Education Centre The Promptwise Approach

The Promptwise Approach

One engine: sales, marketing and AI, working together.

Marketing creates interest. Sales converts it. The marriage between them makes it one engine: one team, one funnel, one number. AI runs across all three, but only where things already work. This is how we think about each part, and how every engagement starts.

Sales, marketing and AI working as one engine SalesMarketingAI Oneengine

At a glance

The Promptwise Approach treats marketing, sales and the marriage between them as one engine: marketing creates interest, sales converts it, and one team with one funnel and one number holds it together. AI runs across all three, but only where things already work. Every engagement starts with the Engine Review, which scores seven areas from 1 to 5 and fixes the lowest first.

Marketing
Creates interest
Sales
Converts it
The Marriage
One team, one funnel, one number
AI
Only where things already work

Jump to

How every engagement starts

The Engine Review

Before anything changes, I score your engine. Seven areas, each scored from 1 to 5. The lowest score is the constraint we fix first.

1 Doesn’t exist3 Exists, but messy5 Works, written down and measured

1

Who & what

Your ideal customer, offer and positioning, shared by sales and marketing

2

Demand

Marketing: how buyers find you and stay interested

3

Conversion

Sales: how interest turns into paying customers

4

Hand-off

Do both teams agree what a good lead is? How fast is it followed up? Does sales feed back what closes?

5

Retention & advocacy

Onboarding, keeping and growing customers, and referrals

6

Shared systems

One CRM, one set of numbers

7

Shared rhythm

One meeting, one funnel

Then the AI check, area by area

If

Only where an area scores 3 or more. AI makes a working process faster, and a broken one fail faster.

What

The repetitive, time-heavy tasks worth handing over.

How

An existing tool, a simple set-up or a custom build, and who owns it.

Why

The measurable win: hours saved, faster follow-up or more revenue.

Book a Session Try the free mini version: the Funnel Health Check

01 · Marketing

Marketing creates interest.

The funnel as it works today, from getting recommended by AI to repeat customers, built for the way your buyers actually buy.

How we think about marketing

The principles behind every plan we write.

Customer first, channels second

Most wasted spend comes from marketing to everyone. A sharp ideal customer profile makes every channel cheaper.

Measure pipeline, not just clicks

Opens, impressions and followers are inputs. We report on qualified leads, cost per opportunity and revenue.

Own the follow-up

A lead that isn’t nurtured is a lead you paid for twice. Automation does the remembering so your team doesn’t have to.

Be the answer wherever buyers look

Search is no longer just ten blue links. Buyers ask ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews for recommendations, and you need to show up there.

Fewer channels, done properly

Two channels run well beat six run badly. We add channels only once the first ones are working.

Content with a job to do

Every asset should move someone a step closer to buying: attract, educate, prove or convert.

The funnel, as it works today

The classic funnel still works as a map, but AI search has added a new stage at the very top, before buyers even know you exist. Whether you run one funnel or several that hand over to each other, every stage needs to be defined, measured and owned, with no gaps.

Stage 1New

Pre-awareness

AI search has added a stage at the very top. A buyer asks ChatGPT for the top tools in your category and meets brands they’d never heard of, before they know you exist.

Think about: Is your content structured so AI assistants find you, cite you and describe you accurately?

Stage 2

Awareness

The content you create and the channels you distribute it through to build the brand: LinkedIn, YouTube, podcasts and a newsletter you own.

Think about: Are you building an audience you own, or renting one from an algorithm?

Stage 3

Interest

Keeping people interested once they know you exist: social media, PR, influencers, events and email nurture triggered by what each lead actually does.

Think about: Would you notice the buying signals when they start to show up?

Stage 4

Consideration

Personalised to the persona. An ecommerce buyer may never speak to a salesperson. A B2B buyer may need a case study, a testimonial or a walkthrough of their use case.

Think about: Can each buyer find the proof they need without having to ask for it?

Stage 5

Purchase

Built for the persona: real urgency, the right pricing, a comparison matrix, the right offers, and proposals people can sign and pay for on the spot.

Think about: How many steps sit between “yes” and a signed, paid deal?

Stage 6

Post-sale

Repeat, predictable revenue: onboarding, customer success, lifecycle email, new features and offers, until clients become advocates.

Think about: Is it easier for a happy client to refer you than to forget you?

AI has changed the funnel, but not its fundamentals. Read the full thinking in principle 15 of Adam’s Sales Philosophy.

Getting in front of buyers: distribution channels

Great content and a great offer still need a way to reach people. We help you choose the right mix of modern and traditional channels, run them properly, and only add more once the first ones are working.

Owned

Channels you control, so the audience is yours.

Modern

  • Website, landing pages and SEO
  • Content structured for AI search
  • Email and a newsletter you own
  • YouTube and podcasts

Traditional

  • Brochures and print collateral
  • Your shopfront, office or stand

Earned

Attention you earn rather than buy, and the kind buyers trust most.

Modern

  • PR and media coverage
  • Reviews and AI citations
  • Creators, influencers and guest podcasts
  • Social media and communities

Traditional

  • Word of mouth and referrals
  • Awards and industry press

Paid

Reach you buy, once you know who you’re paying to reach.

Modern

  • Google, Meta, LinkedIn and TikTok ads
  • Retargeting
  • Sponsored newsletters and podcasts

Traditional

  • Radio, print and outdoor
  • Sponsorships

Partners and in person

Other people selling for you, and the rooms where deals start.

Modern

  • Affiliates and co-marketing
  • Webinars and online events
  • LinkedIn and email outreach

Traditional

  • Channel and referral partners
  • Events, trade shows and networking
  • Direct mail and the phone

How we help

  • Pick two or three channels that suit your buyer, based on your ICP
  • Set a budget and a target for each one
  • Plan the content calendar, creative and offers
  • Brief and manage your agencies, PR people and creators
  • Tag every link with UTMs, so you can see which channels produce revenue

GEO and LLM visibility

Getting recommended by AI

Generative engine optimisation (GEO) makes sure AI assistants know who you are, describe you accurately and recommend you. It builds on good SEO, but the signals are different.

Try the free AI Visibility Checker

  • We test the questions your buyers actually ask across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Google’s AI Overviews
  • We benchmark how often you’re mentioned, how you’re described and who gets recommended instead
  • We fix the sources AI models trust: your site’s structure and clarity, third-party mentions, reviews, directories and comparison content
  • We track your share of voice monthly so you can see it move
  • Read more: How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity

ICP development

Know exactly who you’re for

Your ideal customer profile is the foundation everything else sits on. We build it from evidence, not guesswork.

  • Analyse your best and worst customers by revenue, margin, sales cycle and retention
  • Interview customers, and the people who said no
  • Define the firmographics or demographics, buying triggers, pains and who’s involved in the decision
  • Turn it into personas, messaging and a target account or audience list your team can use
  • Revisit it every quarter as you learn more

What great marketing looks like for your model

Same principles, very different execution. Pick the one closest to you.

Long cycles and buying committees mean marketing is about being known before the buyer is ready, then nurturing until they are. Demand generation, thought leadership and tight alignment with sales matter most.

Ideal team

Who you need

  • Head of Marketing or a fractional CMO
  • A demand generation or performance marketer
  • A content and thought leadership lead, often built around the founder’s voice
  • Marketing operations for automation, CRM and attribution
  • A designer, in-house or on demand
  • An SEO and GEO specialist, often external

Ideal tech stack

What it runs on

  • Marketing automation: HubSpot Marketing Hub or ActiveCampaign
  • LinkedIn (organic and ads) and Google Ads
  • A Webflow or WordPress site with strong landing pages
  • Ahrefs or Semrush, plus AI visibility tracking
  • Canva or Figma for design
  • GA4, Looker Studio and CRM attribution

Assets you need

What you need to market

  • ICP, personas and a messaging guide
  • A website with clear positioning and proof
  • Case studies and customer stories
  • Thought leadership: articles, LinkedIn posts and webinars
  • Gated assets: guides, templates and calculators
  • Nurture email sequences
  • Comparison and alternatives pages

02 · Sales

Sales converts it, on a system, not on heroes.

Most sales problems aren’t people problems. They’re process, data and follow-up problems that look like people problems.

How we think about sales

Six beliefs shape every sales engagement we run.

Process before people

Hiring another rep into a broken process just makes the hole bigger. We fix the path from lead to cash first, then staff it.

Pipeline is a maths problem

Work back from the revenue target to deals, win rate, meetings and leads. Once you know the numbers, you know exactly where it’s leaking.

Follow-up beats charisma

Most deals are lost to silence, not to competitors. A fast first response and disciplined follow-up are the cheapest growth lever there is.

One source of truth

If it isn’t in the CRM, it didn’t happen. Every contact, conversation and deal in one place, so forecasts are real and handovers are clean.

Tools follow process

Buy software to support a process you’ve designed, not to invent one. Most teams we meet pay for features they never switched on.

What great sales looks like for your model

The fundamentals hold everywhere, but a strong sales motion for a B2B software company looks very different to a consumer service or an online store. Pick the one closest to you.

Longer cycles, several decision-makers and higher deal values. Sales is about creating pipeline on purpose, running a repeatable discovery and proposal process, and forecasting with confidence.

Ideal team

Who you need

  • Head of Sales or a fractional sales lead who owns targets, process and forecasting
  • SDRs or BDRs for outbound prospecting and qualifying inbound leads
  • Account executives for discovery, demos, proposals and closing
  • Account management or customer success for onboarding, retention and expansion
  • Sales or revenue operations, often part-time early, for the CRM, data, reporting and automation
  • A partnerships lead once you’re ready for channel and referral partners

Ideal tech stack

What it runs on

  • CRM with pipeline and forecasting: HubSpot Sales Hub or Salesforce
  • Prospecting and data: LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Apollo, Clay
  • Outbound: Instantly or CRM sequences, on warmed-up sending domains
  • Meetings and call notes: Calendly, Fathom or Gong
  • Proposals and e-signature: Qwilr or PandaDoc
  • Dashboards tied to pipeline and revenue, not activity

Collateral you need

What your team needs to sell

  • Ideal customer profile and buyer personas
  • Discovery framework and simple qualification criteria
  • Pitch deck and a short, focused demo flow
  • Case studies and an ROI or business-case calculator
  • Proposal and pricing templates
  • Objection-handling guide and competitor battlecards
  • Outbound sequences and follow-up templates

03 · The Marriage

One team, one funnel, one number.

Sales and marketing run as one engine, with a clean hand-off, shared systems and a shared rhythm. This is where most leaks hide.

How we think about the marriage

What HubSpot made famous as “smarketing”: sales and marketing run as one. No marriage is harmonious all the time, but neither side works without the other.

Sales needs marketing

Marketing owns the personas, research, messaging and collateral. Without it, sales doesn’t know who to chase, what to say or what competitors are doing.

Marketing needs sales

Sales hears what buyers really say on calls and at events. Fed back, it sharpens marketing’s targeting, messaging and competitor analysis.

Sales and marketing share one number

Agree what a good lead is, how fast it’s followed up and who owns it at each stage. Then both teams report on pipeline and revenue, not activity.

A clean hand-off

One definition of a good lead, a follow-up time everyone sticks to, and sales telling marketing what actually closes.

One system

One CRM and one set of numbers, so both teams look at the same truth, with UTM tags on every link to show what produces revenue.

One rhythm

A weekly revenue meeting with sales and marketing together, looking at one funnel, solving issues on the spot.

The full thinking is in principle 15 of my Sales Philosophy.

04 · AI

AI across all three, only where things already work.

AI makes a good engine faster. It won’t fix a broken one.

How I approach AI

Practical, honest and grounded in real work.

I use it every day

Research, call prep, first drafts, call notes into the CRM and weekly pipeline reviews. I’ll show your team exactly how I use AI across sales and marketing, so you can do the same.

I bring in the experts

For deeper AI work, I bring in the right specialists from my network, and our trusted build partners for anything that needs building. You get the expertise without the guesswork.

We draw the map. AI takes the wheel.

Before anything is automated, we agree what’s worth automating, what stays human and how we’ll measure the hours saved.

How we decide what to automate first

Not everything should be automated, and the order matters. We use a simple, repeatable method so the first projects pay for the rest.

  1. 01

    Map the work

    We sit with your team and list the repetitive tasks across sales, marketing and operations: how often they happen, how long they take and who does them.

  2. 02

    Score every task

    Each task is scored on time saved, how often it runs, the risk if it goes wrong and how easy the data is to reach. High-volume, low-risk, well-defined work goes first.

  3. 03

    Prove it small

    We build one or two quick wins in weeks, not months, measure time saved against a baseline and check quality with the people who used to do the work.

  4. 04

    Scale what works

    Successful pilots become documented skills and workflows your whole team uses, each with an owner, guardrails and a budget.

Usually first

Good first candidates

  • Research and prep before sales calls
  • Meeting notes, CRM updates and follow-up emails
  • First drafts of proposals, posts and newsletters
  • Lead enrichment and routing
  • Weekly reporting summaries
  • Inbox triage and answers to common questions

Keep a human in charge

Leave these to people, for now

  • Final pricing, contracts and commitments
  • Sensitive or upset customer conversations
  • Anything legal, medical or financial without expert review
  • Decisions with no clear right answer
  • Publishing anything customer-facing before it’s been proven

What to think about before you automate

These are the questions that separate AI projects that stick from ones that quietly get switched off. We work through every one of them with you.

Guardrails

Clear rules for what AI can and can’t do, which data it can touch, and where a person must approve before anything is sent, published or changed. We build them into the workflow, not just a policy document.

Skills

Reusable, tested instructions for a specific job, such as writing a proposal in your voice or qualifying an inbound lead. Skills turn one person’s good prompt into a consistent result for the whole team.

Training

Tools don’t change habits; training does. Hands-on sessions built around your team’s real work, plus a prompt library and playbooks so it sticks.

MCPs and integrations

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) lets AI assistants connect securely to your CRM, inbox, calendar, drive and other tools. It’s what turns a chatbot into an assistant that can do the work. We give each connection the least access it needs.

Token costs

AI is billed by usage, measured in tokens. Each task usually costs very little, but it adds up at volume, especially with long documents or agents that run many steps. We estimate the cost per task before building, use the cheapest model that meets the quality bar and set spending limits.

Data and privacy

Where your data goes, whether it’s used for training and what your contracts and the Australian Privacy Principles allow. We use business plans with the right data controls and keep sensitive information where it belongs.

Quality and accuracy

AI can sound confident and still be wrong. We test outputs against real examples, add checks for facts and numbers, and keep people reviewing anything customer-facing until it’s proven.

Ownership

Every workflow needs an owner who maintains it as tools, models and your business change. Without one, automation quietly breaks.

What AI looks like in each part of the business

Where we usually start, who needs to be involved, what it runs on and what has to be in place first.

The biggest early wins are usually in the admin around selling: research, notes, follow-up and keeping the CRM up to date, so your team spends more time with customers.

Who’s involved

People and roles

  • The sales lead as owner and sponsor
  • Two or three reps as early testers
  • Sales or revenue operations to connect the CRM
  • Us, to design, build and train

Typical stack

What it runs on

  • Claude or ChatGPT on a team plan
  • Fathom or Gong for call notes
  • Your CRM’s AI features, plus an MCP connection to it
  • Clay for research and enrichment
  • Zapier, Make or n8n to connect the steps

What you need in place

Before you start

  • Clean, consistent CRM fields and stages
  • Approved email templates and a voice guide
  • Rules for which outgoing emails need a person’s sign-off
  • A baseline: how long these tasks take today

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

What is the Promptwise Approach?

It is how Promptwise Advisory approaches sales, marketing and AI: as one engine with one funnel and no gaps, built on a repeatable sales process and a clear ideal customer, with AI used to make the engine faster.

What is smarketing?

Smarketing is sales and marketing run as one team, sharing one funnel, one definition of a good lead and one set of revenue numbers.

How does Promptwise Advisory approach AI?

Adam Agresta uses AI every day across sales and marketing and teaches teams to do the same, and brings in specialists from his network for deeper AI work. Nothing is automated until the strategy and the measures are agreed.

What is the Engine Review?

The diagnostic every Promptwise engagement starts with: seven areas of your sales and marketing engine scored from 1 to 5, followed by an AI check (if, what, how and why) on each area. The lowest score is the constraint fixed first.

Want this approach applied to your business?

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