AI for Sales Capstone Exercise — AI for Sales Professionals

What you'll learn

Apply skills from across this course in a single realistic professional scenario
Produce a concrete, role-relevant deliverable using AI tools
Self-assess your output against professional quality criteria

Sales professionals using AI well are not sending more generic outreach. They are doing more genuine research per prospect, writing higher-quality messages, and coaching their teams more consistently, all in less time. This capstone tests all three of those capabilities in a single realistic scenario.

You are a senior account executive at a SaaS company managing a full week: three new enterprise targets to pursue, a pipeline review deck for your sales director on Thursday, and a junior rep who needs coaching before a key call on Friday. You will use AI for each of these tasks and share the prompts that drove your outreach, demonstrating how prompt quality connects directly to output quality.

Capstone Exercise

Outreach, Pipeline Review, and Team Coaching in One Working Week

Context

You are a senior account executive at a B2B SaaS company selling a workflow automation platform. You have three new enterprise accounts to pursue this week: a logistics firm with 800 employees that recently announced a digital transformation initiative, a professional services firm that is hiring operations roles at volume suggesting rapid growth, and a retail group whose CTO published a LinkedIn article last month about reducing manual process overhead. Your sales director wants a pipeline review deck for Thursday. A junior rep, Alex, is delivering a pitch call on Friday for a mid-market prospect in financial services and has asked for coaching on their core message and handling objections.

Your Task

Use Claude or ChatGPT to complete the following: (1) Research and draft three personalised outreach messages, one per account, each under 150 words, using a specific public signal from each company as the opening hook; (2) Produce a pipeline review slide outline with six slides, each with a title and three to four bullet points of key content; (3) Write a coaching brief for Alex covering: a one-paragraph core message for the financial services pitch, responses to two specific objections common in financial services sales, and one closing question to use in the final minutes of the call. After completing the three outreach messages, write out the two prompts you actually used: one for the research phase and one for the drafting phase. These prompts become part of your deliverable.

Your notes (optional)

Deliverable

Three outreach messages under 150 words each, a six-slide pipeline review outline with content per slide, a coaching brief for Alex, and the two prompts used for the outreach research and drafting phases. The prompts demonstrate how specific briefing drives output quality.

Quick check

This capstone gives one test for whether a prompt is worth keeping rather than throwing away after use. What is that test?

Select one answer.

Key takeaways

Personalised outreach built on specific, real signals outperforms generic AI-generated messages because the hook is recognisable to the prospect as evidence of genuine research, not pattern-matched flattery.
The two-prompt approach for outreach, separating research from drafting, consistently produces better results than a single combined prompt: the research phase surfaces the context that makes the drafting phase specific.
AI-assisted pipeline review preparation compresses a half-day task into under an hour, but the sales director's confidence in the deck comes from the account executive's judgment about which deals to flag and why, not from the AI's slide structure.
Sharing the prompts you used, not just the outputs, is the professional discipline that turns individual AI use into team capability: a good prompt is a repeatable asset, and treating it as one is the foundation of the prompt library approach from the course.

Outreach, Pipeline Review, and Team Coaching in One Working Week

Try these prompts