AI is only as good as the instructions you give it. If you've ever felt like AI outputs are generic or off target, the problem isn't the tool, it's the prompt. When you're running outbound campaigns, you need your AI co buyer then instantly to write in your style, match your positioning, and follow your playbook. Without the right setup, you'll end up with messages that sound like everyone else's, and prospects can smell that a mile away.

That's where system prompts come in. A system prompt is like the DNA of your AI agent. It sets the rules, the tone, and the framework for everything it creates. Get it right, and your AI Copilot consistently produces emails that sound like they came straight from you.

You can lock in your voice, define your ideal customer, and even set up Copilot to consistently manage your account. In this mini course, I'll walk you through how to set up Copilot for outbound success and design system prompts to help you get there. You'll see examples, learn how to tweak them for different campaigns, and end up with a playbook of prompts you can reuse across all your instantly campaigns. Let's dive in and set up your AI Copilot the right way so every email works harder for you.

Now before we dive into more advanced things and we start prompting right away, we need to make sure that we're really clear on what Copilot actually is, what it does, what it doesn't do, and most of all, how it can help you get more success from outbound. Here we are instantly, and when you navigate to the Copilot tab, which is the first tab that you'll see as you launch the application, You can see it right here. It looks like a ChatGPT interface, and it's very similar in a way. It's just that Copilot has been set up just for you for outbound success.

It's a tool that lives on top of your account, has access to all of your data, and everything that you have access in inside of your Insta. Ly account, Copilot has access to as well. You can think of it more like an agency that has access to your account. You can ask the questions.

And the reason I'm saying agency and not employee is because of all the different skill sets that Copilot has. It can grab your analytics for you on a weekly basis. It can write sequences for you. It can find prospects for you and enrich them and a whole lot more.

To give an example, here you can see where it says weekly analytics. When we click on that, it pre fills the prompt, which says, can you share all my campaign analytics for this week, which in itself was already really helpful. But then when we click here, you can see the option to make it a recurring task. When we click that and we, for example, select weekly and then we hit go, every single week, it will share campaign analytics for me.

And it can share it to Slack. It can share it in here just for me to have a full overview of everything that's going on my account without actually having to jump into my account every day. Besides that, it can generate sequences for me, which is something that we'll dive deeper into later. It can turn on and off inboxes for me and everything in between.

Let's have a little bit of a look at the different settings that we have here so we can set up Copilot for success before we dive into more advanced topics. You can see the new chat button, which will always take you to this window right here where you can either speak to Copilot so you can use voice input or you can simply type your request, and that way you can power Copilot. Then here's the memory, which we'll set up now where you plug in your website, and it will automatically create a playbook for you. I've plugged in our website instantly dot a I, and it came up with the business description.

It will find different outreach goals, and these are all things that you can edit where it says here the primary objective is to get them to start a free trial. On the platform, you can change that and say, I want this to book a demo or I want to just open a conversation instead of asking for the demo. So these are all things that you can easily edit to fine tune it to what your main outreach goals are.

They hate to find different customer profiles that they came up with based on, in this case, the Instinet website or in your case for your website, and they don't look very in-depth. But when you click into them, you can see everything that's under there in the ICP. So the different problems that are being solved for the ICP, the different benefits our product has for that ICP and different business offers and unique selling points that we have as well as different customer goals that they are likely to have. And based on that, the Copilot will adjust messaging and other things so that we can really resonate with everything that's going on for this prospect.

Different success stories in there as well, different email actions. And, again, here it says, start a free trial. If I prefer to book a demo, I will change that. Or if I prefer to just open that conversation, I can put that in there as well.

But those are all things that later on, we're just going to override with our system prompts to make sure that it's right in the email sequences in a way that we would like it to. Right? And these are all things, again, that you can look at and adjust however you feel it best represents your company, your brand. And then here, we can add guidance.

Now this is something that we'll dive deeper into later. I'm going to leave this for now because that's something for the next video. On the task, we can see the recurring tasks that we've set up. I already gave you an example earlier.

You can find and manage those under tasks. Here in the settings, you can enable, disable analytics where it shows you how many hours you're actually saving per week for using Copilot, and you guys have Slack notifications. So in our case, we've set up a recurring task to get weekly analytics. It would send those to Slack once I've connected my Slack account, and then we can have a Copilot or analytics channel where it would just give us weekly, daily, monthly analytics and everything else that we've set up just for us to analyze our account without actually having to go into the account, which is really helpful.

Let's get one more quick thing out of the way before we dive into the more exciting part, which is the prompting. There are two main prompts that we can see, two main prompt categories generally when we're talking about AI. So there are system prompts, and those are the ones that we load here on the memory. And then when you go to guidance, you can see different prompts here.

And when I'm saying system prompts, I'm referring to the guidance right here. It has a little bit of a different name, but generally talking about AI, it makes more sense to talk about system prompts and then user prompts, and that's the terminology that we're using going forward.

And then when you navigate to here, you can see there are different things you can type in here. Or if you don't have an inspiration, you can just hit the slash forward slash and then and it will have different things you can do here.

Everything that you put in here, those are user prompts or just prompts. So whenever referring to system prompts, that is the guidance that goes under the memory and everything in here. So everything that goes in here. So when I click, for example, I'll deal customer persona, and I need to enter some information there, it will insert the prompt right here, and that would be the user prompt or just prompt.

And just to get that out of the way so that we all know what we're talking about, we're now gonna focus more on system prompts for this mini course. That's because once you have all of that set up, everything else just becomes a lot easier, and you don't have to think so much about different prompts that you type in there, and you can make things a lot easier for yourself. Now it's time for the fun part, which is where we actually start prompting Copilot to talk like us or at least in the way that we wanted to talk and write cold emails that we are confident will get us results. Now over the years, there are lot of different formats that I've tried, and there's one person that has always sort of stuck out for me that was a really solid copywriter, which is a guy named Josh Brown.

Now that could be someone completely different for you, or maybe you're saying, I'm not sure who even would be a great quote email copywriter. We have a solution for that as well, so don't worry. But let's get started with researching email copywriters. In our case, we're going to take Josh Brown as an example.

And then the fun part is that you can actually use Copilot to train Copilot, and I'll show you how. I've told it, go online and research Josh Brown's cold email copywriting rules and turn that into a big system prompt for an AI called email writer, which technically, Copilot is.

And it came up with a comprehensive system prongs based on Josh Brown. So if we start looking at this, and these are things that once we start writing our own prongs, we can use or we can just copy this as is because there's these are some great core principles, and it talks about the different questions to ask, the frameworks, and avoiding promising the moon focusing or relevance, etcetera, etcetera.

But something else I really like as well, do not ask for large commitments like thirty minute calls, but simple yes, no questions, which is something that I found to be very helpful as well over the years in a different email writing styles and tones. Then what we can do, we can just simply copy and paste this and drop that into the memory of our Copilot to use as a system prompt.

So I head over to memory. Then under guidance, I can click new rule, and I could simply paste the system from that Copilot wrote in there. I hit save and save, and then it's in there. Now I do remember under here, the primary objective is to get to start a free trial.

This is something that could, in theory, interfere with the yes, no question thing that's in our system prompt, but we can prompt for that or we can see how it behaves, and then we can adjust accordingly. So here under guidance, we can see the Joss Brown prompts and now in theory, it should be able to write email sequences that are in Joss Brown's style. And to give an idea of what system prompts could look like when we write them, I usually use ChatGPT to help me write these different system prompts, and this is what they usually look like. And you really wanna talk about the purpose, the goal, and rules.

But also, when creating these prompts, it's as important to say what the output should look like as it is important to say what the output shouldn't look like. So to give it things that it should never say, that should never be in there. And you can see there's really in-depth prompts, but these aren't things that I came up with overnights. These are things that you build out.

So now it's going to write our first sequence, and we can see some things in there that maybe we don't like. And then we could add that to our system prompt saying, never say this, always say that, never write it like this, etcetera, etcetera. What I'm going to try is I'm going to ask it, write a write a three step sequence with four variants for email one for this segment, and then there's the segment that we wanna target. Then once we hit go, we'll start thinking, and it will start generating the three step sequence for us with a different variance.

And then in some case, we like all the variance. In some cases, we don't. We only like maybe three of them. We can just simply turn up the fourth one.

But the biggest value is in not having to start with that blank page, and that's where Copilot is super helpful. Then as you optimize it over time, you can really get to a point where you could ask it to write, and that's it. You can say, sure. Looks great.

Create the campaign for me, and that's it. You're good to go. Now here we have the emails, and they're pretty good.

There are some things I would change about it, and that's what we're gonna start prompting for now as well. So we jump back into our prompting chat right here. Here we go. I'm asking you to write a user prompt for me that instructs AI to write a three step for variant email sequence, starts with a both both the bear question, etcetera. And these are things that you can all write that yourself, but thanks to AI, I've gotten a little bit lazy, so I'm going to ask AI to do my homework for me.

Now we're going to try again with that same prompt that I just wrote for us for the same segment, and we're gonna see if it got a better structure for us. Here we go. So now it's starting with a what we call poker bear question. Are your current email outreach efforts getting as fast as your sale targets demand?

And then it they've dumped into an observation and then a simple yes, no question. Now there's still things I would change about this, but as you can see, these are all things that you can have Copilot do for you where you're saying, I'm not sure if I like this. Let's prompt a little bit different. And then once you have all that, you can start transferring that to the memory of your Copilot and updating the memory of your Copilot.

For example, here it says, would you be open trying your free trial? I know where it's coming from. I know it's coming from here. So if I'm saying, you know what?

The free trial, not sure. I just take that out and I put something else in there. And that's how you use Copilot to sort of build out your Copilot, let's say, memory and the Copilot knowledge base with these different guidance prompts. That's one way to get where you want to go.

But in some case, you may not be familiar with good email copywriters, and you just want to replicate something that worked in the past. And there's another great way for doing that. I have a email template here that has worked really well for us in the past, and I can just simply tell, listen. Here's a template.

Now write a prompt for me to replicate this template at scale, and then that will be my Mollis prompt for Copilot. You can just go online, find any type of email that you think is great, and drop it in here and say, help me replicate this at scale, Add that to your memory. Now we'll start writing these types of emails for you at scale. It really is as simple as, I like this email structure, turn it into an extensive system from for my AI writer and to replicate it, etcetera, etcetera, and then the actual email.

And then Copilot will help us replicate that for campaigns going forward.

I'm simply gonna take this. I'm gonna go to a memory. I still have the Josh Brown thing in there, but I think that's great because that sets some really good ground rules. I'm just simply gonna add a new rule right here. I'm gonna paste that in here. I'm gonna hit save right there and save right there.

Now it's time for the fun part, which is the actual building of the prompts that we're going to be using for Copilot. When I'm talking about prompts, there are a few different prompts that we have. There are what we call system prompts, user prompts, and there are knowledge prompts, and copywriting prompts in this case now. The system prompts or the guidance, what we call inside Copilot, you can set that up under memory and guidance.

They go in here. You can already see a few that I've created in here. And then there are user prompts, chat prompts, or just prompts, and they go in here in the chat box. If at any time you don't have inspiration for what you wanna instruct Copilot right in here, you can simply hit the forward slash, and you can see different prompts that you can use in here.

Then there are copywriting prompts, which is what we're gonna focus on mostly now, then there are knowledge prompts, and that could be maybe guidance that you add here. One thing that I frequently do is just to have ChatGPT's agent mode go and analyze a website of a project I'm working on and then have all of that knowledge added here as well just to add on top of the playbook that Copilot already wrote for us. But here, we're gonna mostly focus on copywriting prompts and then mostly on the system prompts.

Here, I have a lot of presets, and they will be available as a link with this mini course. You don't have to worry about having to write all this or having to come up with any of this on your own. You can use this inspiration for your own system prompts. What we're mostly gonna look at is a type of structure you wanna use and what you want to have in your system, what shouldn't be in there, and then we're going to actually use Copilot to start writing some of these prompts for us.

Now as you can see, these are really big prompts. There's a lot of information in there. It's really dense, and there are a lot in there. Then something that I came up with overnight.

So this is the work of years and years of different testing and different methods and different ideas. And Node dot ai, luckily, everything is is a lot more, let's say, condensed. Everything can be done a lot quicker, meaning that you can simply instruct Copilot. You can see what it comes up with, what you don't like.

You add that to the memory. You can say, okay. This you shouldn't do. I don't like how this is written.

And if there's something that you do like, you wanna add it to there. Now let's get started from scratch in having some system prompts. One person that I really like that's calling a bit of a cold email guru is Josh Brown. I like the way he writes his emails.

What we're going to ask Copilot is to research Josh Brown online and turn his copywriting rules into a system prompt. So that's exactly what I'm asking here. I'm telling Copilot to go online and research Josh Brown's cold email copywriting rules. It's going to start thinking.

It's going to research online and check its its knowledge and then turn it into a prompt, that's a good starting point for us to have a bit of rules in there of what we like and what we do not like. And then we have to start looking at the memory as well because under here, there's the primary goal, the primary objective, which is, for example, free trial. And then there are different things under here as well that influence how Copilot writes. If we start getting some output, are things that we don't like.

We wanna make sure that we either update it here or override it in our system prompts.

They came up with a system prompt for us, and it even came up with an example template structure. And when you're prompting, examples are vital. It is really important that you're telling it, this is the structure that I'm expecting from you and don't deviate from it. This is what it is that you need to be giving me.

And that is something that is vital when prompting a system prompts. With general prompts, it depends on what your system prompt looks like, but it can be helpful as well. Now looking at this structure, there are some things that I like. There are some things that I don't like.

This thing goes for here. So let me just take this entire system from right here. I'm gonna copy that. I'm gonna head over to memory and then guidance, and then I'm going to remove what's in there.

I'm gonna save and add a new room. This is the problem that I just wrote for now. A hundred and fifty, two hundred for me is long, so I'm going to save fifty to eighty words. And then in some cases, what I just add is vital and important.

Now it's in all caps. I'm not screaming at AI here, but everything that is really important, you wanna add that there just to make sure that it really takes notice. It's something it's small prompting trick that I found to work really well. I'm also not a big fan of this right here.

So I'm gonna say start with a relevant thought provoking question, which we call a question. And, again, important.

Follow with an observation about their likely situation, and then there's the CTA.

I'm going to click save and then save.

Let's go back to the chat because there is this right here. And I kinda like it, but there's a different format I would like to use instead.

I'm going to add a new role. I'm going to paste this template, and you can do that anytime. If you have an email template that you've seen perform well or maybe you've seen one on LinkedIn and you're thinking, man, that is a cool template. That's a nice email.

You can simply grab it and you can drop it in here, and you could ask Copa. You can say, listen. Here's a template, a structure that I really like. Turn this into a prompt for me, like a system prompt, and then that goes in here.

I'm going to write it myself, not just because we're here. We're doing this video, but it's a great way for you to take what's already working and simply replicate it at scale.

Here we go. Edit the file and important. Again, I'm not screaming at AI here. And then I'm saying this is the exact email structure we always want to use.

Do not output any other structures. Then there's a structure, and it's important that we should explain the structure. Not just give one example, but say, okay. When you start with a thought provoking question, then an observation statement that drives that pain home.

So we really wanna focus on pain points along futures, benefits a little bit, but focus on pain points that this person likely has. Then a low friction question that's also a CTA. I'm going to save that here. I'm going to save that here.

And then we could try to write an email sequence and see how it reacts. And, again, this is a game of optimization.

We can now write a sequence and we can have a look at how comfortable we are with it, and then there are small bits and pieces that maybe we're not gonna like, and we're gonna turn that into extra guidance and we're gonna add that here as well. And over time, you arrive at a point where it will write sequences that are just phenomenal that you're really happy with. There are a couple ways you can go about this. You could simply ask it write a sequence, or you can just make sure that it really sticks with the structure that we went over.

So I could say, please write a three step sequence, four variants for each step, and then I've just gone over the structure again here. Again, you don't have to do that when you're writing these prompts if your system prompts are really working. But since we're just getting started, we're building our system prompts. I'm just going over the structure again.

And then here, I have our targets, some newly hired VP of sales of VP of SaaS companies.

Now these are the sequence that I came up with, and they're really, really good, and they exactly follow the rules that we laid out for it. So it's asking, and there's that poker beer, thought provoking question. How confident are you that your current email outreach scales without losing deliverability? That's a big thing that people often struggle with.

Then many newly appointed VPs relevant as in we know that's our micro campaign that we're setting up here, face challenges, and then it goes into that low friction CTA, that question. So we're exploring that. We'll be worth ten minutes. I think that's a that's a really good CTA. And then the same goes with variant two, variant three. They all follow the exact same structure.

And that's how we prompt Copilot to write the exact structure that we wanted to follow. And there may be things in here that I'm not a big fan of. So maybe this second seat this second sentence right there, I feel that maybe we could optimize that a little bit. Then I'm just gonna come up with examples.

I'm gonna look at my team, what's working. I'm gonna write some examples, and I will drop that in there and say, these are good examples. Use that. So you wanna add that to the guidance.

And then you can see right here, I'm just going over the format again of, you know, the step one, step two, step three of what the email should look like. Now if you have no idea what a good email should look like, you can work with Copilot on researching copywriters like we did with Jos Brown and see what they feel a sequence should look like. And then have it write one template. Have it write templates until you arrive at a template that you feel is really good, then you grab that, and then that could be the structure or format that you wanna use going forward.

And once you have that once you have that nailed, then it just churns them out going forward in the exact same way that you want it to go out. Again, maybe that's something that you see on LinkedIn or that you found with a colleague or with someone else. You can just drop it into Copilot and say, I like this, and it will start replicating it for you. Now get there, these presets that we have.

This one is called the Helms brain view one because these are just the pros that I came up with over time. You have access to these. You can just copy and paste those in there, and you're good to go. And that will write more or less the the format that you're looking at now with that talk thought provoking poker bear question, then statements and and a low friction CTA.

So let's recap what it is that we went over on making successful prompts and setting up instantly Copilot for our one success.

When you're writing these prompts, it's really important that you have a clear structure on what is it you want to see, but it's equally important to put in there what you do not want to see. And those are things that you build over time.

The problems that I came up with, they take years and years for me to come up with, and they take years and years to just optimize, but you have access to them right away. Code wise is already pre trained, so a lot of it is already in there. But if you're not a hundred percent happy with the sequences that it writes for you, you can simply train it using the prompts that you now have access to, or you can build your own prompts and maybe even copy email formats that you've seen online or that are already working for you, and you can start adding that to the guidance of Copilot. So Copilot really is a pre trained cold email expert, but you can also think of it a little bit as a junior employee that you can still steer in the right direction of where you would like it to go, but it has access to your full account and it really is that agency partner that can do all these things for you as come up with analytics, come up with different ideas, and write sequences for you.

But just like with an agency, every now and then needs a bit of feedback and it needs to adjust to your brand. So that's where there's a little bit of homework for you in there. But the fun part is that Copilot can actually help you do that homework. You can have it go and research online for solid call email templates or sequences that are currently working.

You can ask it to turn that into a framework and just upload that to the Copilot guidance, and then you have a fully trained cold email expert that is twenty four seven at your disposal.