Brooks Lockett uses ChatGPT Work to help bake conversational nuances from interviews with potential clients into proposals for consulting work. Based in Charlotte, North Carolina, he helps B2B software and services companies explain what they do and why a prospect should choose them over the competition. An English major who has loved reading and writing since boyhood, Brooks started as a freelance copywriter around 2019, working with technology startups. He found a broad pattern underlying their recurring requests for better messaging: leadership teams often hadn't agreed on what made their business worth choosing. Before anyone rewrites a website, Brooks wants the CEO and leadership team to agree on what the business should be known for. He defines positioning as the lasting impression a product or service carves out in a potential customer's mind. His consultancy helps teams reach that aligned understanding, then Brooks turns it into a sharp message to convert prospects into paying customers.
When a founder friend introduced him to ChatGPT in December of 2022, Brooks dismissed it at first. But over the first six months of 2023, giving ChatGPT more complex tasks changed his mind. At first, he was testing it as something that was supposed to do much of the work of writing for him. For a few months, he even abandoned his handwritten notes, but soon noticed his work getting worse. He also found that giving ChatGPT a transcript and asking it to exercise editorial judgment was disappointing. Over the last year, he built a process that gave him plenty of sufficient space to think deeply before collaborating with ChatGPT.
Brooks writes 10 to 20 pages of handwritten notes over the course of each workday. For a recent prospect, he printed the transcripts of two calls with the VP of Marketing. She was considering hiring him for a monthslong engagement. With 15 pages of printed paper on his desk, he methodically circled passages, underlined phrases and wrote in the margins, trying to understand the problems behind her requests, the meaning between the lines, remembering the tone of her voice and expressions on her face. For this work, he closes his computer for hours to slow his thinking before moving to ChatGPT.
Before uploading material to any AI tool, Brooks omits or redacts sensitive client information. For this proposal, he photographed the annotated pages with his iPhone and uploaded them to ChatGPT Work, alongside links to transcripts in Google Drive and his proposal template Google Doc. His notes captured what he thought the conversation meant. The transcripts preserved details he may not have highlighted himself. He spent 10 to 15 minutes writing a prompt to explain the proposal draft he planned.
He says the whole process, including both calls, took four hours. Previously, typing the proposal himself would have taken multiple days, even with the template, and longer if the client had revisions. Getting these proposals right on tight deadlines is crucial to running a successful consultancy, and this two-pronged process leaves him more time to think through every detail. Clients pay him for his thinking, not his wordcount, but they need it on time. If someone in his position takes weeks to respond, “the moment has kind of passed.”
Brooks now offers prospects a free hour to examine how their business presents itself. The consultation lets him explain his approach before a project starts. During the call, he types messy notes on a shared screen, then gives ChatGPT those notes and the transcript to organize into a visual report. It also generates a graphic showing his assessment. Including the 60-minute call, the work takes about 90 minutes from start to finish, making the free consultation practical for a solo operator.
Brooks can return the report the next day or within 48 hours, while the conversation is fresh. Prospects can bring it to their CEO and discuss problems they hadn't considered. The report gives others in the company a few pages they can read and discuss together. He says his first positioning audit led to a paid engagement.
