👩‍💼 How AI is radically changing B2B sales right now

AI-HOI AInauts,

Welcome to the latest issue of your favorite newsletter. Today we have an introduction to sales with AI and a new prompt hack.

Here's what we have in store for you:

• 👩‍💼 How AI is radically changing B2B sales right now

• ✍️ Improve your prompts with the OpenAI Meta Prompt

• 🔮 This is what AI will do in the next 10 years

Let’s go!

👩‍💼 How AI is radically changing B2B sales right now

A few days ago, we had an exciting conversation with an absolute B2B sales professional. He wants to remain unknown, which is always a sign that things are going well for him … 😉 

We talked about B2B sales, cold calling, CRM and, of course, the impact of AI.

In the course of the conversation, we realized that the way companies acquire corporate customers is changing radically - and how AI is contributing to this.

Small sales teams, sometimes one-man or one-woman shows, are acquiring large customers by using AI, e.g. via:

• LinkedIn to interact with defined profiles on posts,

• scrape data from all people that engage with the posts,

• then enrich it with AI to complete email, company information, etc.,

• identify suitable customer targets,

• and send automated, highly personalized outreach campaigns.

We all know those annoying emails and DMs that bluntly pitch us stuff.

But what if you get an email from someone whose name you've already read somewhere on LinkedIn before? Someone who has interacted with your posts in a meaningful way and then writes something along these lines:

"Hey, interesting discussion on LinkedIn the other day about XY's post. XY is a good client of mine, and I had a feeling you were looking for something similar. If you feel like it, we can have a chat sometime..."

This could work better, right?

At its core, good sales is never about forcing something on someone, but ideally you know exactly which potential customers need your solution and when they need it - and that's when you approach them.

AI is currently changing a lot in this field.

Which tools support B2B sales with AI?

It's exciting when you don't have to do the process described above manually, but rather through largely automated systems.

One tool that is helping to bring about this radical change in B2B sales through AI is HubSpot, for example (which is why we are working with them).

HubSpot has a feature in its in-house AI called Breeze Intelligence.

Breeze Intelligence uses AI on three levels:

1) Data enrichment

Let's stay with the case above and assume that you have a list of LinkedIn names and profiles that have interacted with a particular post, for example.

You can then import these into HubSpot and have Breeze Intelligence add up to 40 attributes.

For example: role, employer, location, revenue, industry, address, social media profiles, email etc.

This allows you to see very quickly who from this list could potentially be of interest and you can then address these people directly through (automated) campaigns.

2) Find companies with buying intent

Wouldn't it be cool to know who is hanging around on your website? Or even better: on your offer page or pricing page?

Whoever is on there is probably interested in your solution.

Breeze Intelligence can do this and tells you when someone from your target market is on your website and who they are!

Imagine a person is on your website and checks it out, maybe even twice.

A little bit later, this person happens to receive an email from you with a very good time-limited offer. Nice, isn't it?

If you're thinking: "Yes, but it's probably also super complicated...", then let us reassure you: the setup is very simple.

• You simply define your target market. In our case, 8,763 companies in Germany.

• Then you determine when someone has a purchase intention for you.

• Finally, integrate the script on the website, and you're done!

HubSpot Breeze uses reverse IP and other sources to tell you who from your target market has visited your website.

3) Intelligent forms

The last AI helper from Breeze Intelligence are intelligent forms. They help you to quickly turn your leads into customers by only asking for the information that is not already available in the intelligence data.

Let's say you always need email, company name, number of employees, revenue and phone number.

If someone enters their email and Breeze Intelligence already has all the details about the company, this information is no longer requested.

Of course, this results in many more prospects converting, because the number of people who submit the form decreases with each additional input field.

You don't need any technical know-how to build such intelligent forms. The editor is super simple, the intelligence runs in the background.

That was just an overview of a few important little features. We firmly believe that the world of B2B sales is continuing to change rapidly. If you don't jump on board and take advantage of these opportunities, you're missing out on a lot of potential.

If you or your company has corporate customers and want to scale sales, be sure to take a closer look at HubSpot Breeze. You can test it here for free:

Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg. The topic is too extensive for a single article. Feel free to write to us if you are interested and would like us to do a deep dive, white paper or something similar on the subject.

✍️ Improve your prompts with the OpenAI Meta Prompt

Here's a quick but very useful topic for your practice. If you've been reading us for a while, then you know our mantra:

"The better your prompts, the better your results with AI."

However, writing good, detailed prompts is often time-consuming and exhausting. That's why we've been using so-called meta prompts for a long time.

These are prompts that ask the AI to turn your simple description into a well-structured prompt.

We used to use Anthropic's Prompt Builder for this.

Now, OpenAI has also published a meta prompt that helps you to generate great prompts. We are copying it here in full length, because it is quite interesting to read how OpenAI talks to its own system. Here is the prompt:

Given a task description or existing prompt, produce a detailed system prompt to guide a language model in completing the task effectively.

# Guidelines

- Understand the Task: Grasp the main objective, goals, requirements, constraints, and expected output.

- Minimal Changes: If an existing prompt is provided, improve it only if it's simple. For complex prompts, enhance clarity and add missing elements without altering the original structure.

- Reasoning Before Conclusions**: Encourage reasoning steps before any conclusions are reached. ATTENTION! If the user provides examples where the reasoning happens afterward, REVERSE the order! NEVER START EXAMPLES WITH CONCLUSIONS!

- Reasoning Order: Call out reasoning portions of the prompt and conclusion parts (specific fields by name). For each, determine the ORDER in which this is done, and whether it needs to be reversed.

- Conclusion, classifications, or results should ALWAYS appear last.

- Examples: Include high-quality examples if helpful, using placeholders [in brackets] for complex elements.

- What kinds of examples may need to be included, how many, and whether they are complex enough to benefit from placeholders.

- Clarity and Conciseness: Use clear, specific language. Avoid unnecessary instructions or bland statements.

- Formatting: Use markdown features for readability. 

DO NOT USE ``` CODE BLOCKS UNLESS SPECIFICALLY REQUESTED.

- Preserve User Content: If the input task or prompt includes extensive guidelines or examples, preserve them entirely, or as closely as possible. If they are vague, consider breaking down into sub-steps. Keep any details, guidelines, examples, variables, or placeholders provided by the user.

- Constants: DO include constants in the prompt, as they are not susceptible to prompt injection. Such as guides, rubrics, and examples.

- Output Format: Explicitly the most appropriate output format, in detail. This should include length and syntax (e.g. short sentence, paragraph, JSON, etc.)

- For tasks outputting well-defined or structured data (classification, JSON, etc.) bias toward outputting a JSON.

- JSON should never be wrapped in code blocks (```) unless explicitly requested.

The final prompt you output should adhere to the following structure below. Do not include any additional commentary, only output the completed system prompt. SPECIFICALLY, do not include any additional messages at the start or end of the prompt. (e.g. no "---")

[Concise instruction describing the task - this should be the first line in the prompt, no section header]

[Additional details as needed.]

[Optional sections with headings or bullet points for detailed steps.]

# Steps [optional]

[optional: a detailed breakdown of the steps necessary to accomplish the task]

# Output Format

[Specifically call out how the output should be formatted, be it response length, structure e.g. JSON, markdown, etc]

# Examples [optional]

[Optional: 1-3 well-defined examples with placeholders if necessary. Clearly mark where examples start and end, and what the input and output are. User placeholders as necessary.]
[If the examples are shorter than what a realistic example is expected to be, make a reference with () explaining how real examples should be longer / shorter / different. AND USE PLACEHOLDERS! ]

# Notes [optional]

[optional: edge cases, details, and an area to call or repeat out specific important considerations]

The best thing to do now is to quickly create a GPT and post the prompt from above in the system instructions. And now you have your own prompt generator!

And for all the lazy ones, here is the direct link to our Prompt GPT. 😎

Have fun with the improved prompts and results!

🔮 What AI will achieve in the next 10 years

We've already written a lot today, so let's finish up with a quick reading recommendation.

Dario Amodei, Anthropics CEO and creator of our favorite chatbot Claude, has published an essay on how he thinks AI will make the world a much better place in the next 10 years.

Here are the top three theses, from someone who is at the forefront and should be taken seriously:

• AI will create advances in biology and medicine that would normally have taken 50-100 years in 10 years.

• AI could strengthen democracies by exposing misinformation and providing tools to undermine authoritarian regimes... (Note: Or the opposite...)

• AI will cure most mental illnesses and improve the human experience.

It's an exciting article. If you're bored on the weekend... read it here! 

We made it! But no need to be sad. The AInauts will be back soon, with new food for thought.

Reto & Fabian from the AInauts

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