A new hire who knew nothing about your business would ask you a dozen questions before writing a word to a customer. An AI sales worker can't ask. It writes what the brief supports and fills the gaps with plausible guesses, and plausible guesses are how a landscaper ends up offering tree removal. Writing the brief takes about 30 minutes and fits on one page.
Generic advice for "AI agent prompts" talks about roles, context and output formats. Useful if you're building the agent. You aren't. You're briefing one, and what matters is what it needs to know about your business and what it must never say. The parts below follow the Settings questions in Rocketship, but the content works anywhere you can type instructions.
Where each part of the brief goes
In Rocketship, four Settings questions hold the brief. "What does your business do?" is for facts: what you do, who you serve, what makes you different. "How should emails sound?" holds a tone choice and a short "How do you sell?" note. "Send on its own, or ask you first?" holds the Rules and instructions box, described there as what the team must always or never do, which wins when it clashes with anything else. "What counts as a win?" is one choice: book meetings, start conversations or close sales. Who exactly to write to is set when you find buyers.
Keep facts and rules apart. Facts are things it may say. Rules are things it must do or never do. Mixed together, "we're insured and never quote prices" becomes a muddle the worker has to untangle on every email.
Who you sell to, in one sentence
Give the worker a buyer, not a market. "Small businesses" is a market. "Property managers and HOA boards who hire out lawn care for a property of 5 to 40 acres within 25 miles" is a buyer. If you can't write the sentence, you can't brief anyone, human or not. Describing your buyer in one sentence has a formula for it. Add the titles to skip: "Don't write to tenants, receptionists or assistants."
The offer and the price rule
State what you sell as a concrete thing with a unit: "weekly mowing, spring and fall cleanups, mulch and bed care, seasonal flowers, for commercial properties." Then decide how price is handled, because the worker will be asked. There are three workable rules. Never quote a price and offer a site visit. Give a range ("most small commercial properties run $250 to $600 a month") and never an exact number. Or quote from a published price list. Pick one and write it as a rule. Without one, the worker will either dodge or improvise, and a stranger holding your improvised number is a problem for months.
Facts it may state, claims it may not
Write two short lists. May state: your services, your service area, years in business if you're sure, your license and insurance if they're current. May not claim: awards you don't have, customer names you haven't cleared, results you can't prove, a start date, "the best" or "the cheapest" anything. Be especially careful with anything legal or regulated. If you work in a field with rules about what you may say in marketing, put the strictest version in the rules and check them yourself with your regulator.
Your voice in three sample lines
The "How do you sell?" note takes 400 characters. That's tight, so spend it on voice and show, don't describe. Write three lines the way you'd actually say them, and let the worker copy the register:
- An opening: "Hi Dana, your lot on Cedar Street looked great from the road. Who looks after the beds?"
- An answer to a price question: "Most properties your size land between $250 and $600 a month. I can give you a real number after a 15-minute walk."
- An answer to "not now": "Understood. When does your current contract renew? I'll check back then and not before."
Add the rules that tone can't carry. "Say crew, never solutions. No exclamation marks." Tone is the first thing recipients notice, and it's the easiest thing to fix with a sentence.
The five lines most briefs forget
- What you don't do. Services you decline and places you don't go. Without it, a reply asking for something you don't offer gets a confident yes.
- The price rule. Written, as above. It's the most common gap.
- The one next step. "Ask for a 20-minute site walk," not "let's connect." A vague ask gets a vague reply.
- Who is not the buyer. The titles to skip, and what to do when a reply says "wrong person" (ask for the right name once, then stop).
- What to do with "not now." When to check back, and when to leave it. This one decides whether the worker feels persistent or pushy.
A filled-in brief for a landscaper
Odalys owns Fieldstone Lawn and Garden, a five-person crew in a college town. Here is her one page, split into the four boxes.
What does your business do? Fieldstone Lawn and Garden is a five-person landscaping company serving commercial properties and HOAs within 25 miles of Millbrook. Weekly mowing, spring and fall cleanups, mulch and bed care, seasonal flowers. Insured, in business since 2011. The same two-person crew every week, and a text when they leave. We don't do tree removal, irrigation installs or hardscape.
How do you sell? Plain and warm, like a neighbor who runs a tidy crew. Start with something true about their property, not about us. Short sentences, one question at the end. Say "crew", never "solutions". No exclamation marks.
Rules and instructions: Never quote an exact price. You may say most small commercial properties run $250 to $600 a month, and offer a 15-minute site walk. Never promise a start date. Never name another customer. Don't write to tenants or receptionists. If someone says they are under contract for the year, ask when it renews, thank them, and stop.
What counts as a win? Book meetings.
That's under 250 words, and it covers all five forgotten lines. Odalys wrote it in 30 minutes on a Sunday night.
Revise it after the first week
The first week's emails tell you where the brief is thin. Read a handful (see the five-minute daily review) and change one line per problem. A generic opener means the facts are thin, so add a concrete detail about your best customer. A reply that got an odd answer means a rule is missing. Wrong people replying means the buyer sentence is too loose. Test any new rule with a reply of your own before relying on it, as the day-one limits checklist suggests.
The better the brief, the less personalization has to be forced. If you want the worker to write a true first line, the thinking in personalization at low volume applies directly, and how to write a cold email that gets replies is a good yardstick for the emails it produces. For what a worker does with the brief, see hire an AI, not a tool and the AI workers page.
A one-page brief is the cheapest thing you will do all month that improves every email. Rocketship finds the buyers, emails them from your own Gmail, follows up, and books the meeting on its own. Plans that get you customers start at $24.99 a month (Launch), and both Launch and Frontier start with a 7-day free trial, card required.