One Hundred Sales Prompts

• 9.1 Cold email and openers, prompts 1 to 16
• 9.2 Follow-up sequences, prompts 17 to 30
• 9.3 LinkedIn and social selling, prompts 31 to 42
• 9.4 Discovery and call preparation, prompts 43 to 56
• 9.5 Proposals and quotations, prompts 57 to 70
• 9.6 Objection handling and closing, prompts 71 to 84
• 9.7 Compliance and opt-out, prompts 85 to 92
• 9.8 Deliverability and reputation, prompts 93 to 100

Around these: why this is on your desk now, the context in law and science, the BNK KAM position, the decision frameworks, practice and case studies, checklists and worksheets, frequently asked questions, pitfalls and misconceptions, a glossary and the full list of sources. The subject throughout is Dutch and European law, and the book is published in two languages, Dutch and English; you choose at checkout and receive that edition.

This book begins with that email, not with the question of whether AI works in selling. It points at exactly what is wrong with it. The email is about you and not about him. The occasion is guesswork: the model has seen nothing, it has gambled on a line that is plausible at almost any company, and that is precisely why the recipient knows within one line that nobody has looked at him.

The halfway house that gets sold as personalisation is the merge field. First name, company name, job title, industry, province. Neatly worked into the opening sentence, and still not personal, because every one of those fields was already sitting in your own file before you had looked at this organisation even once. The test is simple. If you can fill a field for a thousand companies at once from an export, it is not a signal.

The solution therefore does not lie in a cleverer phrasing of your request. It lies in what you supply. Every prompt in this book is built on six building blocks, and of those six there is one that is not negotiable: the Signal, one real and checkable fact about this particular organisation, with the source alongside. If that field stays empty, the prompt does not write. It asks for it first. You supply the observation, the model supplies the form.

Then the second half, and that one is more uncomfortable. Your tool is new and delivers fluent, empty text. Your reference material is old and describes rules that have changed. The law described here is Dutch and European throughout. Almost every Dutch sales playbook still advises you to consult the Bel-me-niet Register, the Dutch national do-not-call register, before you dial. That register no longer exists, and since 1 July 2021 the article of law that governed it reads nothing but "[Vervallen per 01-07-2021]", Dutch for "lapsed as of 1 July 2021".

• One hundred fill-in prompts in eight categories: cold email and openers (1 to 16), follow-up sequences (17 to 30), LinkedIn and social selling (31 to 42), discovery and call preparation (43 to 56), proposals and quotations (57 to 70), objection handling and closing (71 to 84), compliance and opt-out (85 to 92), deliverability and reputation (93 to 100).
• Six building blocks in every prompt: Role, Signal, Context, Task, Format and Check. The Signal is the non-negotiable field. Leave it empty, or fill it with a generality, and the model does not hand you the piece you asked for. It tells you what is missing and asks you for that one fact first.
• Five fixed fields per prompt: Purpose, When to use it, The prompt, How to fill it in with one good and one too-vague example, and a Release check. 499 tick boxes in total, spread over one hundred checks that all differ from one another, not a general warning but the question that genuinely matters for this particular text.
• The framework around the prompts, with five figures: the six-part prompt model, the sales journey with the eight categories, the decision tree for may I approach this prospect, the deliverability chain and the release flow. Alongside them six worksheets to print, four worked case studies, decision frameworks, a role matrix, the questions to put to a supplier, and an implementation in four steps.
• The state of the law on 16 August 2026: Article 11.7 of the Telecommunicatiewet (the Dutch Telecommunications Act) with the amendment of 1 July 2026, the GDPR with legitimate interest and the absolute right to object, the misleading advertising standards of Articles 6:194 and 6:194a of the Burgerlijk Wetboek (the Dutch Civil Code) with the reversed burden of proof, Article 50 of the AI Act, and the self-regulation of the Nederlandse Reclame Code (the Dutch Advertising Code).
• Seventy-three sources, each actually retrieved and read, and then, in a second round, not confirmed but challenged by verifiers who had not written the first round.

For the commercial director and the head of sales. You are the one who ultimately signs for what leaves the building in the company's name, per channel and per contact. So what you are buying is not, in the first place, one hundred prompts. You are buying the answer to the question of which instructions in your own playbook have quietly expired.

For the sales manager and the team lead of an SDR or BDR team. You have to give eight people one working method that does not fall apart the moment somebody is in a hurry. Anyone who starts without a Signal gets no text, and you will notice that in the conversation you no longer have to have about it. And for the account manager or sales consultant who buys the book himself, with a long sales cycle and a name he cannot afford to damage in his own market.

Not written for the department that pushes out a thousand messages a week and leaves the outcome to a dashboard. And not for anyone in search of a guaranteed response rate, a figure with a per cent sign behind it, or a proven framework with a number attached. The book describes Dutch and European law, and states for every rule where it comes from. If you recognise yourself in one of the roles above, it is here for you, in Dutch and in English.

In compiling this book, every figure we came across was traced back to its publisher, its measurement method and its sample. What we found each time was the same picture: published by a party that sells the software the figure is about, measured with a survey in which participants estimated their own results, among marketers and not among sellers. All of those figures have been struck out.

What survived that sifting is one serious study, and it says something other than the market does. In the only pre-registered field experiment, carried out at an American consumer web shop among existing subscribers, no difference in gross profit and no difference in open rate were demonstrated against a human writer, while the writing work itself takes fewer working hours. "No difference demonstrated" is not the same as "proven equal", and quality was not measured in that study. That is why this book carries no performance figure about selling at all.

Beneath the book lies a file of seventy-three sources, built up in two independent rounds. The first admitted only sources that had actually been opened: the statutory text itself and not the commentary on it, the penalty decision and not the press release about it. The second round was given the opposite instruction, not to confirm but to refute, on the principle that a finding is wrong until it has been found back literally in the source. Together, well over five hundred retrieval actions.

That second round took things away, and that is the most interesting part. Three standards that circulate everywhere as part of a code of conduct turned out not to exist in the text of that code. The fine in the much-cited Dutch spam case, which in almost every retelling is one hundred thousand euros, turned out to be the opening amount from 2012 and was, after three sets of proceedings, finally fixed at seventy-five thousand. There is also a section in this book called "Where we do not know".

2026 edition, cut-off date 16 August 2026. 347 pages, approximately 157,800 words, 100 fill-in prompts with 499 release tick boxes, 73 sources with full references, 5 original diagrams and original photography. Digital publication, available immediately after purchase.