If you’ve ever asked AI for help and gotten back something that could have been written for anyone, you’re in good company. Most of us start the same way. We type a quick request, something like “Help me get ready for this meeting,” and hope the AI fills in the rest.
The good news is that getting a better answer doesn’t take any technical know-how. It takes the same thing that makes you good at asking a coworker for help, which is giving them enough to work with.
AI can only work with what you give it. When you ask a coworker to help you prep for a meeting, they already know a lot without you saying a word. They know who the customer is, what happened last quarter, and how your manager likes things done. AI doesn’t know any of that unless you tell it.
So when the request is short, the AI fills in the gaps with the most common answer it can come up with. That’s why the result often feels like it was written for someone else.
A little structure fixes most of this. Instead of trying to remember everything to include, you can run through a short checklist before you hit enter.
In our AI Sales Edge course, we teach a framework called GUIDE. Each letter is a question to ask yourself before you send a prompt.
G is for Goal. What do you want back? Start by telling the AI what you want it to produce. “Help me with this renewal” is a topic. “Write me a one-page prep sheet for my renewal meeting” is a goal, and it tells the AI what finished looks like.
U is for User. Who should the AI be? Tell it what role to play. An experienced sales manager would give you different advice than a contract lawyer would, so pick the person whose help you’d want.
I is for Input. What does it need to know? This is your situation, in your own words. Share the facts, the background, and anything you can paste in, like your notes from the last call or the email you’re replying to.
D is for Direction. How should it go about it? Tell it what to focus on, what to leave out, the tone you want, and how long the answer should be.
E is for Example. What does good look like? If you have a sample you like, paste it in. If you don’t, describe it. “A short checklist I can read in two minutes” works fine.
If you only remember two letters, make them I and E. In our classes, Input and Example are the parts people skip most, and they’re the parts that turn a generic answer into one that fits your situation.
Here’s what that looks like on a real task. Say you have a renewal meeting coming up, and the buyer has asked to revisit pricing. This is the quick version most of us would type:
Help me get ready for this.
And here’s the same request with GUIDE:
Goal: Help me prepare for a meeting where parts of an existing agreement may come up for discussion.
User: Act like a practical coach helping me think through a conversation I’m directly involved in.
Input: The agreement is up for renewal. The service has been stable and meets expectations. The buyer has asked to revisit pricing.
Direction: Keep it practical. Focus on how I should think and prepare, not on theory.
Example: A short checklist of questions I can review right before the meeting.
The second version takes about a minute longer to write. What comes back is built around your meeting instead of a general list of tips you’d have to sort through yourself.
Here’s a version you can copy into ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude or whatever AI tool your team uses. Fill in the brackets with your own details. The last line asks the AI to point out anything you forgot, so you don’t have to get it perfect on the first try.
Goal: I want you to produce [what you need, for example a one-page prep sheet for a customer meeting]. User: Act as [the role that would help most, for example an experienced sales manager]. Input: Here is what you need to know: [your situation, the facts, and anything you can paste in, such as notes or an email]. Direction: [What to focus on, what to leave out, the tone, the length and the format]. Example: Good looks like [describe it, or paste a sample you like]. Before you answer, ask me up to three questions about anything important that's missing.
One quick reminder: keep customer names, pricing and contract details out of any AI tool your company hasn’t approved.
Filling in a template works, but it’s one more thing to remember on a busy day. That’s where a skill comes in.
A skill is a set of instructions you save once in your AI tool. After that, the AI follows those instructions any time you ask for that kind of help, so you don’t have to retype them or remember the steps.
We built a skill that turns GUIDE into a coach. You tell it what you need in a sentence or two, and it asks you for the pieces you left out. Once it has what it needs, it writes the full prompt for you.
Save it once in your AI tool. Use the ZIP for Claude. Use the Markdown file for ChatGPT, Microsoft 365 Copilot and other tools.
On a company Claude account, an administrator may need to turn on Skills first.
Setup takes a couple of minutes, whichever tool you use.
If you use Claude, open Customize and go to Skills. Click the + button, choose Create skill, then Upload a skill, and add the file. From then on, ask for help the way you normally would, something like “help me write a prompt for my renewal meeting,” and Claude will use the skill when it fits.
If you use ChatGPT, start a new chat, upload the file, and ask ChatGPT to follow its instructions for the conversation. If you’d like it ready every time, create a custom GPT and paste the file’s contents into its instructions.
If you use Microsoft 365 Copilot, create a custom agent and paste the file’s contents into its instructions. Copilot won’t run the file on its own just because you upload it, so the agent is what makes it stick.
If you use another AI tool, attach the file at the start of a chat and tell the AI to use these instructions for the conversation.
Prompting is a skill like any other, and it gets better with practice. We teach GUIDE in AI Sales Edge, our foundational AI course for sellers, and in Win-Win Negotiations with AI. In both classes, people practice on a real situation from their own work, so they leave with prompts built for the deals and conversations in front of them.
