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You wouldn’t spend hours surfing the web for each prospect’s info — only to repeat it 99 more times. Neither will you write messages for hundreds of leads one by one.
So why not use ChatGPT?
It’s fast, scalable, and sustainable. With the right prompts, you can qualify leads faster, engage prospects, and close more deals, without getting burned out from manual efforts.
In this article, we offer practical steps on how to use ChatGPT to generate leads. We also discuss:
Let’s get straight into it.
Yes, ChatGPT can help with lead generation, a process where you attract and capture potential customers with the aim of converting them into sales. Its evolution began in 2016 when generative models generated answers from a vast amount of data.
As of the time of this writing, five iterations of the GPT (Generative Pre-text Transformer) have been introduced, generating coherent and contextually relevant sentences, as well as multimodal images.
Beyond these functions, ChatGPT has become a vital tool in the hands of salespeople. From finding relevant information about leads to personalizing outreach and automating workflow, the AI technology remains a crucial factor for streamlining sales processes in this modern age.
As a salesperson, you can use ChatGPT in three ways:
If your goal is to perform complex sales operations without crossing limits, we advise using the paid versions. It unlocks a variety of features that you can leverage to boost lead generation efforts.
As mentioned earlier, ChatGPT helps with various tasks of lead generation. But what exactly do you gain using the AI tool for these processes? Let’s explore the benefits below.
Lead generation consists of different time-consuming tasks that inhibit productivity. However, with ChatGPT, you can automate these processes, saving hours and enabling you to focus on other crucial activities.
ChatGPT collects and analyzes data from different sources. So, rather than relying on a platform to find information about your leads, you can obtain information from diverse channels (social media platforms, Google, industry directories, etc), leveraging AI for sales prospecting. This streamlines your process and allows you to expand your reach.
ChatGPT can easily collect valuable information about your prospect’s needs, pain points, and preferences. With this approach, you can leverage the numerous data points to create personalized campaigns, driving more engagement among customers.
By creating relevant campaigns for prospects, ChatGPT can help you to nurture leads more effectively, guiding them through the sales funnel for higher conversion rates.
While ChatGPT offers these benefits, it’s essential to note that it doesn’t replace humans. Instead, combined efforts allow you to harness the full potential of this AI tool.
If you’re considering using ChatGPT for lead generation, there are some key details you need to understand. In this section, we will walk you through how to use ChatGPT for lead generation.
Traditional lead sourcing involves lots of manual research. Think about it. You ask for referrals, attend events in person, or place ads on TV only to end up with leads that aren’t relevant to your campaigns. Not only will this waste time, but also leave you exhausted.
However, ChatGPT streamlines this process by taking over the research process. You don’t have to ask for referrals or attend events to get leads. With a single prompt, you can gather relevant information about your prospects and ask it to produce the result in your desired format.
Here is an example. Suppose you’re generating leads for a B2B SaaS company, you can ask ChatGPT to visit relevant competitors’ websites or LinkedIn profiles and look for this information:
In your prompt, instruct ChatGPT to qualify the prospects based on defined criteria. If they meet the criteria, ChatGPT should enter their data in a table and format it in a CSV file. This speeds up your research process and prevents you from uncovering information manually.
Here’s a prompt example:
Here is a list of competitors that are relevant to my business, which belongs to the [industry]. Visit their [website or LinkedIn URL], extract information from key decision-makers with the [job title], and score them based on this information:
Please, format the data in a CSV file. Create a table and assign a column to each information, e.g., Column A for company name. Remove all duplicates from the CSV file and summarize the findings in a numerical score for each category.
While ChatGPT is powerful, we advise that you use it for the most suitable task. For instance, you can integrate OpenAI API into tools like Clay for prospecting, data enrichment, and cleaning. Here is how to use the OpenAI API for extracting key details about job titles from a prospect’s list.
ChatGPT remains one of the best generative AI tools for cold emailing. With its advanced capabilities, you can obtain relevant information about your prospects and create engaging messages that resonate with them. Joaquin Garasino, GTM Engineer Team Lead at ColdIQ, explains that the key to drafting outreach messages is creating structured prompts.
He says, “ChatGPT isn’t as effective as a human copywriter if you just let it freestyle. But if you provide a very clear structure — like role, industry, pain point, and call-to-action — it can put together something very decent. The trick is to keep it simple: don’t over-engineer the prompt, just feed it exactly the inputs you want.”
There are two kinds of email messages you can use ChatGPT to create.
This is the first email your recipient receives from you. You want to keep it short, personalized, and straight to the point.
With ChatGPT, you can craft personalized messages for hundreds or even thousands of leads at scale. All you need to do is include some relevant details in your cold email prompts:
Note that this prompt may require some edits and tweaks before you hit the “send” button. That said, here is a ChatGPT prompt example:
Craft a cold email (around 100 words) for a prospect with [job title] interested in [product or service]. Include these details:
Write as if it were for humans. Keep it professional, concise, and friendly. Include a CTA that triggers a response.
Research reveals that it takes 8-12 touches per prospect before receiving a response. In other words, your initial outreach message isn’t enough to build meaningful relationships and get a reply. You need to follow up. So, rather than thinking about what to write, ChatGPT can help.
Based on your last email, ask it to write a follow-up message. This lets you provide more context, enabling the AI tool to generate a message that resonates with your prospects.
Consequently, you can add 2-3 follow-ups to your cold email sequence without getting exhausted. When asked on the best tool for crafting follow-up messages Gerardo Teijeira, GTM Team Lead at ColdIQ, recommends Twain, an outreach tool for sales copies.
He says, “The best tool is Twain. There are different components to a Twain-generated campaign. You'll typically need to input your ICP as detailed as possible, describe the campaign idea, and upload a few leads so Twain can analyze their profiles. It will then auto-generate the campaign, and once that's done, you can further prompt Twain to change the parts you want to change.”
He further explains, “The most important thing with follow up messages is to avoid cliches like "Just following up here" or "Just circling back on this"; you want to add some value with that.” Below are examples of prompts he uses to generate follow up messages in Twain and its result.
In the next section, we discuss how to use ChatGPT with Clay and Twain for generating messages. But before then, check out these pro tips for creating outreach messages.
Joaquin Garasino, GTM Engineer Team Lead at ColdIQ, offered three tips you can use in drafting outreach messages.
Social media platforms are a treasure trove for generating leads, but the conversations (content + comments) you have there unlock these opportunities.
Fortunately, ChatGPT remains a great tool to stay updated and engage with your audience on these platforms. Whether it’s LinkedIn, Instagram, or X (Twitter), you can use ChatGPT to generate this kind of content:
A popular social media tool you can use to create social media posts includes:
Renowned for its LinkedIn content creation capabilities, Taplio lets you create and schedule LinkedIn posts. With access to a library of over 5 million viral posts in your niche industry on LinkedIn, you can create high-performing LinkedIn posts to build and nurture meaningful relationships with potential customers.
On top of that, you access its AI automation feature that creates posts, generates carousels, and handles replies. Taplo also features a Chrome extension that integrates with your browser for easy usage.
Pricing
Taplio’s pricing plan starts at $39 per month.
You read that right. ChatGPT helps with real-time customer support when you build it into your website as a chatbot. This is useful for businesses that want to keep customers engaged on their site. By integrating the AI tool, it can answer questions, engage visitors, and guide them through the sales funnel.
Besides, you can customize it to your preference to nurture inbound leads. For instance, you can also pair with an advanced tool to analyze prospects’ responses, gather their pain points or interests, and qualify them for effective nurturing.
ChatGPT doesn’t always give vague or inconsistent answers. It depends on how you prompt it. If your prompt is broad, unspecific, or lacks contextual information, you may have a hard time getting the desired result.
In this section, we will take a look at how to write effective ChatGPT prompts for lead generation. Note: Be clear about the kind of information you feed the AI tool. The clearer your input, the more relevant the output
When you give ChatGPT an identity, you tell it to think or act in a specific role. This approach prompts it to give a response that’s best suited for a targeted audience. For instance, here are some example prompts for specific roles:
Here is an example:
If you can’t use a role, you can consider using your buyer persona to put all the details together. This will generate a detailed response when compared to a generic prompt.
A prompt that includes relevant context will perform better than a generic one. Here, context could be:
The table below further compares some examples of poor prompts that lack context with good ones that include it.
Tell ChatGPT the kind of information you want in its response. Mention the kind of format you want the output to be in explicit instructions. For instance, you can discuss the kind of tone, style, length, or structure of the output. Here is a prompt example:
I want to create a LinkedIn post in less than 300 words targeting founders or CEOs, discussing the pain points they’re currently facing with their customers. Create a list of questions of what I should ask in bullet points. Keep it concise and engaging.
Similarly, you can ask ChatGPT to exclude specific information you don’t need or want repeated. Here is a prompt example:
I want you to create an email about a project that would take (timeframe, e.g., six months). The goal is to discuss the upcoming changes and how they would affect their schedule. Exclude any financial information relating to the project. End the message with a call-to-action asking them to message me if they have any questions.
Now that you’ve input the right prompt and gotten the desired result, the next step is to integrate its output into any AI lead generation tools. At ColdIQ, we connect ChatGPT with Clay and Twain. While Clay works best because of its broad use case, Twain is great due to its generative capabilities.
Joaquin Garasino, GTM Engineer Team Lead at ColdIQ, provided more details on why ChatGPT works best with Clay.
He explains, “You can layer different GPT levels with different prompts to do pretty much anything with the information you’ve pulled in or web research— whether that’s cleaning data, enriching records, or generating personalization snippets.” Joaquin also explains how you can use ChatGPT on its own.
He says, “GPT allows me to build custom bots that we feed and train to focus on very specific tasks: investigating companies, analyzing value propositions, and surfacing good fits for ICPs and personas. That way, we get sharper insights into who we should be targeting and why, before we even start pulling data into Clay for activation."
Upon explaining why he integrates ChatGPT with Clay, Joaquin further gave a simple workflow he runs in Clay.
Step 1 → Source prospects (via LinkedIn Sales Navigator / Apollo and import into Clay).
Step 2 → Enrichment with ChatGPT → He pipes lead data into ChatGPT via Clay’s AI column to:
Step 3 → Push the enriched dataset with snippets into Lemlist/Instantly for campaign execution.
Below is an example of how we use ChatGPT to categorize personas by their relevant job titles into Clay. First, have a Clay table filled with your lead’s details, such as:
Next, click on “Add Enrichment” >> “Integrations.” Scroll down to “Open AI/GPT” and choose “ChatGPT: Generate text”
Then, choose “Configure.” Here, you can choose the kind of model you want. In this case, we chose “OpenAI > GPT 4o Mini” because it’s a lightweight task. Then, input your prompt. You should have something like what’s in the screenshot below.
Once you’re done, click “Save” to run the rows based on your instructions. Aside from modifying the content, you can also gather prospects’ information with a ChatGPT model using Clay’s web researcher, Claygent.
TL;DR
Joaquin Garasino, GTM Engineer Team Lead at ColdIQ, shares insights on how to integrate ChatGPT output into Clay in this step-by-step Loom video.
Twain is renowned for its generative capabilities, particularly for sales outreach messages. Joaquin Garasino, GTM Engineer Team Lead at ColdIQ, explains, “ChatGPT is great for structuring or summarizing data and generating hooks, while Twain is built specifically for outreach copy and tones.”
He further adds, “For example, if I have a complex trigger — something that’s hard to research just from a LinkedIn URL — I’ll first run it through GPT to summarize it, then feed that into Twain. That way, Twain has the best possible information to craft a strong email or LinkedIn message.”
Also, editing the output from the tools is essential. Joaquin adds, “I always human-edit before sending. AI gives me the raw material, but I refine tone and strategy to make sure it feels authentic and relevant."
That said, here is a step-by-step instruction on how to use ChatGPT + Twain:
1. Create a buyer persona. For this example, our buyer persona is Fintech Executive.
2. Add your lead list to Twain. You can ask Twain to look for lookalikes, upload a CSV file to Twain, or add the list manually via LinkedIn URLs. In this example, we uploaded a CSV file and mapped each column to what exists in the lead list.
3. State your campaign ideas as shown in the example below. You can add your idea manually or use the “Suggest” function to generate ideas.
4. Determine your message structure. You can use the “Auto” function or “Manual setup” to craft your message. If you selected the manual approach, you can input your ChatGPT summary and customize the framework to your preference.
5. Once you’re done, click “Create campaign” to proceed to the next step. Twain will then generate a personalized message for each lead in your list.
ChatGPT offers different models to perform various operations. As of the time of this writing, the GPT-5 model is the latest flagship model, renowned for its speed, improved reasoning, and ability to handle complex tasks.
When asked about the most effective ChatGPT for lead generation tasks, Joaquin Garasino, GTM Engineer Team Lead at ColdIQ, explains that he doesn’t rely on one model. Instead, he splits by use cases and cost.
He says, “For bulk, structured tasks where the information is already there — like classifying job titles, cleaning datasets, or tagging industries — I use lighter, cheaper models like GPT-4o-mini. They’re fast, inexpensive, and perfectly fine for anything repetitive or rule-based.”
On the other hand, “For higher-level logic, nuance, or research-heavy work — like analyzing a company’s positioning, mapping ICP fit, or drafting high-quality outreach copy — I go with GPT-5. It’s more expensive, but the accuracy, reasoning, and context handling pay off when personalization really matters.”
“GPT-5 also lets me dig deeper: connecting signals across datasets, breaking down a company’s value proposition, and suggesting the most relevant angle for outreach. That’s where quality has a direct impact on response rates, so the extra cost is worth it,” explained Joaquin.
However, you don’t always have to opt for GPT-5. Joaquin clarifies, “There’s a middle layer with models like GPT-4, which are great when you need more reasoning than a mini model but don’t need the full horsepower of GPT-5.
So the way I approach it is simple:
In short, it’s not about one ‘best’ model — it’s about matching the right model to the right stage of the GTM workflow."
That said, here is a snapshot of the best ChatGPT models for lead generation tasks.
Using ChatGPT for lead generation is great, but you could experience some challenges, such as:
Over-relying on ChatGPT could result in impersonal communication that may fail to resonate with your prospects. While it has data, it struggles to recreate the nuances of human emotions, personal touch, and empathy that make messages resonate with prospects. As a result, this lack of emotional connection can make your messages robotic and stiff, failing to connect with prospects and drive meaningful impact.
Hallucinations, the tendency to provide irrelevant or incorrect responses, are quite common with ChatGPT. The result? It frustrates your outbound sales automation process. For every information it provides about your prospects, you may need to fact-check twice to make sure you’re not using incorrect details for your lead generation efforts.
Over-relying on ChatGPT erodes your sales team’s critical thinking and problem-solving skills. It creates dependency and inhibits creativity, which could offer solutions in the case of complex, unforeseen challenges.
So, rather than fully relying on automation, it’s best advised to balance automation with human efforts. As ChatGPT handles minute tasks like gathering prospects’ information, humans can handle complex workflows like building meaningful relationships.
At ColdIQ, we know how to build ecosystems of outbound automations that work for us and with us. Need support? We’re here to help you with a completely free GTM Strategy Call
Now you’ve figured out how to use ChatGPT for lead generation, how do you measure and track success? Here are some key metrics to help with this task:
This indicates the total number of leads generated through ChatGPT-driven efforts. You want to know the number of leads generated during the specific period to determine the effectiveness of your lead generation strategies.
This measures the percentage of leads that are actively interacting with your content. Examples include:
Lead conversion rate indicates the percentage of leads that proceed to the next stage of the sales funnel, such as a sales-qualified lead becoming a paying customer. This shows how effective your lead generation strategy is.
If you generate thousands of leads and you’re only converting a dozen, that shows something is wrong. A high conversion rate indicates that your ChatGPT-driven strategy is successfully attracting and nurturing leads.
Your initial ChatGPT prompts may not provide the desired result. However, continuous refinement makes the responses more precise and useful, enhancing automated lead nurturing. In this section, we will walk you through three tips for iterating ChatGPT prompts for lead generation.
The output of a ChatGPT prompt is only as good as the input. Rather than giving a vague statement, you’d want to walk it through a step-by-step approach to enhance the depth of the ChatGPT’s response. Here is an example below:
This approach guides the ChatGPT model through a structured process, triggering a more precise and accurate response.
When you ask ChatGPT to reason through a problem before providing an answer, you give it “thinking” time. It sifts through its vast knowledge to generate a more accurate response.
Here is an example to help:
If you aren’t satisfied with ChatGPT’s initial response, you can refine it. Leverage the initial suggestions to spark new ideas that were hidden at the beginning. Remember that each response from ChatGPT is a feedback loop, which you can refine to provide a more accurate response. Here is an example:
If you still struggle with using ChatGPT prompts for lead generation, consider partnering with ColdIQ to help.
ColdIQ remains the best lead generation agency to flood your pipeline with qualified sales opportunities. What sets us apart is our defined technical expertise with AI sales tools, including ChatGPT, which we leverage to create scalable outbound systems for businesses.
Our objective goes beyond leveraging these tools; we collaborate with our customers to create a system that consistently delivers quality leads to drive revenue growth. We don’t just say this.
The result speaks for itself as we drove 80+ leads a month for Lyl marketing, a digital marketing agency, and 250 leads a month with a 40% conversion rate for Peoplelogic.
So if you’re looking for an agency that:
We are the one. Our sales experts leverage ChatGPT to find prospects’ information, craft personalized messages, and push to a sales engagement tool to generate replies. Beyond that, we also set up your email infrastructure system to make sure your emails land in your prospect’s inbox.
When used correctly, ChatGPT remains one of the best tools for streamlining AI B2B lead generation efforts. As good as it is, we recommend combining the output from the AI with human expertise to achieve the desired result. Here are a few things to keep in mind when using ChatGPT for lead generation:
If you struggle to get the most out of the tools, we recommend working with ColdIQ. Our sales experts leverage AI sales tools like ChatGPT to find and nurture qualified leads for improved conversions. Book a GTM strategy call with us today!
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