Sales enablement

ChatGPT for SaaS Sales: 5 Ways Your Team Can Use ChatGPT to Convert

The CloudShare Team

Mar 02, 2023 - 6 min read
ChatGPT for SaaS Sales: 5 Ways Your Team Can Use ChatGPT to Convert

ChatGPT has attracted millions of users since entering beta in the final months of 2022,

OpenAI’s advanced chatbot is already capable of everything from answering questions to composing emails and writing code, making it the perfect tool for sales enablement. Don’t take our word for it though.  

Have a look at what it said when we asked what it could do:

We asked ChatGPT: “How Can ChatGPT Improve SaaS sales.” 

This is what it replied…

ChatGPT for SaaS Sales: Here's what it says it can do

We’ll dive into and expand on those points in just a moment — but in the meantime, let’s go over a bit of background information. 

What Is ChatGPT?

Again, we’ll let the chatbot speak for itself: 

What is ChatGPT? And how can it help you make more SaaS sales?

Benefits of Using ChatGPT for SaaS Sales

When we asked about the benefits of ChatGPT in sales enablement, the bot spoke very highly of itself. However, before you get too excited there are a few important caveats to keep in mind:

  • ChatGPT is best suited for short, simple, and straightforward SaaS sales cycles. It doesn’t quite have the teeth to support longer or more complex buyer’s journeys — not yet, at least. 
  • If you intend to use ChatGPT for anything beyond internal experimentation, you’ll want a premium subscription. In addition to giving you priority access to new features, a subscription ensures high availability and faster response speeds, both of which are essential for a sales-focused chatbot.  
  • ChatGPT is by no means a replacement for human staff. While it may eventually supplant entry-level salespeople, it will still perform best as a sales enablement tool. 

With those small sticking points out of the way, let’s talk benefits. Bringing ChatGPT into your SaaS sales cycle can benefit your organization in several ways: 

  • Improved customer engagement and satisfaction. 
  • Increased conversions.
  • More leads captured near the top of your sales funnel. 
  • Improved productivity and performance in your sales team. 
  • Less busy work means salespeople are free to focus on high-level tasks such as relationship building. 
  • Improved insights on customer needs, preferences, and values. 

Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? Let’s talk about how you can unlock each of these benefits. 

5 Best Uses of ChatGPT for Sales 

Many of ChatGPT’s use cases focus on the front end of the sales process and the top of the sales funnel. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that these are its only applications where your sales team is concerned. ChatGPT’s potential goes far beyond that. 

Improve Your SaaS Sales Training

With ChatGPT, your organization can support better SaaS sales training

Alongside a virtual training lab, ChatGPT allows you to develop engaging, interactive training modeled directly off real-world scenarios. Being entirely virtual, these programs can be accessed from anywhere and at any time, with personalized feedback for trainees and data analytics for team leads. These modules can not only scale infinitely, but are also highly dynamic, enabling continuous learning. 

Internal training aside, this technology also has significant applications for product demos and customer onboarding

Generate Compelling Sales Copy

ChatGPT can help a great deal with topic ideation by identifying trending topics in your field. Let’s say, for instance, that you’ve developed a code hosting and collaboration tool for JavaScript developers. You might ask ChatGPT any of the following questions: 

  • What are the top trends in JavaScript development for 2023? 
  • What’s the biggest challenge of JavaScript development? 
  • What do JavaScript developers look for in a project management app? 
  • What do JavaScript developers find most frustrating about project management? 

You could even take things a step further and leverage the chatbot to create frameworks for emails, sales scripts, site copy, blog posts, and more. Take care that you don’t lean too heavily on the chatbot, though. Use the content it generates as a starting point, and refine it according to your brand voice, objectives, etc. 

Lead Management

As an advanced chatbot, ChatGPT is remarkably well-suited to gather data from and about sales leads. Through targeted, personalized questions, it can help your sales team more  effectively qualify sales leads and more accurately identify which prospects demonstrate the highest potential. You can also integrate it with your CRM to manage and track leads — it will help you write custom validation rules to support the integration.

Depending on the status of your sales cycle, you might even leverage ChatGPT to create a sales funnel

Enhance Customer Support

Not all of ChatGPT’s use cases need to be groundbreaking or innovative. Your sales team can also use it as a run-of-the-mill chatbot. Given its comprehensive language model, it excels at answering customer questions and managing customer support inquiries, potentially improving both engagement and retention in the process. 

Automate and Optimize Workloads

We already touched briefly on how sales teams can automate lead qualification and customer support through ChatGPT. This is far from the only way the chatbot can help your sales team streamline its internal processes. We asked ChatGPT what else it could automate, and it responded with the following: 

  • Scheduling of sales appointments, eliminating time spent on manual coordination. 
  • Lead nurturing, including follow-up messages and notifications. 
  • Sales reporting and analytics. 
  • Custom sales proposals. 

Additionally, ChatGPT had this to say about how it can improve sales demos and POCs: 

  • Provide a more personalized experience. 
  • Offer real-time support during the demo. 
  • Incorporate interactive features including polls and quizzes. 
  • Share relevant case studies, product information, and testimonials
  • Follow up with prospects.

How to Incorporate ChatGPT Into Your SaaS Sales Process

Now that we’ve gone over what ChatGPT can do, it’s time to talk about how you can use it. 

Laying the Groundwork

Before you dive into ChatGPT, there are a few questions you’ll want to ask yourself first: 

  • What specifically are you trying to do with ChatGPT? What sales tasks can you use it for? 
  • Do you have access to the necessary training data? Provided it’s relevant, more data is always better.
  • How does ChatGPT fit in with your other SaaS sales tools? Will you be using it as a standalone solution or will you integrate it with systems such as your CRM and email marketing platform?
  • Compared to bringing in more salespeople or leveraging a virtual IT lab, is ChatGPT the most cost-effective option? 
  • How will you measure the ROI of ChatGPT? What metrics will you use to assess its impact on your sales cycle?  
  • Can your team use ChatGPT for customer onboarding and training? What about internal sales training? 
  • Do you have a formal process in place for gathering, analyzing, and acting on customer feedback? 

Choosing Your Approach

Once you’re sure you want to leverage ChatGPT, your next steps depend on your use case. 

Building a Chatbot

  1. Define what the chatbot needs to do. This could include capturing and qualifying leads, providing customer assistance, answering questions, or sharing product data. 
  2. Gather your training data. More is always better, and you’ll want to make sure your data represents the most common questions, responses, and scenarios in your sales cycle. 
  3. Select a GPT-3 compatible chatbot platform. 
  4. Train the GPT-3 model until it can reliably generate responses. 
  5. Build a UI for your chatbot and incorporate GPT-3 into the backend. 
  6. Test, evaluate, and continuously fine-tune your chatbot and GPT-3 language model. 

Creating a Sales Funnel

  1. Define your target audience, including their needs, preferences, and pain points. 
  2. Plan a strategy that resonates with that audience. 
  3. Develop your script, which should account for each touchpoint in the customer journey while also grabbing attention and generating interest as customers are guided through the funnel. 
  4. Either create a landing page or tweak your existing landing page to align with your sales strategy. Make sure this page clearly communicates the value of your SaaS service. 
  5. Integrate ChatGPT into your website through a plugin, API, or chat widget. 
  6. Augment your strategy by promoting your product through paid media, social media, and inbound marketing. 
  7. Monitor ChatGPT’s performance, paying careful attention to engagement and conversion rates and looking for any potential bottlenecks or opportunities. 

Designing a Training Program

  1. Define your training goals. Is this for customer onboarding or internal development? What is the ideal outcome of this training program? 
  2. Identify your learners. Who are they? Are you training your top sales professionals, entry-level employees, or your customers?
  3. Use ChatGPT to collect and curate potential training content, which you can then incorporate into your training platform.
  4. Train the ChatGPT model. With this use case, ChatGPT essentially augments your existing training by actively responding to learner questions and comments. 
  5. Regularly assess ChatGPT’s effectiveness where improving your training is concerned.  

Creating Content

  1. Collect as much data on your core topics as possible. This can include white papers, blog posts, case studies, news articles, product detail pages, and more. 
  2. Train the ChatGPT model, tweaking and tuning it until it can reliably generate relevant content. 
  3. Input any prompt, question, or subject related to one of your topics. 
  4. Review, refine, and rework the content ChatGPT generated. 
  5. Leverage and promote the content as normal. 

Next Steps: Make ChatGPT Part of Your Customer Acquisition & Retention Strategy

ChatGPT is an incredibly powerful addition to any sales team’s tool set, regardless of how you intend to use it. At the same time, it’s only part of the equation. If your sales team cannot provide high-quality experiences to customers and prospects, even the most advanced AI can only do so much. 

You need a solid customer acquisition and retention strategy. You also need to enable your sales team with the tools and technology to execute said strategy via world-class sales demos, proof of concept demos, and customer training. 

Our eBook, Mastering Customer Acquisition and Retention, shows you how to get started on both fronts, providing the knowledge you need to get the most out of ChatGPT. Download it today and discover some of the top customer acquisition and retention strategies you can start deploying with ChatGPT.

MasteringCustomerAcquisitionandRetention