How to Use ChatGPT in Your HVAC Business
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The new productivity tool of the future is here — and it’s free! AI can write marketing emails, analyze trends in your business and more, but only if you know the best ways to implement it into your company’s workflow.
This week on Cracking the Code, James Leichter and Gary Elekes log in to ChatGPT to demonstrate how to prompt it for success. Then, they take you step-by-step through building a marketing campaign with ChatGPT in under 30 minutes.
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Today we have the one and only Mr. James. Like you’re in the studio to chat about ChatGPT and how you can utilize it in your Hvac business. Take it away, James.
Appreciate everybody spending some time with us today. It’s going to be a fun subject.
Yes. This is this is something that everybody’s talking about. And I also want to introduce my esteemed colleague Ian Chapman. He is a software engineer at ABP Torah and he is a AI freak. He’s a real AI enthusiast. Thank you for being on with us today. And.
Thank you. Yeah. Hello.
All right. So I thought I would get started with a quick explanation of AI, but there’s nobody more qualified to do that, I think, than Ian. But, Ian, you being such a smart guy, you’re going to have to kind of dumb it down for me. What is what is I. I just arrived on this planet. What is ai what is. ChatGPT.
AI is basically just, stands for artificial intelligence. It’s just a way for computers to essentially, have intelligence or simulate, different types of intelligence, like human intelligence.
Now, how how can a computer act like a human? How can they be intelligent? How is that system working?
Well, behind the scenes, they’ve taken enormous data sets and basically, they basically, created a large language model, with a lot of advanced statistics. And basically what it does is it tries to whenever you give it like, one, two, three data or type that in, it’ll say four or 5 or 6. So basically tries to predict what you’re going to say next.
All right. So I, I talked to contractors all over the country. People ask me all the time about AI and ChatGPT. And I think what a lot of contractors say is that’s not for me. That’s for technical people, tech geeks. I understand why scientists might use it, but what’s in it for the everyday business owner?
What’s in it for the everyday of this business owner is, basically, you know what? The invention of ChatGPT. It’s become widely available to, talk to an AI chat bot that essentially, can and is trained on just a large breadth of knowledge and can help you do tasks, you know, things like, if you wanted to, create, like, a newsletter, email, you know, you could create that, you could create a company slogan. There’s really it’s really endless.
So and we’re going to go through some of those exercises, by the way, we’re going to show you what’s in it for you. We’re going to we’re going to ask ChatGPT to help us, figure out some things today. We’re going to make ChatGPT, basically our business consultant, and give you a real demonstration of its capability and power. Gary, that takes me to you. You are the owner of many businesses. For those who don’t know, Gary is in the contracting industry as a contractor, as a consultant, he’s also in the marketing business, co-founder of AI marketing. What do you use AI for?
A whole bunch at this point. We, in the agency business are using it to, stimulate campaigns, marketing campaigns, marketing slogans. We’re doing data analysis with a James. What I used to do when I was in school would go to the library and pull the census data. And the cool thing now is I really as long as we have the prompts correctly, I think, you know, Ian would probably talk to that. If you can get the prompts properly organized. There’s not a lot I can’t do for a business today. So, you know, in the contracting side, we’re using it to generate email drip campaigns that detects the content. We can really use that also to start modeling financial information. So I think we’ve struggled over the years teaching contractors about finance and accounting and all that stuff. That’s the business process. And I has that pretty much all in there. As long as you sort of know what to ask it. Role descriptions, policy manuals, standard operating procedures. We’ve we’ve pretty much used it for all those things. One small comment I would make, you know, in addition to the prompts, if you got a humanize, you know, some of what comes out of ChatGPT or, the Google version of Bard. We find that, you know, the data and the constructs are very accurate, pretty factual. It’s grabbing a lot of information, but it isn’t necessarily organized the way we might want to present it to another human being. And I think over time, the AI is going to figure that out. It’s going to learn how to do all that. You know, we’re on the first inning of probably a nine inning game of AI. Maybe the second inning, but, I think that’s that’s the trick is you still have to probably touch it. So I as I sent you a couple of pieces, I’m not sure if you’re going to share those or not, James, but, you know, five seconds 10s of loading time with the right prompt and about 20 minutes of editing, produced a piece that would normally take us about 6 to 8 hours with a whole bunch of different people looking at it. And really, we’re able to solve that productivity puzzle much quicker. So it’s it’s pretty cool stuff.
It is cool stuff. I, I think my experience with many business owners, contractors, not just contractors, but that’s who I deal with mostly. But this is true with all business owners. A lot of them struggle with writing. They aren’t particularly good at writing. They are not comfortable writing sales copy and standard operating procedures, and writing letters and writing responses to complaints and things like that. And chat GTP can really help them with writing, and then data analysis and all kinds of things. I think we’ll see some great examples of that today. And everybody get your questions ready, because we want there to be a very robust Q&A at the end of this presentation. I think what we’ll start with, Gary, I think we’re going to give a practical example of how a contracting business owner could use chat GTP as a business consultant. If they were to hire you, Gary, you would of course charge a lot of money. You’d be worth it. But not everybody is ready for that, and not everybody’s ready for an ongoing relationship. So I like to tell business owners, use chat GTP as your marketing consultant, your sales consultant, and so forth. I thought what we do first, Ian, is we would. Talk about the importance of loading chat GTP with information about your company first, so that it knows something about you, and I think the way to think about it. Is if if you were talking to a human consultant and you asked it a question like what would be a good slogan or a tagline for my business? They would say, well, hold on a minute. Tell me about your business. What is the company name? Who founded your company, etc.? They would get background information before they could give you an answer. Chat GTP works the same way. Chat GTP, by the way, is the proprietary name of a product. It’s. It’s. You can find it on the web. We’ll show you that here in a minute. And. Let me, let me go ahead and get that set up. So we will share our screen so that we can see chat GTP. I see. I keep saying teepee, don’t I? Yeah, it’s it’s chat GPT. Yes. Sorry about that chat GPT. Okay. Get my letters mixed up. This is what you’ll see when you create your account. And by the way, I’ll give you a web address where you can get complete instructions on how to set up this account. I wrote a blog article on my website, Mr. hvac.com, and you can see the information about how to create the account and the difference between the accounts and so forth. But here we are in chat GPT, and we’re going to select version four at the top of the screen. That is the latest version. It’s a little bit more powerful than 3.5. It’s a little bit slower but gives better results. And let’s say that we own a business. We own a heating air conditioning business, and we want help coming up with a tagline. So we wrote so you don’t have to watch us do it. We wrote some background on a fictitious company. This company is called pro-American services. I’m supposedly I’m supposedly the president of this company. My dad founded it. None of this is true, by the way. My dad founded the company. He was a veteran. As you’ll see, we told ChatGPT all about the company, our background, what we do, who we serve, etc.. It’s really important to start out with all of that information in order for it to give you better results. Now, at the end of all that background information, we posed a question and that is, please give me idea five ideas for a company slogan that we can use in our marketing. Now that would be something that you would normally research yourself on the internet. You might have to pay an expert for help. But here we’re going to get it. For free or close to free. Now, by the way, the four version four product is a paid version. ChatGPT. Is 3.5 is free. So let’s fire away. Let’s hit that button and see what it tells us. Okay, now you’ll notice it’s pretty quick. It reads that information very fast and begins to answer your question usually very, very quickly. One thing that I will tell you I’ve discovered with this product is, rather than ask it, a lot of questions about sales and marketing or anything else for that matter, you’re better off asking it in pieces. Like I have a lot of other things I need to know about running my company. But I want to ask it one thing at a time. So, Ian, why don’t you share with us some of those results in case people can’t see those?
Okay. So we asked that to come up with five, slogans. And so with that, with the information we gave it, it came up with that first one was pro-American services, patriotic efficiency, family driven comfort. So the second one, service beyond temperature, pro American’s commitment to comfort and community. Number three, heating and cooling with pride. Pro-American services for superior comfort. Number four efficiency meets expertise. Pro-American promises to the Johnson County, and then the last one pro-American services. Your comfort, our commitment for every season.
Like that does sound pretty good, Jerry. What do you think about those responses?
I love those responses. I think you could use any any one of those and be successful with it. So and I love what you said about parsing the information. So you could take that one that you choose here and really develop then marketing behind that. So, ChatGPT can do all that as well.
Yes, I like that. Yeah, I like those answers. I think those are pretty good. Now, if we aren’t happy with those answers, Ian, do we have.
Yeah. So since this is set up in a, in a, in a chat dialog, we can just continue the conversation and be like, you know what? I don’t really like that. You know, let’s let’s come up with five more. Perhaps that’s not good.
Yeah, yeah. Let’s do can I get.
Five more? I don’t know, you know, that we’re talking about, creating, you know, slogans. So just from the how the is going. So you can see you came up with, five more, if you like me to read those offer.
Yeah. Go ahead and read those off. I’ll see if I can get you on the screen here, too. Okay. So we can see your face.
So, number one, pro American services, engineering comfort, empowering community. Number two, redefining home comfort, efficiency, expertise, excellence. I like that one. Number three, pro American services, trusted tradition, modern efficiency. And, number four, innovation and integrity. Pro Americans pledge for perfect climate. And then the last one pioneering comfort pro America and its, services commitment to your coziness.
Yeah, I like that.
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Hey, scroll up, do me a favor and scroll up, and let’s give the audience a quick look at the background that we gave ChatGPT, because I think it’s really important that that they understand that they are talking to it like a human being, using plain English simple words, maybe like in a 12 year old eighth grade reading level type of thing, you you really want to give it plenty of information because it’s going to use that information as context when it generates the answers. So you can see, I don’t know how well you can see that screen, but you can see that we mentioned the company name, where the website is, our phone number, we gave our own name, etc. the more information, the better. One thing that I would remind everybody is that you want to leave all this information in the chat. We have the ability to delete this chat, but if you leave that chat up and don’t delete it, then it will learn from this conversation and subsequent questions will refer back to older answers and content. So it’s like an ongoing conversation with a human being. You don’t have to re-explain what you are asking. You can ask follow up questions, which I think is one of the really neat things about this particular product is the the fact that it it remembers the context of the question. So now that we have in our company some slogans that I think are pretty good, we have ten to pick from. Now we can ask it further questions. So what we did is again to save time so you don’t have to watch us try to type. We put this in a word document already and E and will copy and paste a request to create a marketing letter. Now this marketing letter is asking ChatGPT to write a letter advertising a precision tuneup for an air conditioning system. And I will go ahead and read you what we told ChatGPT because I think it’s important. We offer a precision tuneup for air conditioning systems. I’m telling ChatGPT, our highly trained technicians follow a 33 point technical checklist. Our goal is to get their air conditioning system as close to factory specifications as possible for efficiency and cooling capacity. The price of this tune up is $119 and takes about 90 minutes to complete. Our precision tune up follows sound mechanical engineering standards. Our tune up almost always saves the homeowner more money on electricity than the price they paid for it. Our competition offers a lower quality cleaning check that only takes about 30 minutes or so. Their price is always much cheaper than ours. So here I’m telling ChatGPT about the problem I have. We’re really great, but we have to charge more. They charge less, but they’re offering less. I need a way to explain that. I go on to say we lose sales because our price is higher, and we don’t know how to explain how good we are and how much better our tune up is. Finally, please write me a letter that does a great job of justifying our higher price. The letter must convince the homeowner that they need this service, and encourages them to call to schedule an appointment and have the service performed. I recommend that you always end with your question. You can start with a question and that might work fine. I’ve had bitter experience ending with my question without any more information after the question. So now that I’ve asked it to create the marketing letter, let’s go ahead and see what answer we get. Okay. Now it’s looking at the original information that we gave it about our company. I didn’t mention again that we were pro American services. It knew it. So it’s putting all that information in there. It remembers my name even though I didn’t give it my name again. I have a feeling it’s going to end this letter with my name. But it’s using a lot of information that it was given earlier. Now, in this fictitious company. We service the Johnson County, Kansas area. And it mentioned that it mentioned our phone number. It put my name, title, etc. our website is in there. I see the websites in there. That’s cool. So that’s a pretty decent letter. Let’s scroll up and just show the beginning of that letter so everybody can have a look at that. And I won’t take the time to read it to you, but I think that you can see that it’s a pretty decent letter. Now, Gary, I think you mentioned this earlier. You can’t just copy and paste that and use it. It needs that human touch. You want to go in and fine tune the letter. But what do you think about those results?
I like the results. I do think there’s some best practices on the humanization side that you would probably want to do. I would want a QR code that would link to a landing page to the website. I love that. GPD put the website in there. You didn’t ask that in the actual prompt, but it had the website and the, you know, previous info that you dropped in, as a prompt. So again, back to my original comment. The better job that we do at creating a prompt, the better output, you know, chat, GPT or Bard or any of these other AIS are going to do in terms of, production. And so what I do is I take this and I’ll sit down and I’ll, I’ll try to just personalize it just a little bit more. And, you know, 5 or 10 minutes of, of stylizing it to James or Gary or Ian style. You know, you’ve created productivity and a pretty effective, marketing letter. So, I look at the, the text here and it’s almost exactly what, you know, somebody that is a professional agency would write. So, you’re doing an effective job of putting the agency in a position to be able to support you, or you can do this yourself either way.
Yeah. So one thing that I didn’t do, Gary, is I could have asked ChatGPT to speak to me as if they were a sales and marketing consultant or a direct mail expert. And if you tweak the prompt like that, you’ll get different answers. You can also tell ChatGPT to take on the tone of a famous person, or a genre or some other, some other, area, and it’ll change the tone of the letter depending. So it’s really neat, and we could ask it to generate an alternative. We could say, I like the letter again. You talked to it like a human being. You could say I liked the letter, but I want it to be a little bit more, about our involvement in the community. I want you to talk about our involvement in the community and how we sponsor Little League, something like that. And it’ll rewrite the letter. And if you’d like to. You can ask it a follow up. You can tell it that you liked the letter, but you’d like it to be. Whatever you want. Maybe say more about our involvement in the community and our dedication to.
James, this really gets right back to the idea that there are different styles of writing, different styles of marketing, copy and content. So, you know, some of my clients will say, that’s too aggressive. It won’t work in rural wherever, let’s say rural Iowa. Or it’s not aggressive enough. You know, I need it to be more marketing savvy, more aggressive. I need to call to action to be more forceful. So if you change those prompts, you would get three variations of those letters depending upon, you know, your style and your community. It’s a great, you know, billboards, same thing, you know? So in a metro area, you might get away with some seven words or less. That’s more aggressive. If you were in, you know, a rural southern state, maybe rural Tennessee where I am, you probably want to think about how you want to tie that together locally. So, again, the more information that you can provide to the eye, the better. And and we’re training it like we’re, we’re literally training the AI, to be better the next time somebody utilizes it.
Right, right. That’s that’s that’s worth that’s worth reiterating. As you use this product, you are making it better not only for yourself but for everybody. The product is learning, and there is a thumbs up, thumbs down, and an opportunity to comment on the results. And supposedly the makers of this say that it uses that again to learn. Is it is it giving you the right information? So they really want you to get feedback, thumbs up, thumbs down at a minimum. But they say if you type in a comment, the system learns from it. Notice the new letter. It, talks about some of the. Some of the connections to. I’m just reading, as I’m talking, some of the connections to the community or a commitment to the community. Proud sponsors of a Little League baseball team. You could have told it. The team, Gary, used a term that marketing people use a call to action. I think most of us have heard that. Remember, it’s smart. And if you tell it to give you a certain call to action, it’s going to know what that call to action means. It understands all that. So you could say, write me the following letter and give me a three alternative call for actions. You could probably say, is there any research on the price or should I charge a different price? Or is a certain price going to give me a better response. And and you can go on and on. But I think you can see the power of this. We could also tell it that we want an email versus a letter, and it might give us a different result. So I think it I think it looks pretty good. I mean, I think most of you would agree if you’re not a great copywriter and I’m certainly not, but this would help me get started. I just have to explained in my own words to ChatGPT what I’m trying to do, and I can whine and complain about competition. Higher price. People don’t believe it’s worth it. And it’ll sort all that out and give me a pretty decent letter. Remember, it’s probably obvious this is just one idea. You could ask it to create a cover letter for your sales proposals. You could tell it the story about how you do in-home sales presentations. Residential customers in Johnson County, Kansas, and most of them are middle class and blah, blah, blah. And you want to overcome price objections. They are going to think you’re too high, and you’re having a hard time explaining why you’re a better value than the competition. Just tell it the whole story and it’ll produce a cover letter for your sales proposals. As I mentioned earlier, keep these conversations. You can create a new conversation and go in a whole different direction, like writing standard operating procedures. But if it’s sales marketing related, I would recommend that you keep the same conversation going indefinitely until you have a reason to delete it. I’d keep that conversation going. What do you think about that advice, Gary?
Yeah, I love that advice. In fact, just working with contractors, you know, on the coaching side, we would start this whole conversation here with, let’s create a marketing plan outline for the company. And so that would be the final question that we would ask after we loaded in the information, you know, for pro American services, we would say, let’s go ahead and create a full outline for a marketing plan for the business. And that would give us topics. And each one of those topics then becomes part of this thread. So if somebody said, okay, Brand Promise was one of those outline topics, then you could say, oh, hey, let’s, you know, generate five brand promises for pro American services. And then you could get used to go down the list of the outline topics. And that really teaches, the eye what’s going on not only with inside of that company, but it’s starting to give you focus in terms of your business process, looking at that individually. So, you know, when we do that, it’s pretty expansive, James. That’s why you want to go one bullet point at a time and then let the AI start generating responses, and you basically will have a full marketing plan inside of your company at that point. And then you can either work with somebody like you, or any of the coaches or anybody that’s out there in the industry as a coach and refine that.
Right? Right. I’m glad you brought that up, because I, I’m reluctant to admit this, but, I’m writing a book on bookkeeping and accounting. I want to explain what bookkeeping is, what accounting is, why they’re different, how to analyze financial statements, etc. and I couldn’t just go into ChatGPT and say, write me a book and then I could put my name on it. But what I was able to do is I gave chat a bunch of background about who I am and the people I work with and the contracting industry, and then I asked it to create a table of contents for the book, and I described the book and my objectives, and it gave me a really good table of contents. And then I tweaked the table of contents and made it my own. Then I could go back and ask it to explain or give me information about each element of the table of contents. So like chapter one might be Chart of Accounts and General Ledger, then I could ask it. Explain in simple terms to a non accountant as if you were a teacher in a classroom. What is a chart of accounts? Please keep your answer to 500 words or less, and it will give you a very good explanation of chart of accounts. And then you can move on to General Ledger and just keep on going. I haven’t tried, Gary, a marketing plan, outline, like you said, but I’ve done that same concept with, books and things, and it’s been very effective.
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