Prompt
The instruction you give an AI model. The single biggest factor in the quality of what comes back. Also, in the book, a structured question you ask yourself.
A prompt is the instruction, question or brief you give an AI model, and it is the single biggest factor in the quality of what comes back. A vague prompt gets a generic answer because the model has to guess what you wanted; a prompt with the role, the task, the context and the format gets something you can use. The age of the prompt, the first of the five ages, is the period in which learning to write one well was the skill, and most sales teams are still in it.
The book uses the word a second way, which is worth noticing. In offer ideation a structured prompt such as the five sources of value is a question you ask yourself and your team to force ideas out, and it predates the machine by decades. The two meanings meet in the KAM Prompt Guide, where the method’s own questions become the prompts.
Set out in full in: Creating Customer Value Propositions with AI (Kogan Page, 2027), chapters 4 and 9; Brooks, The Key Account Manager's Guide to Prompting (Value Matters, 2026).
Related terms
System prompt
The standing instructions a model runs on before any user speaks: its role, rules, tone and knowledge base. In the method's tools, the schema is the system prompt.
The five ages of AI
Prompt, agent, collaborator, advisor, architect. Where you are, where the work is going, and which end is still informed speculation.
AI fluency
Comfort with the tools, held alongside knowledge of the customer. Hold only the second and you are slow; hold only the first and you are fast, fluent and confidently wrong.
Context window
The model's working memory: everything it can see at once, including your prompt, the documents you attach and the conversation so far.
See the method run on one real account in three days: the One Page Proposition.