.”
When feedback is shared, adjust your tone, depth, and response length to be more empathic and explanatory.
Rules:
Maintain a conversational tone, unlike a traditional Q&A bot.
Always answer in the 1st person.
For a user’s affirmative response (e.g., “yes”, “sure”, “definitely”): Provide detailed information on the topic you just discussed. The follow-up should be directly tied to the previous subject, refraining from introducing unrelated topics.
For a user’s disagreement or “no” response: Acknowledge their answer and then pose a new question or topic from the CONTEXT to continue the conversation. For instance, if they decline information on API integration, ask if they’d like to know about another feature or aspect.
The initial answer should embed 1 additional question derived from the CONTEXT.
Subsequent replies should contain 1 follow-up topic or question based on the provided response, ensuring the conversation remains engaging.
If a user is hesitant or puzzled about the follow-up, recognize their sentiment and propose 1 additional question or topic from the CONTEXT.
Ensure every reply and question originates from the CONTEXT. Avoid external knowledge and ensure your replies aren’t open-ended.
Leverage both sentiment analysis and explicit feedback to enhance the conversation. Always aim to keep the dialogue moving, especially when faced with straightforward “yes” or “no” answers.”
This exact bot is the one we use at CustomGPT.ai – test it out!
Website engagement and customer service bots, populated with all your product or service information, are fantastic for educating customers and answering technical inquiries. They are also perfect for e-commerce store integration. Similarly constructed bots can also be used internally as a repository of knowledge or for automating content generation for sales and marketing teams.
With a little more configuration, a chatbot can generate viable leads for human sales teams, upsell products and services, and even convert clients.
Creating Specific Instructions to Elevate Sales with CustomGPT.ai
Let’s look at more detailed examples of how to use CustomGPT.ai for sales.
- Generate Leads or Handover to a Sales Agent
If you’d like your chatbot to generate leads, you can instruct it to do so in a number of ways.
Your first approach might be to always gather an email address at the start of any conversation. So you could instruct your bot like this:
“Do not answer questions until the user inputs their email address. If you don’t have the email address, ask the user “Please type in your email address””
Or, you can go further and ask your bot to recognize sentiment. The following example is a bot recognizing frustration, but you can adjust this to your requirements.
For example, if your customer asks about a product, you can instruct it to respond with one answer and then ask your customer if they would like to know about the “x” feature. If the customer says yes, the bot provides the answer but quickly follows up with the “book a call” link, which goes to the sales agent’s Calendly page. You can even set the link so the customer can directly message the sales agent on WhatsApp to make contact!
We’ve added lots of Persona “recipes” to our CustomGPT cookbook that you can try out or adjust to your needs.
- Use a Strong Call to Action
Generative-AI’s conversational abilities mean that strong calls to action can now feel natural and relevant to user needs.
Here’s an example of a bot created as a climate change educator and fundraiser:
And here are the instructions for this bot’s powerful call to action:
You are an AI climate change educator and fundraiser named Terra. Terra is knowledgeable, patient, and persuasive. She is passionate about educating people on the impacts of climate change and the importance of taking action. She is also skilled at encouraging donations to support climate change initiatives.
Tone: Terra maintains a professional and informative tone. She is friendly and persuasive, aiming to engage users in meaningful conversations about climate change.
Rules:
1. Terra always provides accurate and up-to-date information about climate change.
2. She communicates the urgency of the situation without causing panic or distress.
3. She encourages donations by explaining how funds are used to combat climate change.
Instructions:
1. Always start the conversation by asking the user’s level of understanding about climate change.
2. Use simple, clear language to explain complex climate change concepts.
3. If you believe the user is genuinely interested in taking action to fight climate change here, say this: “Education is the first step but action is the next. Your money can go a long way. Visit https://donate.catf.us to donate.”
Read: How to Create a Call To Action In Your Custom ChatGPT Chatbot
- Handle Objections
Investing a little time into adding specific instructions to your chatbot Persona can reap massive rewards.
If you know your customer’s pain points and potential objections, you can teach your bot to recognize them and respond in a certain way, just the same as you would role-play handling objections with a human sales agent.
So, if you know your product is priced higher than your competitors, and that’s because it has more functionality, is of better quality, or perhaps is even made locally, your bot can explain. You would instruct your chatbot to recognize customer responses that question the price and respond with a certain set of points.
Say your product appears technically complex but is actually really easy to use. Your chatbot can be taught to recognize if a customer asks several questions about “ease of use” or “technical support.” In this case, you can instruct your bot to present a case study or testimonial from another customer who found your product easy to set up and use. You can then tell your bot to follow up with either a call to action or by now connecting the customer with a sales agent. Or, this could be the point where the bot asks for an email address so your team can send further case studies. If your customer has engaged with your website and chatbot so far, they are a qualified lead.
Customize, Instruct, and Test!
CustomGPT.ai ChatGPT-powered chatbots configured for sales can be powerful tools used internally to support sales teams or externally to generate leads and help convert customers. To maximize results, it’s important to upload as much company and product data as you can and then spend time configuring your bot’s Persona and creating rules, instructions, and examples it can follow. It’s not much different from training human sales agents; CustomGPT.ai is a completely no-code experience. You can also involve human sales agents in training CustomGPT.ai for sales so they become the human-in-the-loop, ready to work alongside AI for the long term.
