Using AI to Fully Capture the Key Information on Opportunities

And save AEs time on busywork that they hate.

Very few AEs like to fill out Salesforce or HubSpot with information about their opportunities.   It’s one of those necessary evils in selling. Keeping an up-to-date CRM is critical for the whole team to understand an opportunity and to help find the blind spots and see around corners.

I once worked with the CFO years who believed that someday reps will just conduct meetings and everything will be filled out in the CRM for them. We’re much closer to that reality than I realized back then.

Capturing Information from a First Call

I was recently working with a younger AE on opportunity reviews. His CEO was frustrated because he felt that Salesforce should be updated with more details about the opportunity.  The AE was doing good job of the right questions during his calls, but he wasn’t as effective and conveyed back the key points to the rest of the team about the opportunity

The company was using SPICED, which is a sales methodology from the company Winning by Design.  They could’ve just have easily used other common methodologies like BANT or MEDDICC.  Each one is an acronym meant to capture some of the key details about the opportunity.

One of the suggestions I made to the AE was to use ChatGPT to fill out these fields based on the transcript from his calls.  Note that this only works in cases where you have a notetaker on a call, which many companies do, and you have permission to use that with ChatGPT. Many companies will just request that their data isn’t used for training.

AI Prompt

This is the prompt that I gave him:

I'm uploading the transcript from an initial discovery call. $person is from $company and their role is $role. $vendorpeople are also on the call and they are from $vendor. You can find information about their product at $vendorwebsite. We use SPICED as a sales methodology, which stands for Situation, Problems, Impact, Critical Events, and Decision. Based on the transcript from the call, can you provide SPICED details from this call? If there is any one of those areas that you don't know, just reply with "Unknown at this point"

$person: 
$role: 
$company:  
$vendorpeople: 
$vendorwebsite: 
$vendor: 

He would export a transcript of the call, upload it to ChatGPT, and put in this prompt. If he had multiple calls, he combined the call transcripts into one document and used that.

What about for more experienced AEs?

I also used this with the more experienced AEs on the team. They knew what good looks like and had more context than what they input just because they had more pressing things to do. This became a productivity hack for them in which they could spend less time filling out Salesforce while providing more of the details to the rest of the team.

Benefits of this Approach

An Enablement Tool

It ended up being a great learning tool for him because he could write out what he thought those fields should be and then see what ChatGPT would provide back and then he would compare those.

Better Opportunity Reviews

It also helps with opportunity reviews because SPICED captures the most critical details about the opportunity and it’s comprehensive so if you looked at the information in the CRM, there wasn’t any doubt about whether information was just not filled in or not asked during the meeting. If there was a gap in SPICED, that could be discussed and a plan could be created to obtain that information.

Improved Productivity

AEs no longer had to parse through their notes to fill out SPICED (if they were even taking notes at all while a notetaker was being used). Now they could just export the transcript, ask the question to ChatGPT, and just paste those answers into Salesforce or HubSpot

What Next?

It’s not hard to imagine that note-taking tools will do this automatically for AEs, filling out the fields in the CRM tool automatically from not just one call but all calls and emails.