A Napier Webinar: Make ChatGPT Your Best Salesperson

Register for Napier’s webinar and learn how you can make ChatGPT your best salesperson and boost AI visibility for your brand. We will cover:

• Is SEO dead?
• What is generative AI visibility?
• Measuring your visibility in generative AI models
• Improving AI visibility for your brand
• 5 Steps to AI Success

Register to view our webinar on demand by clicking here, and why not get in touch to let us know if our insights helped you.

Napier Webinar: ‘Make ChatGPT Your Best Salesperson’ Transcript

Speakers: Mike Maynard

Hi everyone. Welcome to the latest Napier webinar. We’re going to give it a couple of minutes just as people join, but I’m looking forward to talking to you about ChatGPT and how ChatGPT can be your best possible salesperson.

Okay. Thank you very much everyone for joining the webinar. Really appreciate you all coming along and listening to the presentation today. Today we’re going to be talking about ChatGPT and making it your best salesman. So looking forward to talking about that and also talking about generative AI in general. Let’s kick off.

What do we mean by making ChatGPT your best salesperson? Well, basically what we’re seeing is AI is becoming a bit like search. People are going to AI to find things out, with ChatGPT probably being the best known. But let’s not forget there are a large number of AI models that are all important. What you really want is for those AIs to start promoting your brand, your products, your technologies.

So we’re all hearing about AI helping, but the question is: does it really help to sell, or do you find you’re not actually listed in some of the results? Let’s have a look at what we’re going to work through today.

Firstly, we’re going to talk about what we want to achieve—and apologies to anyone who might not be a speed skating fan, but you’re all going to discover my fascination with the sport. We’ll look at what we can use AI for and how people are beginning to use AI today. We’re then going to consider how important AI is—whether it’s more important than search, or less. We’ll discuss GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), how AIs find information, and how you can appear in GenAI results. We’ll go through a process to improve the number of times you appear in AI results and finish with five top tips for GEO, followed by a Q&A.

Let’s start off with a little diversion into short track speed skating. Here’s a picture taken at the end of the 500 meters race in the last Olympics, where a Hungarian skater beat a Russian skater, who beat a Canadian skater. For those who don’t know, I am a speed skater. I love getting involved in speed skating. I would love to be at the Olympics—probably won’t be—but maybe one of the ways I could do it is by being involved in the equipment.

Just out of interest, the two medal-winning skaters used skates from a Chinese manufacturer called Li-Ning. But let’s assume I didn’t know that and I go to AI and ask: “What are the best skates to buy if I’m a great short track speed skater?” AI doesn’t tell me I’m not great—it just answers the question. It gives me a comprehensive result, talking about boot and blade combinations and identifying vendors.

AI recommends boots and blades separately, which is important because you buy them separately. It explains why we should buy certain products, which feels more informative and smarter than search. To compare, I searched “Best Short Track speed skate boot” in Google, which gave me shopping results and even a roller skate boot by mistake. So while it does okay, most people would agree that the AI result felt better.

More and more, B2B tech customers—whether they’re in industrial automation, semiconductors, or other fields—are using AI to find information. Initially, AI was used for informative queries, but now people are asking more factual and decision-based questions. Modern AI combines generative capabilities with web search, making it far more powerful than early versions like the original ChatGPT.

So does this mean we give up on search? Not yet. ChatGPT processes about a billion queries a day with around 125 million users, mostly under 25. In contrast, Google handles 9 billion searches a day and has 3.5 billion daily users. It’s still the largest source of web traffic. However, AI is growing rapidly. Even Google is changing—searches are becoming more conversational, like ChatGPT prompts.

This shift means SEO is still relevant, but its dominance is fading. We need to focus on GEO—Generative Engine Optimization. Sometimes called AIO (AI Optimization) or LLMO, GEO is all about making sure your content appears in AI-generated responses.

To do that, we need to understand how AI finds and uses information. AI converts words into tokens, maps relationships, and generates likely next-word sequences. AI models are trained on vast data sources—web pages, books, Wikipedia, and even Reddit posts with enough upvotes. Most AI tools also now search the live web, so fresh, authoritative content is key.

To appear in GenAI results, your content must be part of the training data or be indexed during web searches. You must be seen as authoritative, and your content should be structured in ways that help AIs understand it.

That includes using question-and-answer formats, bullet points, tables, and clear summaries. Structuring data and using schema markup also helps. AI prefers expert content, kept up to date, and relevant to your site. Like SEO, freshness matters. A special file, llms.txt, helps AI understand what’s on your site—this will likely become a best practice.

You should also track when your brand is cited by AI and tweak your content to improve performance. Generating Q&A content and using bullets is easy. The harder part is analyzing AI results to refine content based on what performs best.

So here’s the process:

1. Build AI-friendly content.

2. Think about what prompts your audience might use.

3. Test those prompts in AI tools.

4. Analyze why some brands appear and others don’t.

5. Do better than the brands that are currently winning.

For example, I asked ChatGPT about speed skates and added “include citations” to see where the information came from. This helped me identify that sites like CBC (Carpenter Boot Company), Reddit, YouTube, and specialist e-commerce stores are important. The same applies in B2B—your distributors or trade publications might matter more than your own site.

This analysis is time-consuming if done manually, especially across multiple prompts and AI models. Fortunately, tools are emerging that help automate and analyze these AI-generated results. We’re using a tool (soon to launch) that we believe is the best available, and we can offer access or demos to interested clients.

Remember, prompts are key. Slight changes can alter the AI’s output significantly. It’s crucial to generate a wide variety of high-quality prompts to get a true picture of your presence in GenAI.

Let’s wrap up with five top tips for GEO:

1. Use tools to analyze GenAI results.

2. Structure content in Q&A formats for AI readability.

3. Get featured on authoritative third-party sites.

4. Keep testing and learning—models evolve continuously.

5. Understand the customer journey and optimize content for top, middle, and bottom-of-funnel queries.

Bonus tip: Tailor content for different customer journey stages. Top-of-funnel queries are often informational, like comparing boot types. Bottom-of-funnel ones ask directly which product to buy. Customize accordingly.

Finally, a fun note: when I asked ChatGPT which skates to buy, its recommendations included products that don’t exist or are incorrectly identified. For example, Maple ST is a Doc Martens boot. Some brands were bankrupt or misattributed. Still, it shows the power and pitfalls of AI responses.

For the record, I skate on Apex skates, which are excellent and weren’t mentioned. Marques makes the best boots in my view.

Thanks for joining! Our next webinar will feature Shoko Maki, CEO of ISB Marketing, discussing B2B tech marketing in Japan on July 10. It’ll be held at 9 a.m. UK time / 10 a.m. CET. U.S. attendees can register and watch the recording.

If you have questions, feel free to drop them into the chat or Q&A. One came in asking whether you need a premium subscription for ChatGPT—you don’t, but the free version has limitations. All our demos used the premium version.

Another question asked how our agency helps with GenAI optimization. Short answer: we handle everything from prompt analysis to content optimization and third-party coverage. This is similar to PR work and crucial for AI visibility. If you’re interested, drop me a line at mike@napierb.com. We’d love to help.

Thanks again for listening. Hope to see you on July 10!