You can't afford to ignore ChatGPT anymore

The cheapest, most reliable assistant you'll ever have

If I had a dollar for every time I’d wished for some extra help at work, well - let’s just say I’d be working on this newsletter from a nice sunny beach somewhere.

Photo by Sean Oulashin on Unsplash

You may be in the same boat as me. Has anyone ever felt like they could use an extra hand, or twelve?

While we’re still waiting for Rosie the Robot for GTM Operations teams, perhaps you should be taking a closer look at ChatGPT.

That’s right - that innocuous little “chatbot” has some amazing superpowers that you can harness without too much extra effort.

There’s already a good number of meaningful use cases, and new ones are being implemented all the time. The speed of improvement with ChatGPT and other AI tools is astonishing. Just check out some of the new video creation functionality ChatGPT announced recently. Each new release has added significant functionality and new features, and they’re coming frequently.

ChatGPT can become the utility tool in your toolbelt, helping with everything from summarizing important documents to tutoring you with customized lessons, from analyzing data to helping generate your weekly updates. Leveraging ChatGPT can truly help you spend time on high-ROI activities, and offload the mindless work to a machine.

Really? AI?

(read: skip this section if you see potential in AI today)

If you’re not all in on AI yet, I get it. It’s hard, especially when you’re an overworked Marketing Ops pro, to want to carve out some time to look at something that may still be considered by some to be a fad.

Since you’ve invested some of your precious time in reading this newsletter (for which I am very, very grateful 🙏), please allow me a few sentences to try and convince those of you still on the fence that artificial intelligence is something very much worth your time and attention.

Instead of viewing AI as this “thing” - an entity (like in Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part 1) or Jarvis/Vision from the Avengers, just think of it for a minute as a tool, just like the others you use every day.

If AI was just a tool and didn’t have all of this crazy hype, and everyone and their talking dog wasn’t trying to get you to buy into it, how would you feel about it? If you had access to a tool that could fundamentally change the way you work, free up your time from the endless busy work currently monopolizing your calendar, and offer significant opportunities for innovation, wouldn’t you consider trying it?

If you’re still not convinced AI isn’t all talk, that’s fine. I know some people will continue to hold out. Perhaps after reviewing the use cases below you’ll see where I’m coming from. Don’t worry, this isn’t going to turn into an AI newsletter. It’ll still feature as it relates to growing your career.

It’s all about the question

You may remember that a few months ago, some companies were hiring for AI “prompt engineers” left and right. It was the hottest job on the block and some people were speculating it was going to become a ubiquitous role.

The excitement surrounding prompt engineers seems to have died down some, but one thing we can take away from this phenomenon is the importance of a good prompt, or question when communicating with a GPT (or Generative Pre-Trained Transformer).

Many will tell you (and this has been my experience as well), that using a GPT is still work. As GPTs aren’t living, breathing beings with brains, they don’t remember very well, can’t always use context, and can often hallucinate. Because it doesn’t have much of a memory (yet), you need to carefully craft each prompt or communication in a conversation to ensure that ChatGPT doesn’t lose the thread of what you’re talking about.

So it is very much worth learning how to craft prompts to ensure you’re getting as accurate a response as possible. Forgetting this can derail an entire conversation and require starting over, which means that it will take longer to get the result you need from the chat.

Much of this is intuitive, especially if you treat ChatGPT like you’re in a scene from 50 First Dates. You’ll become comfortable with it after the first few minorly irritating experiences.

So, with that, let’s get to the use cases.

ChatGPT Use Cases:

First, some housekeeping.

You can sign up for a ChatGPT account here.

Some of these use cases can be executed using the free version of ChatGPT (as of this writing, ChatGPT 3.5).

All of these use cases can be executed using the paid version of ChatGPT (as of this writing, ChatGPT 4.5).

The current price for a paid ChatGPT account is $20/month. It’s cheap enough and valuable enough that you should easily be able to make the business case for having your employer foot the bill, if applicable.

ChatGPT 4.5 enables the creation of custom GPTs, functionality that is required for some of the use cases - typically anything where you want to “train” a GPT model on a specific data set that you provide.

Here is a high-level tutorial for how to create a GPT, and this video is very informative as well.

No custom GPT needed (can be done with a free account):

Code creation

I’ve used ChatGPT to create HTML, Javascript snippets, SOQL queries, and even tweaks to Velocity Scripts for Marketo. I’m certainly not a coder by any stretch of the imagination, so having a tool that can generate sample code (that seems to be about 80-90% accurate) is a lifesaver.

I appreciate that ChatGPT explains how each part of the code works, as well, so if I do need to attempt some ad hoc adjustments I can be slightly more informed.

The actual code is provided below the explanation and is super easy to copy and use. Because you can typically refer to previous messages in your conversation, you can iterate on the code or troubleshoot error messages to get everything working correctly.

Logic sanity check

Over the last few months, we’ve been working on a custom integration between some of our tools. Handling some of the logic around how and when records should be synced in the integration tool was a headache-inducing exercise. To confirm that we’d orchestrated the logic correctly, we asked ChatGPT to recommend how it would approach the situation - luckily the solution it provided matched our own!

Learn literally anything

You can ask ChatGPT to evaluate your understanding of a topic by asking you questions and evaluating your responses. Once it understands how well-versed you are in “Predictive Lead Scoring” or “SQL” or any other of the thousands of things we hear about each month, ChatGPT becomes the ultimate tutor.

You can ask it to teach you concepts, ask follow-up questions, and even instruct it to include pop-culture references or quotes from movies to help deepen your understanding. So next time you hear an acronym you don’t understand in a meeting - don’t Google it, have your personal tutor provide you with a customized walkthrough at your leisure.

Custom GPT needed/paid account required:

Operations role-related tasks:

Data Analysis

ChatGPT can be prompted to analyze data in spreadsheets and provide insight and specific analyses. Does it need some guidance? Absolutely. Will it unearth a silver bullet in your data? Highly unlikely.

However, the work it does can help you quickly understand the data contained in hundreds or thousands of cells in a matter of seconds.

I recently used ChatGPT to help me analyze the compensation data from the open Marketing Operations roles I found on LinkedIn. It took some effort to get helpful insights, but this is an area in which I’m excited about developing my prompting abilities.

New Hire onboarding

All sorts of documentation is created (or at least collected) when you have someone new join your team. Upload this information to a GPT and turn it into an onboarding buddy for your new hire. Include everything: role- and team-specific items, as well as company policies, holiday information, the list could go on and on. Whenever your new hire has a specific question, they can ping the GPT first.

Other Examples:

• Lead scoring/prioritization (teach ChatGPT with a set of your ideal customers and then ask it to compare new leads with enriched data to them and assign a similarity score - instant data-driven lead scoring)

• Document Creation (requirements docs, project plans, agendas - templates for all of these can be set in a GPT and then updated with inputs you provide)

• Weekly Update Creator (follow the same format each week in an update? Set the template in a GPT, feed in your completed work, and cut down the time you spend every week keeping your boss up to speed)

• Auto-responder email management (forward your auto-replies to ChatGPT for CRM updates - org changes, new emails/leads, champion changes, etc.)

• Sentiment Analysis (tweets, LinkedIn replies, Facebook posts, emails - feed them to ChatGPT and ask for sentiment analysis for each piece of content)

Personal development:

Continuing Education (PDF, Webinar, and Podcast)

Just downloaded an interesting-sounding whitepaper but don’t have the time to read all 17 pages? Did you miss the webinar last week about new releases for your favorite tool?

Have no fear - you can easily upload PDF files and documents to ChatGPT and ask it to analyze the document and summarize the key points for you.

This is an example of a prompt I would start with:

“I am going to upload a PDF entitled "xyz" - it is a topic I'm interested in learning more about related to my work as a Marketing Operations Manager. Please analyze the document and provide a brief summary of the key points. Highlight any specific recommendations the document makes as well.”

If you’d like to take this process a step further and customize your experience to the nth degree, you could include something like this:

“I am going to upload a PDF entitled "xyz" - it is a topic I'm interested in learning more about related to my work as a Marketing Operations Manager. Please analyze the document and provide a brief summary of the key points. Highlight any specific recommendations the document makes as well.

I am somewhat familiar with this topic already. Before presenting your summary of the document, please ask me 5-7 questions to determine my level of understanding related to the content and exclude presenting anything that I am already familiar with.”

With this last prompt, ChatGPT will review the PDF, ask you multiple questions about it to determine your level of understanding, and then only present new information from the PDF, saving you even more time.

How does this work with webinars? You can’t yet upload and analyze videos, but ChatGPT handles transcripts very well. The more detailed the better. Because many podcasts also provide transcripts, you can include them as sources of information.

BONUS: Vendor evaluations are another interesting application of this use case. If you have multiple decks or presentations from vendors that you can get into PDF format, they can be analyzed and compared, as can transcripts from recorded demos.

ReadMe doc

Have you created a “ReadMe” doc that describes your personality, working style, how you like to collaborate, and other helpful items for those on your team? This is a great resource to set up as a GPT to allow others to quickly find the specific item they might be looking for. You can even give the GPT some of your personality and communication style in the setup process to add to the ‘realism’ of the experience. 😆

Other Examples:

• Career Adviser (Provide context around your current situation and where you’d like to head next and ask ChatGPT for feedback. You can include very specific coaching information for ChatGPT in your prompt - the more specific here the better your feedback will be. They could be a former Marketing Operations pro, a Marketing leader and mentor, or a Fortune 500 CEO - it’s up to you)

• Hard conversation coach (Have a hard conversation coming up? Get recommendations and practice with a custom GPT)

Wrap Up + Resources

I hope that this post has opened your eyes to the possibilities when it comes to using ChatGPT as your personal assistant. Gaining experience with ChatGPT will not only be beneficial because of the literal time savings you’ll get from using it, but it’ll also create a valuable experience using a tool that will likely be a major part of the tech stacks we manage in the future.

If you’d like to take things to the next level and enable ChatGPT to take action on your behalf (or at least, via automations that you’ve set up), this Zapier article is worth checking out.

For even more GPT-specific inspiration, I highly recommend checking out this write-up from Lenny’s Newsletter (which served as the inspiration for this post):

You should be playing with GPTs at work

If you’d like to do more of a deep dive on the AI side, I would recommend checking out the following newsletters:

• Every

• Superhuman

Happy prompting!