How I Used AI Tools to Create a
High-Value Sales Piece
By Jen Phillips April

I have a confession to make …

 … I don’t stay on top of all the AI tools as much as I’d like to. Frankly, it’s hard.

I have client work to complete, marketing tasks to keep my business going, and life outside of work … the same as everyone else.

Sure, I subscribe to newsletters like Inside AI, but when it comes to reading them? Let’s just say I have a lot of unopened newsletters. A client just sent me a pile of links to Google’s new AI shake-up on search, but I was on vacation and have only skimmed the material.

I’ve never tried AI drawing tools like Midjourney or any of the music-oriented AI tools.

However, I do use AI tools and have for several years.

One of my clients subscribes to the SEO tool Clearscope. Her content briefs include information from Clearscope. The tool uses AI to pull all the competitive keywords and related top-ranking articles. It assigns a grade to each of those articles based on keyword usage. It even pulls outlines from those articles and provides a useful starting point.

I’ve been a longtime Grammarly user, and in the past year, I have added ChatGPT, Perplexity.ai, and AI-enabled transcription services to my toolbox.

While those have become second nature to me, another practical-use case saved me hours on a recent project. And I wouldn’t have known a thing about it if it weren’t for my partner Rick, who spends hours every week immersed in the latest AI developments.

When a client asked me to handle a new project, I immediately turned to Rick and asked if he could help. He said yes, and 10 minutes later, shared a sample template from an AI tool. I was impressed and scheduled a call with my client.

We recorded the call using reader.ai, which is free for up to five calls a month. Rick then took that transcription, fed it into ChatGPT, and gave it the parameters to produce the content we needed. After that, he fed that content breakdown into another AI tool that produces slides. In less than an hour, we had a pretty solid first draft.

This is the kind of progress I can appreciate!

To give you more insight into the workflow, I’ll share the exact steps we took to create a decent draft of a high-value sales piece in about an hour. From there, it was a matter of adapting the content to tell a compelling story and formatting it for easy consumption. We saved hours on this important project thanks to the AI tools and our experience.

This got me thinking: How many AI tools are you using? AI goes far beyond text-based tools like ChatGPT. You can create illustrations, graphs, and full slide decks like we did. A few revisions, and boom, you have a high-value sales piece in a fraction of the time.

In our case, we created a pitch deck.

What’s a Pitch Deck?

A pitch deck is a series of slides that showcase a business opportunity. It includes graphs, facts, and figures to tell a compelling business story. Companies use them to make a persuasive presentation when they’re asking for an investment.

A year ago, if my client had asked me to create a pitch deck, I would have asked for his facts and figures, created graphs, and designed slides. None of it is complicated, but it would have taken way more than an hour.

In this instance, I asked for his facts, figures, and target audience, and an AI tool created a slide template with the details filled in. It literally took seconds to create the template. Then, we used our brainpower to edit the slides and to weave in a compelling story about the business opportunity. I don’t know about you, but we enjoyed this process way more than creating slides from scratch.

It shaved several hours or more off the project. Here’s the step-by-step of what we did.

How We Used AI to Create This Important Sales Piece

In April, my client asked me to create a pitch deck to share with a few potential investors to raise capital to scale their software product.

1. Since it had been several years since I’d created a pitch deck, I decided to refresh my memory and asked ChatGPT to list the components of a pitch deck.
2. Armed with my 13ish slide topics, I put together my client questions. The list included questions about their goals, target audience, current financial information, and projections.
3. I scheduled a call with my client to ask the questions and recorded it using reader.ai.
4. Rick fed an AI-generated transcript of the call into ChatGPT and asked it to break the transcript into a pitch deck format. That took seconds.
5. He cleaned up the draft and gave that to an AI slide deck generator called Gamma. Within a minute (or less!) it created a nice-looking slide presentation that incorporated all the details we’d given it.
6. We made a few revisions to those slides, shared them with the client, and fine-tuned the details.

If we’d had to do this without AI, we would have had to wade through my client’s answers to strip them down to the essentials and think through how to present the information on the slides. But AI-generated transcripts give you the primary takeaways. With those takeaways, we were able to use AI to outline a basic script and put it in slide format.

In the past, it would easily take me four hours to build a slide deck without polishing, but with the AI transcription, I had the information I needed at my fingertips. Then, the other tools broke the information into the appropriate format and adapted it to slides. After that, we only had to edit it and add illustrations.

How You Can Use AI Tools to Save Time and Provide Value

There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of AI-specific tools available these days, each with specific uses. Some are free, while others are paid. Tools like ChatGPT, Gemini (previously Bard), Perplexity.ai, and many others can be valued partners for brainstorming, outlining, explaining complicated topics, and even a first draft.

Here are some ways AI can help you get more done in less time in your business.

1. Ask AI to explain complex concepts. From complicated medical conditions to technology, I’ve asked AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity.ai to explain it to me like I’m 8 years old and use an analogy.

Here’s a sample prompt. “You are an expert health writer with excellent communication and writing skills. Your task is to explain [complicated medical term] simply for an 8-year-old. Please include an analogy.”

2. Ask AI to help you better understand your intended reader. As freelance writers, we often end up writing about things we may not have personal experience with, but with good questions, we can craft a narrative much like a reporter.

AI can distill mountains of data into usable actions. For example, pretend you’re writing about how enterprise companies can save on cloud computing. This is a complex topic with a lengthy sales cycle, yet every day the companies don’t make a decision costs them money. Your job as the writer is to help the decision-makers see how much money they’re wasting, so that they’ll choose to work with your company.

Here’s how you could craft a prompt for such a situation. “You’re an expert technology writer who sells cloud computing consulting services to enterprise companies. What are the top questions the chief technology officer would ask about cloud computing costs? What do they need to know before making a decision to purchase your consulting services?”

You can see how, if you drill down, you can learn a lot about your intended reader. I’d keep going with different job titles to get a sense of what matters to people in different roles. This information would inform my questions when I interview a subject matter expert.

AI has many implications for freelance business owners, and it’s getting better all the time. If you treat it like a game — “How can I use it to help me understand X better?” or “How can I use it to save me time?” — it can be not only extremely useful but fun.

One of the best things you can do to get to know AI better is to start practicing creating prompts. Over time, you’ll learn to craft prompts that get you better results. Try it out and see how it can help you, your business, and your clients!

This article, How I Used AI Tools to Create a High-Value Sales Piece, was originally published by Digital Copywriter.