.svg)
.avif)
Unlock the power of AI with Instantly
Find warm leads, scale email campaigns, reach primary inboxes, engage smarter and win more with AI.
How Claude Skills Work
Skills are the mechanism that give your Sales Brain specialized capabilities. Rather than typing long instructions into every conversation, a skill is a saved, reusable set of instructions that Claude can call on automatically when it's relevant. The result is a more organized, consistent, and capable system — one that doesn't require you to re-explain how to do things every time you start a new task.
The best analogy for skills is employee training. When you onboard a new sales rep, you don't explain everything from scratch in every meeting. You train them once — on how to use your CRM, how to research a prospect, how to write a cold email according to your style — and from that point forward, they apply that training automatically in the right situations.
Skills in Claude work the same way. Each skill is a text file (usually with a .md extension) that contains two parts: a description of what the skill does, and the actual instructions that define the skill's behavior. When you ask Claude to do something, it reads through the descriptions of all available skills and determines which one is most relevant to your request.
You can find your installed skills in Claude's settings under the Capabilities section. There, you'll see example skills that come pre-installed, as well as any custom skills you've added. One of the most important built-in skills to enable is the Skill Creator — this is the skill that allows Claude to build new skills for you, based on your instructions.
Because Claude selects skills based on their descriptions, clarity matters. If you have five different email-related skills, Claude may struggle to pick the right one. The solution is to assign each skill an explicit trigger command. For example, a cold email writing skill might only activate when you type the command [cold-copywriting]. This removes ambiguity and makes your system predictable and efficient.
Skills can cover a wide range of capabilities. On the research side, skills can be built for prospecting company research, ICP qualification, and competitor analysis. On the writing side, skills can handle email sequences, subject line generation, and follow-up templates. On the operations side, skills can pull campaign analytics, audit account performance, and summarize weekly results.
Each of these lives in its own skill file. When you install it into your Claude workspace, it becomes available across all your projects and conversations. The library grows over time as you identify new tasks you want to systematize.
The next step is to build your first skill from scratch — a sales playbook skill that will form the backbone of your Sales Brain's understanding of your company.
Video transcript
Okay, now that we have our project set up, we want to start teaching Claude all of these different things that we wanted to do, and we do that using a thing called skills, so skills for Claude. Now, you can, again, think of that the same way as if you will be onboarding an assistant or a sales rep, and they are new into your company, into your organization, and they need to learn all these skills. Now, those can be skills on how to use instantly, how to use HubSpot, but they can also be skills on how to research a company before you reach out to see whether or not they are a good fit, or how to write a cold email according to our guidelines. All of those are skills. They go in separate skill files, and then Cloud can just call them whenever it feels is relevant.
Now I'm going to give you a little bit of theory, not too much, not not to overwhelm you, and then we'll dive into actually building skills, which is the fun part. Now, a skill is a text file, and I will show you plenty of examples in just a second. But basically, how Claude talks about them is that they are that's what's a skill. It can be a folder or just a text file, and I will talk a little bit more about why we are just using text files in a second.
Whereas there's the scale dot md, which is an extension for the type of text that's in there.
And then in that scale, at the top it says, this is what the scale does, and under it, it says, this is the exact scale. Right? So I will show you an example, and that will make more sense.
If you want to find the skills that you have in Claude, you go to settings and then click capabilities. And then as you go and you scroll down, here it says skills, and then these are the skills. Now, as you can see, I have a lot of skills. I'm playing around with this all day long.
But if you click under example skills, you will have skills as well. And what you wanna do is you wanna make sure that the skill creator is toggled on, and then we'll scroll back really quickly to my skills. So, for example, here is a called copywriting skill. And as I said, at the very top of this text, there is a description of what this skill does.
And then under it here, it starts with the actual skill.
And the reason why it's built up that way is whenever you say to your employee, Claude, hey, I would like to write an email, launch a sequence, do research. It will start reading all the different descriptions of all the skills that you have, and then determine which one is most relevant. So it starts kind of searching in his brain, in his memory, and it will look at all the different skills that you have and say, okay, the user said write an email. This skill is about writing emails.
Okay? So that's how it determines that. It's important that we make it clear which skill it should be using. Right?
Imagine that we have five different skills about writing emails. We have skill number one, which is about writing follow-up emails. Skill number two is about writing emails to your family about family updates. Skill number three is about financial updates.
Skill number four is about writing cold emails, and skill number five is about customer support emails. It may get a little bit unclear to Claude, and all of that just depends on the the context that it has, but we're not gonna select the right one. It will take time. It's not efficient.
So for that, we use explicit commands, and you can see that here. So we give each of our skills a very explicit command saying to write emails, to write cold emails, only do that using this command or only use this command. And then we can simply type the command saying, okay, cold copywriting, and Cloud will know, ah, they're looking to use this skill. Let's let's pull in that one.
So that's a little bit about skills. I will show you now how we build a skill from scratch, how we install it, what it looks like. This is just some theory. I know I'm going a little bit fast, but we're going to actually go through this step by step right now where we're gonna create our first scale, install it, and then we have the very start of our sales break.
Resources
Courses
.svg)
Prompts
%20(1).svg)
Unlock the power of AI
with
Find warm leads, scale email campaigns, reach primary inboxes, engage smarter and win more with AI.
Stop letting poor deliverability kill your pipeline. Join 50,000+ sales teams who've made the switch to Instantly for better inbox placement, higher response rates, and more closed deals.
No credit card required.
