Guides
Using AI in sales and business development
Checked 9 November 2026 against the pages linked in the text. This is a reading of those public sources for a buyer. It is not legal advice, and it is not your regulator's rule unless the paragraph says so.
Use it to prepare, to draft, and to tidy notes. Keep a person between the draft and the client. Do not treat a model as a source of new facts about a prospect.
What can a team practise?
Three jobs fit a workshop, because each one starts from material the firm already has and ends with a person.
- Turn notes from a call into a structured write-up the firm can file. A person reads it before it is saved as the record.
- Draft a follow-up email or a proposal section from those notes. A person edits it and is the one who sends it.
- Prepare for a meeting by reading what the other organisation has published itself, such as its own website. If the notes name a living person, that name is personal data under Article 4(1), and the client data guide applies before anyone pastes it into a tool.
The half-day workshop published on the AI training page is £950, for up to 12 people, and the full day is £1,450. Sales and business development training is the half-day workshop.
When is a contact's detail personal data?
When it relates to an identifiable living person. A name, a direct email address, a mobile number and a note of what that person said on a call are the usual cases in business development. Article 4(1) is the definition. Processing it, including dropping it into a prompt, needs a lawful basis under Article 6, a purpose that fits Article 5, and security under Article 32. If the tool provider processes it for you, Article 28 needs a contract. None of those duties disappears because the person is a prospect rather than a current client.
Can the team email people it found online?
Sometimes, and the statute is narrower than "B2B is fine". Regulation 22 of the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 applies to unsolicited electronic mail for direct marketing sent to individual subscribers. Direct marketing, in regulation 2 and in UK GDPR Article 4(15A), means advertising or marketing material directed to particular individuals. Unless an exception applies, the sender needs the recipient's prior consent. Consent here takes the UK GDPR meaning, which regulation 2 adopts.
Regulation 22(3) is the exception teams usually mean by a soft opt-in. All three parts have to be true. The sender obtained the contact details in the course of a sale, or negotiations for a sale, of a product or service to that recipient. The marketing is only about that sender's similar products and services. The recipient was given a simple means of refusing, free of charge except the cost of sending the refusal, at the time the details were collected, and again in each later message if they did not refuse at the start. A list scraped from a website does not meet the first part. Regulation 22(3A) is a further exception for charities, on its own conditions. It is not a general sales exception.
Regulation 22 is written for individual subscribers. Regulation 2 defines an individual as a living individual, including an unincorporated body of such individuals, and it defines a corporate subscriber separately (a company, a Scottish partnership, a corporation sole, or another body corporate). The regulation does not say "email to a limited company is always outside this rule" in a sentence you can lift and rely on. It says who the rule applies to. The person sending the email still has to know which definition the recipient meets.
Article 6(11)(a) says processing necessary for direct marketing is an example of processing that may be necessary for a legitimate interest. That example lives inside Article 6. It does not switch regulation 22 off. A firm can need both a lawful basis for using the personal data and a regulation 22 answer for the email itself.
Practising on your own notes
The SRA warning is a solicitors' document, but its practical caution travels: the person who sends the email owns the email. If you want the team to rehearse the three jobs above on its own notes, write to info@lancashireai.co.uk and say so. The published prices are on the training page.