AI as a Sales Tool, Not a Salesperson with Kayla Kurtz

What It Covers

Kayla Kurtz, VP of Sales and Business Development at Forthea digital marketing agency, walks through practical ways B2B salespeople can use AI tools like ChatGPT and Copilot daily — from trimming follow-up emails to prepping for sales calls — while flagging where AI outputs require real-time validation with prospects.

Key Questions Answered

• •AI for call prep: Before any sales call, input the prospect's name, company, and role into ChatGPT and ask it to surface likely concerns, company background, and potential objections. Then open the call by explicitly telling the prospect you used AI to research them and want to verify what you found — this signals preparation and builds credibility rather than risking embarrassment from outdated data.
• •Email compression tactic: Write your full follow-up email in your own voice, then paste it into ChatGPT or Copilot with the instruction to preserve all original intent but reduce word count by one-third. This removes filler without losing meaning and is particularly useful for complex multi-stakeholder deals where follow-up messages carry significant weight in moving decisions forward.
• •Prospect research shortcut: Pull up ChatGPT during a live sales conversation with a prospect who claims their digital presence is fine, then run a search query on their business to show them where they fail to appear. This pattern-interrupt technique either opens a genuine problem-solving dialogue or surfaces a real gap the prospect had not previously acknowledged.
• •Buyer research timeline compression: Research from Sixth Sense shows prospects now complete initial vendor research in roughly 3.5 weeks, down from 7 weeks just one year ago, because LLMs accelerate information gathering. Simultaneously, buyers are including more vendors in their shortlists — up to 10 compared to the previous 2 or 3 — meaning sales teams face broader competition but also more entry opportunities.
• •AI-assisted negotiation awareness: Approximately 15% of prospects now feed contract terms directly into ChatGPT or Copilot and ask the tool to identify weaknesses in the proposed agreement. Sales leaders should respond by bringing subject matter experts into discovery calls earlier, requesting more technical collateral from marketing sooner, and running fresh competitor research using LLMs to identify who now appears alongside them in AI-generated vendor lists.