I was wrong about AI…🥶

Ladies and gents, I was wrong.

I saw sales people use AI to do their outbound and I was disgusted.

The messaging was off, the “PS” at the end was shit, the entire execution was bad.

I quickly jumped to the conclusion that the problem was AI.

Until of course i realized recently, that the problem is CLEARLY the dumb salesperson.

I have spent the last month learning how to write prompts and how to automate a CHUNK of my work, and I don’t think I’m ever looking back.

Today’s email I will give you a glance at what I have been building!

Chapter 1: Prompting 🥶

The issue I have noticed with the badly written emails generated by Chat-GPT is that people will write a prompt like this:

No shit Chat-GPT will come up with absolute hot garbage of an output.

There is one youtube video I Watched that helped me out, I thought he did a great job breaking down how to write a prompt that generates the output you want:

If you’re serious about writing cold emails with chat-gpt, start by learning the basics, I can’t recommend this video enough.

TLDR:

1. Give it context

2. Give it a specific goal

3. Give it a specific format

4. Break down big tasks into smaller tasks

5. Provide examples

I’d say #4 and #5 are the ones you want to spend the most time on, let me show you an example of a prompt I have written for one of my clients:

Chapter 2: My prompt

Before you read the prompt, I know there will parts of it that might be confusing or just empty, so make sure you ready the next chapter, to understand why.

Act as an expert Business development representative (BDR) who writes great cold emails to book meetings. I am the founder of Fiber.ai, an Ai native customer support platform. I am reaching out to early stage founders who have to wear multiple hats to run the business, including the “customer support hat”. Often these founders have to manually respond to customer support tickets, which takes time away from them to work on the business. So my goal with my cold email is to bring up that pain point and offer the prospect to test out my tool.

Write me 1 cold email, and with my various inputs: The inputs are 1. What my company does. 2. How are we different from our competitors? 3. A case study on how we have helped people. 4. The way that companies are solving this problem today. 5. The reason I’m reaching out to the person. 6.Something personal about the prospect.7. What my prospect’s company does.

1.Ai native customer support platform that enables you to automate customer tickets. 2.We require zero configuration and we provide you with a chat bot that auto learns automations based on how your CS team responds to tickets. We are also cheaper than most competition. 3.We helped SmartPass take their chat bot cost from $450/M to $10/M and saved founders 10 hours/week by training a custom AI bot on their business. 4.Founders have to manually respond to customer support tickets. 5. I am reaching out because from one YC backed founder to another, I’d love to give the prospect access to our Ai native customer support platform so they can focus on other parts of the business. 6. .7.

Please also make sure you to follow these guidelines:

• Make sure the level of english used in the email is of grade 10 ( that means avoid using complicated words)

• Always start with hi [first name]

• Followed by an observation of something personal about them using input 6.

• Second sentence should use “input 6” “input 1”, “input 4”, “input 5” and “input 7” to create a creative way of connecting the prospect’s personal information with my offer.

• Third sentence is social proof, use “input 3”.

• For the last sentence, use any of the following call to actions, “Is this worth a chat?” or “ Interested?” or “is this worth exploring?” or “Is this something that’s top of mind for you now?” Avoid asking the prospect for a call or a meeting.

• Avoid saying anything like I hope this email finds you well or other useless pleasantries.

• Keep the email under 100 words.

Example #1

Hey Earl, I noticed you’re a fan of zombies.

Do you know what zombies and support tickets have in common?

They can both pile up very quickly.

Chances are you were left alone fighting off all the zombies during your Sabbatical, and I wouldn’t want you to go through a similar experience again with support tickets.

From one YC backed founder to another, I’d love to give you access to our Ai native customer support platform.

Interested?

Example #2

Hey Miles, saw your tweet trying to find a good keyboard/mouse combo for macbook.

Don’t shoot the messenger, but getting on that apple vision pro waitlist might be the move for you here.

Anyway, Miles I’m reaching out because from one YC backed founder to another, I wanted to give you early access to our Ai native customer support platform.

If your hands hurt now, can you imagine the pain you’re going to have to go through responding to every support ticket that comes in?

Let me know if you’re interested to have a look at what we’re building.

Example #3

Hey Ishaan, gotta give it to you and Krrish for putting together one of the most unique landing pages I’ve ever seen.

I see you’re giving away $250 in Open AI credits, and we want to do something kind of similar.

From one YC backed founder to another, I’d love to give you access to our Ai native customer support platform.

This way you prevent potentially hallucinating from responding to so many cs tickets in the future.

Interested?

Example #4

Hey Jake,

I've seen your frequent posts about New York City. Just like NYC never sleeps, customer support inquiries never take a break.

You're an early-stage founder. We both know the hours you put into your business, and I'm sure manually answering customer support tickets isn't what you imagined. I'd love to give you access to Fiber.ai, our AI native customer support platform that automates responses, saving you time to focus on what you love: growing your business.

SmartPass, another early-stage founder, was in a similar position. We helped them reduce their chat bot cost from $450/M to $10/M, and freed up 10 hours of their week by automating their customer service.

Interested in giving Fiber.ai a try?

Best, Xavier

Example #5

Hey Nick, you're all about slashing time off diligence in private equity, and I can't help but think about how our missions align in reducing wasted hours.

You and I both know the frustration that comes with seeing founders manually swimming through an ocean of customer support tickets, when they could be focusing on building their companies. Just like you've seen friends in PE struggle with unnecessary diligence, I'd love to show you how our AI-native customer support platform, Fiber.ai, can ease that burden in the startup world.

We've already helped SmartPass reduce their chatbot cost from $450/month to just $10/month and saved their founders 10 hours per week. That's 10 more hours to invest into growth, not tickets.

Is this the kind of time-saving solution you’d be interested in exploring

Chapter 3: Breakdown

You’ll notice some of my inputs were empty, like inputs 6 and 7.

That’s because I prefer to work with Chat-GPT and not let it do the entire job.

I find what I like to call “The golden nugget” which is essentially the personal piece of information about my prospect.

I also then find the breakdown of my prospect’s company’s mission ( that part I actually automate, it’s easy to do).

The outcome is that Chat-GPT will write a great, personalized and relevant email.

Re-read the examples on there, they were all written by chat-gpt 😉 

Takeaways

• I was wrong about AI + Sales

• Learning how to prompt has opened up so many doors for me

• The BDR role will change dramatically in the next 12 months if not 6

• Don’t be lazy, learn this if you want to stay ahead of the curve