Buyer's guide
ChatGPT or hire someone for your messaging?
ChatGPT is enough when you already know what buyers value and need the words tightened, a page drafted or ten variations of a headline. It is the wrong tool when the question is what the story should be, because it cannot interview your lost deals, cannot tell your leadership team something they do not want to hear and cannot test a sentence in a live sales conversation. Use AI for the writing. Hire a person for the evidence and the decision.
What ChatGPT does well
- Tightening copy you have already decided on. Give it a proposition and a buyer and it will produce clean variants faster than any copywriter.
- Summarising research you have collected: interview transcripts, win-loss notes, call recordings.
- Spotting jargon, passive voice and claims with no proof in a draft.
- Drafting the twenty versions of a page, an email or a deck slide that follow from one agreed story.
- Playing a sceptical buyer in a rehearsal, once you tell it who the buyer is.
The three things it cannot do
1. Collect the evidence
Positioning is built on what buyers say when a salesperson is out of the room: why they chose you, why they chose someone else, what they were really worried about. That evidence sits in conversations that have not happened yet. A model trained on the internet knows what everyone in your category says about themselves, which is exactly the sameness you are trying to escape.
2. Tell the CEO the uncomfortable thing
Ask ChatGPT to critique your proposition and it will, politely, and then help you improve the one you gave it. It will not walk into a leadership meeting and say the market does not believe the thing the founder has believed for ten years. A person with the interviews in hand will, and that moment is usually where the value of the project sits.
3. Test it where it counts
A story proves itself in a sales conversation with a real buyer, not in a chat window. The sentence that reads beautifully and dies in front of a CFO is common. Someone has to sit in those calls, hear it fail and change it.
Where it goes wrong
The usual pattern. A marketing lead asks ChatGPT for a value proposition, gets something fluent, puts it on the website, and six months later the sales team is still saying what it always said and the number has not moved. The words were fine. Nobody checked whether they were true, and nobody got the people who sell to use them. Fluency is cheap now. Evidence and adoption are the whole job.
A way to use both without paying twice
- Collect the evidence first: interviews with customers, lost deals and your own sales team. A person does this, because people say different things to a researcher than to a form.
- Use AI to transcribe, cluster and summarise what they said. This is where it saves real time.
- Decide the story with the leadership team, in a meeting, with the evidence on the table.
- Use AI to draft every version of the words from the agreed story.
- Test the story in live sales conversations and change what fails.
- Put it in the deck, the discovery questions and the proposal template, and practise it with the sales team.
Steps 1, 3, 5 and 6 need a person, in-house or hired. Steps 2 and 4 are where ChatGPT earns its keep. The comparison of a consultant, an agency and an in-house team covers who does the people parts.
A quick way to find out which you need
If five customers would give the same reason for choosing you and the sales team already says it the same way, you need words, and ChatGPT will do. If you cannot answer those two questions with confidence, you need evidence first. The Growth Story Score asks 15 questions and takes four minutes to tell you which.
Questions people ask
Can ChatGPT write a value proposition?
It can write a fluent one in seconds. Whether it is true for your buyers is a separate question it cannot answer, because the evidence lives in conversations with your customers and lost deals.
Is it safe to paste customer interviews into ChatGPT?
Only with permission and with names removed, and never into a public tool for anything confidential. Business tiers with data controls are different from the free version. Check your own policy first.
Which AI tools does The Proposition use?
AI is used for transcription, clustering interview themes and drafting variants from an agreed story. The interviews, the findings meeting and the sales-call testing are done by Dan in person.
What does hiring someone cost compared with ChatGPT?
More, and for a different job. The cost and timeline page explains what moves the scope. A subscription buys fluent words; a consultant buys the evidence and the decision.
Get your Growth Story Score Or speak to Dan or start with the free sales pitch audit