AI Prompts for Building Products Sales
Which tools to use, what they cost, and how to get value from your first prompt in five minutes.
Updated July 2026
You don't need to understand how AI works. You just need to know which tool to open and what to type.
There are dozens of AI tools out there. Most of them do similar things. Here are the four worth knowing about, plus a couple of special mentions that are worth having in your toolkit.
Best for: Writing, analysis, following detailed instructions, and handling long documents. If you paste in a product datasheet, a meeting brief, and ask it to build you a call plan, Claude handles that better than anything else I've used.
Free version available. Pro version handles bigger uploads, longer conversations, and gives you access to deeper thinking modes.
This is what I use most. It powers a lot of what I do across recruitment, content, and research. If I had to pick one tool, this is it.
Best for: General-purpose tasks, quick emails, meeting prep, and summarising documents. The most well-known AI tool and probably the easiest to get started with.
Free version works fine for most prompts on this site. Paid version lets you upload PDFs and images, which is useful for plan reading and datasheet summaries.
A solid all-rounder. If Claude doesn't click for you, this will.
Best for: Research. This one is different. It searches the web in real time and gives you sourced answers instead of generating them from memory. It tells you where the information came from and links to the original sources.
Use this for company research, project research, competitor intelligence, and market data. It's brilliant at this. Genuinely the best research tool I've used.
Free version is solid. Paid version gives you deeper research modes that can produce full reports on a topic in minutes.
Important: Perplexity is a specialist. Use it for research and fact-finding. For everything else, writing, meeting prep, planning, use Claude or ChatGPT.
Best for: Anything connected to your Google workspace. Calendar, email, docs. Useful if you live in Gmail and Google Calendar and want AI built into the tools you already use.
Longer guides on the two tools most reps end up using day to day. What each one is actually good at, what the free tier gets you, and what is worth paying for.
The document one. What it does well, what free gets you, what is worth paying for.
Open the guideVoice mode in the car, plan reading without the hype, and what A$35 a month actually buys.
Open the guideWorth calling out separately. Google's image generation is excellent for creating visuals, infographics, and marketing assets. If you need a quick visual for a presentation, a product comparison graphic, or imagery for LinkedIn content, Gemini handles this well. I use it regularly for content visuals.
If you've ever spent hours building a presentation or a carousel, Gamma is worth knowing about. It uses AI to generate slide decks, documents, and visual content. But the real value isn't in hitting 'generate' and hoping for the best. It's in learning how to steer it. Give it detailed content, guide it slide by slide, and it produces professional output fast. I use it for LinkedIn carousels and it saves hours every week.
Master one tool first. Pick either Claude or ChatGPT, learn how to use it properly, and build your systems and processes around it. Don't try to learn four tools at once. Get good at one, then expand.
The exception is Perplexity. It does something the others don't do as well, which is searching the internet and giving you sourced, current information. So my actual recommendation is: pick one main tool for writing and planning, and use Perplexity alongside it for research. That combination covers almost everything a building products rep needs.
AI doesn't know your product, your territory, your customers, or your competitors unless you tell it. The biggest mistake people make is typing a vague question and expecting a specific answer. The more context you feed in, the better the output. Paste in your product datasheet. Tell it who you're meeting. Describe your territory. Be specific about what you need. Think of it like briefing a new colleague. The less you tell them, the more generic their work will be.
A prompt is just a question or instruction. But how you write it changes everything. 'Write me an email' gives you something generic. 'Write a follow-up email to an architect I met at a site visit in Cremorne last Tuesday. We discussed their spec for a 40-unit apartment project and they're currently considering [competitor product]. Keep it short, suggest a sample drop-off, and mention our fire rating advantage' gives you something you can actually send.
The prompts on this site are written this way for a reason. Copy them. Modify them. Learn the pattern.
AI rarely gets it perfect on the first go. That's normal. The skill is in steering it. 'Make it shorter.' 'That's too formal, make it sound like a normal email.' 'Add a line about our warranty being twice as long as theirs.' 'Rewrite the opening, it sounds like a robot.' This is a conversation, not a single command. The people getting the most out of AI aren't the ones writing perfect prompts. They're the ones who know how to push the output until it's right.
This is where most people stop. They get a great result, close the chat, and start from scratch next time. Don't do that.
Most AI tools now have a way to save your context and instructions so you don't have to repeat yourself. In Claude, these are called Projects. In ChatGPT, they're called GPTs or Custom Instructions. In Gemini, they're called Gems.
Here's what this looks like in practice. Say you've built a workflow for competitor analysis that works well. You've refined the prompt, you've fed in your product range, your territory, and your key competitors. Instead of copying and pasting all of that every time, you save it as a project or a gem. Next time you need a competitor comparison, you open it up and you're already halfway there. The AI already knows who you are, what you sell, and how you like the output.
This is where AI goes from being a useful tool to being a system. You build it once, refine it over time, and it gets better the more you use it. Every conversation you have inside that project makes it smarter about your specific situation.
Start with one. Pick the workflow you use most often. Save it. Refine it after every use. Within a few weeks you'll have something that would take a new starter months to build from scratch.
Most of these tools now have a 'deep research' or 'extended thinking' mode. Instead of giving you a quick answer, the AI spends longer researching, cross-referencing sources, and building a more thorough response.
In Perplexity, this is particularly powerful. Ask it to deep research a company, a project pipeline, or a market trend and it comes back with something close to what a junior analyst would produce in half a day. Sourced, structured, and detailed.
Claude's extended thinking mode is useful when you need it to work through something complex. A detailed call plan, a comparison across multiple products, or building a full week's outreach strategy. It takes longer but the output is noticeably better.
You won't need deep research for every prompt. But when you're prepping for a major pitch, researching a new territory, or trying to understand a competitor's full range, it's worth switching on.
Copy this into Claude, ChatGPT, or Perplexity. Replace the brackets with your details. See what comes back.
I'm a BDM selling [your product category] in [your city]. My customers are [architects / builders / contractors / developers].
Give me:
1. A 30-second summary of what [company you're meeting this week] does, who they sell to, and any recent projects or news
2. Three specific talking points I can use in the meeting based on their business and my product
3. Two questions I should ask that show I've done my homework
4. A short follow-up email template I can send after the meeting
Be specific to the Australian building products market. No generic sales advice.Pro tip
Don't try to learn everything at once. Pick one prompt from this site, use it this week, and see what happens. The reps who get the most from AI are the ones who started small and built the habit.