Can ChatGPT find sales leads for you?

What can ChatGPT do well for prospecting

A general chat assistant such as ChatGPT is good at the thinking that comes before a lead list. It can turn a product description into a first ideal customer profile, suggest segments you had not considered and list the events that make a company likely to buy.

Where a chat assistant can read the web, it can also summarise what a named company says about itself and point to the pages it used. That is useful research, as long as you open the sources.

• Draft an ideal customer profile from your best customers.
• Suggest segments and the problems each one is likely to have.
• List trigger events to watch for, such as new hires or new markets.
• Research a named company from its public pages.
• Draft a first message once you have a real contact.

Why can an AI chatbot invent contact details

A chatbot can invent contact details because it predicts likely text, and an address in a common first-name-dot-last-name pattern is easy to predict. The result looks right whether or not the mailbox exists.

Names and titles have the same problem. Even with web search, a chatbot finds what was published, which may be a year old, and people change jobs. Never paste a chatbot's list of people straight into a send.

Can ChatGPT build a lead list for me

It can give you a list of companies worth checking, but not a dependable list of people with working emails. Treat its company list as a starting point: confirm each business exists, still operates and fits your size and market.

Collecting people's details from scattered web pages also raises a GDPR question you will need to answer later: where did each person's data come from, and were they told?

What does a contact database with confidence scores change

A contact database changes the source: each person comes from a record rather than a prediction, and each email carries a score you can act on. A catch-all flag tells you when the mailbox cannot be confirmed at all.

It also gives you a straight answer to the question of where the data came from, which matters both for your privacy notice and for deciding how far to trust a row.

How do you combine a chat assistant and a contact source

Use the chat assistant for judgement and the contact source for facts, in that order. Each step feeds the next.

• Agree the ideal customer profile in chat.
• Search for companies that match it and choose the accounts worth working.
• Find the people in the right roles at those accounts from a contact source.
• Check each email's confidence before it goes anywhere.
• Ask the assistant to draft a message per person from what you now know.