How to Write Better AI Prompts for Prospecting

The best AI users aren’t tech wizards — they’re master communicators. And they’ve learned to speak robot. 

Like people, AI has its own way of understanding the world. And the only way to unlock its full potential is to meet it on its terms.

Prompting — the skill of feeding AI clear, strategic instructions — is what separates 10x outputs from mediocre ones. When you know how best to frame your inputs, you take control over the results, whether you’re targeting the right leads or crafting the perfect outreach. 

In this article, I’ll teach you how to structure prompts in a way that generative AI can interpret and process, using insights from conversations with prompting experts on how to get exactly what you want, every time.

Keep reading for a pressure-tested outbound prompt framework you can use to structure every prompt, plus templates for specific sales use cases from Apollo power users.

👉 This article is our second in our series on “How to Sell with AI”. To get a baseline on The State of AI in Sales in 2025, click here.

Inside the brain of artificial intelligence

AI is only as useful as you make it.

Samuel Thomas Elliot, a Senior Account Executive on the Apollo Labs, says most people don’t explain what they want clearly enough.

“AI isn’t an expert — it’s just all-knowing,” he tells me. “And it’s almost too intelligent for its own good. If you don’t clearly explain what you’re looking for, it's not going to know what you want.”

How do you communicate with a mind that’s all data, no instinct? And, perhaps an even better question, how do you iterate on it? Converse with it?

With some help from Samuel — and a few of my own tests — I’ve drawn a few conclusions.

Tip #1: Create context “clips” for a richer output

Every scrap of detail you layer into your prompt will result in a better, richer output.

The specific context you give it will depend on what you’re asking from it; but there are a few snippets you’ll find yourself reaching for time and time again as you write detailed sales prompts.

Such as these ones…

Write them out and store them somewhere accessible.

If you use Apollo, you can store them in the AI Content Center. It allows you to create and store bits of context like these and funnel them into bite-sized, personalized emails. 

I tested it out as if I was a rep from Writer and fed Apollo information around my hypothetical pain points and value props. Considering these are good clips of context to have within my AI tool anyway, I thought the email output was pretty solid.

 

Considering these are good clips of context to have within my AI tool anyway, I thought the email output was pretty solid.

But, the biggest benefit of configuring the Content Center is to train Apollo’s AI on who you are and what you offer to fuel more powerful features like prompting.

Tip #2: Ask AI to self-reflect

“Garbage in, garbage out.” Another great AI one-liner from Samuel.

What he means is, the quality of your input directly determines the quality of your output. And, like we’ve established, to get the strongest possible results, you need to understand the way it reads language.

And what better way than to…just ask it?

Samuel does this with a simple line:

“Before you begin, return with five questions you have.”

A simple command that gets AI to poke holes in itself; to self-identify the gaps in its knowledge, the gaps in the prompt, and communicate back to him what it needed.  

He was creating a real conversation.

“I guarantee you that you’ll be pleasantly surprised with how well AI is understanding and thinking about very key aspects that you left out of your prompt. It’s going to make sure you get a much better output,” he says.

I started using this tactic myself and quickly saw the benefits:

• Better outputs, faster. I get more precise results with less trial and error.
• Less time spent rewriting prompts. Getting it right the first time saves effort.
• Learning AI’s “language”. I’m understanding how it thinks, and it’s making me a stronger prompt writer.

Tip #3: AI prompting is a marathon — not a sprint

Like any other skill, prompting is something that develops and strengthens over time.

Samuel offers some perspective for any newbie. “It’s completely normal for only half of your prompts to provide the exact output you are looking for at first,” he says.

So, don't give up! When you get to the point where you’re using libraries of proven prompts to save hours daily, your future self will thank you for staying the course.

An outbound sales-specific prompt structure

If you're writing prompts to generate outbound emails, structure matters.

The quality of your output doesn't just depend on what you say; it depends on how you say it and in what order. Apollo’s team of prompt engineers (yes, that's a thing now) has tested countless combinations to figure out what consistently delivers punchy, relevant, high-converting cold email drafts.

Here’s the structure they recommend for outbound sales prompts.

Consider this as one of many strategies for getting a good output.

The team from Smartling 10’xd their SDRs productivity and pipeline with a much simpler Power-up prompt that uncovers if a website offers translation services:

“Look at the {{account.website_url}} of this {{account.name}} and determine if you can toggle between multiple languages. If it can be, then figure out if the website has any gaps in its translation. If so, return to what those reasons are.”

While, the folks on the Labs team often take a “long scroll” approach.

Prompting is often just a matter of knowing where to start and iterating from there.

In a recent template contest, hundreds of folks from the Apollo community submitted their most effective prompts in the hopes it might give other sales orgs a headstart, too.

I had the privilege of speaking with a few standout contributors.

• Dhara Patel wrote a prompt to automatically research for her construction company’s most important buying signal
• Rene Cobar’s AI prompt pulls competitor insights directly into outbound messages
• And Carol Olona put together a prompt that digs up a prospect’s product, pricing, and market fit in just a few focused paragraphs

Their exact prompts are available in the Apollo template library and product itself, ready to use, tweak, or inspire something entirely your own.

Boost your sales with AI-powered outbound

The better you are at framing your message, the better AI can work for you. And just like any good conversation, the more you refine, the better the results.

You can apply your new and improved prompts directly to your lead lists using Apollo’s AI prompting tool. With a prompt to segment down your list, one to research them, and another to write highly-custom messages — you’re halfway to fully automated outbound…

In our next article, I show you how to do it.

In our “How to Sell with AI” guide, I take everything I learned about prompting, using what AI is currently equipped to do well, to create something entirely new: an AI-powered system that handles outbound for you.

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More to come!