Estimated read time: 2 minutes
By Lee Rodgers, CEO at Syft AI
None.
At least not to use their sales tools. And if that's not the case, you have a vendor problem, not a training problem.
Here's what I mean.
Every time you see an open text box in your sales application, ask yourself a question: why is this here?
If the core workflow of a sales tool requires you to write a good prompt to get a good result, the vendor is outsourcing their development work to you.
Valuable things are hard to do.
Finding the right account. Qualifying it properly. Identifying the right contact. Writing something worth reading. That's genuinely complex work, and there's no way around it.
Somebody has to do the hard part.
If you're the one investing money and time into a tool, the vendor should be absorbing that complexity, not handing you a text box and wishing you luck.
A great sales tool should feel simple to use. Not because the problem is simple, but because the vendor did the hard work so you don't have to.
Yes, there are edge cases. Things so specific to your business that no vendor could reasonably anticipate them. One of our customers never wanted to use the letter “I” in any outbound email, no matter what. You can't predict that.
But these should be handled with simple settings and rules, not open ended prompts. In this case, the vendor gets you 90%+ of the way there. You fine-tune the last 5%.
That should be the exception, not the default experience.
To use a well-built sales tool? None.
If your team needs prompt engineering skills to get value out of a product they're paying for, the product isn't finished.
There are massive advantages to learning how to use AI well outside of your sales tools. Ironically, it mostly comes down to the two most human skills there are: communication and organization. But that's another post.
