Should sales reps spend more time curating AI prompts?

As AI automation touches every facet of the sales funnel, more focus is being put on specific AI use cases. In a perfect world, AI tools and agents streamline workflows and simplify tasks, but behind any action is a prompt; many leaders think reps should spend more time curating what they put into AI engines to get the best results.

“People that are really good at leveraging the best prompting techniques are producing outsized productivity compared to people that don’t know how to use AI prompts,” said Shankar Ganapathy, founder at Boomerang, an AI-powered intelligence platform.

Sticking to the playbook

As more companies infuse AI into their tech stacks, CROs and Rev Ops leaders are tasked with helping sales reps get the best out of the technology. While establishing an AI playbook of sorts gives the team a sense of direction, Ganapathy thinks sales reps should feel free to experiment with prompts to see what works best for them as the AI landscape evolves.

“We are seeing more and more companies standardize playbooks that are centrally run by the team, so reps can ideate to experiments, but then the moment something is working, it’s taken over by a Rev Ops or a GTM engineer, and it’s deployed as standardized play,” he said.

Kuber Sharma, senior director of product marketing at enterprise automation software platform UiPath, says GTM teams should deploy this kind of AI playbook, especially as older generations have had a harder time adopting AI tools.

“Salespeople are typically in their profession for a very long time and now we are running into people who’ve been doing the same thing for 20 years, but the way of doing this has changed so much,” Sharma said. “You have to teach the old dog new tricks. Classically you say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but having a library really helps that onboarding journey.”

Sharma suggested AI role-playing as a way for sales reps to get more familiar with these prompts and to experiment with them. He says this allows a seller to not only learn new things with AI, but “bounce those ideas against a couple of AI sales personas.”

Garbage in, garbage out

AI’s proliferation has resulted in the emergence of the dreaded “AI workslop”—AI-generated work that lacks substance; this is typically a result of insufficient or lazy prompting, leaving the opportunity for the AI to guess the context and tone—a potential recipe for disaster. Focusing on more curated prompts can prevent this from happening.

“We have to get into a way that these prompts are sophisticated enough that they are customized,” Sharma said. “It’s about data, and it’s not just about AI…which is garbage in and garbage out, except that garbage now comes out sounding very confident…There’s always that threat that somebody may be mindlessly using AI to automate part of their job and may make a lot of mistakes.”

Ganapathy said AI prompting should be used for busy work like account research, so sales reps can get into a cadence where the same task can be repeated per client or prospect.

“Getting AI prompts to go through [research] in a structured way, so that it is repeatable and scalable,” he said. “We’ve seen that a lot where it works really well.”

Better outcomes

The big picture seems to be that more curated prompts deliver better outcomes, which allows sales reps to be more efficient and successful. According to Ganapathy, this also allows them to expand their scope of coverage, giving them the ability to increase their quotas and territories.

“The really good reps are moving from just prompting to skilling, and that is the next era where the moment you figure out best practices, you don’t want to prompt them manually every single time,” he said. “You create a skill and call that skill to do work.”