Prompt engineering has a reputation as a developer skill, but according to Dr. Connor Robertson, founder of Elixir Consulting Group and host of The Prospecting Show, it has more in common with communication than with code. In his view, writing a good prompt is structurally similar to briefing a capable employee: give it context, state exactly what’s needed, constrain the format, and remove the ambiguity. Business owners who treat it that way, he argues, tend to get dramatically better results from AI tools than those who type in a quick request and hope for the best.
Why Vague Prompts Produce Forgettable Output
Robertson traces most disappointing AI output back to a single root cause: vague input. When a business owner asks an AI to draft a proposal without specifying who the client is, what problem is being solved, or what tone to use, he explains that the model has no choice but to fill those gaps with statistical averages. What comes back is technically correct and completely forgettable, recognizable as AI-generated precisely because it was produced without the specific context that would have made it sound like it came from someone who actually knows the situation.
The Four-Part Prompt Framework
At the core of Robertson’s approach is a four-part framework that he says applies to nearly every high-performing business prompt. The role covers what expertise the AI should bring to the task. Context covers what it needs to know about the specific situation. Objective covers exactly what it should produce and what “good” looks like. Format covers how the output should be structured, how long it should run, and what it should avoid. Fill in all four deliberately, Robertson says, and output quality improves immediately. Skip even one, and the model quietly substitutes its own assumptions, which are rarely as accurate as the business owner’s would have been.
Building Reusable Prompt Templates
According to Robertson, the real leverage in prompt engineering isn’t found in any single prompt crafted on the fly. It’s in the templates a business builds once and reuses across every similar situation going forward. He points to client email templates with variable placeholders, proposal outlines that adapt to different service tiers, and meeting summary formats that consistently extract action items as practical examples. Write each one carefully a single time, he says, and it can go on producing consistent output indefinitely, without anyone having to reinvent the prompt from scratch each time a similar task comes up.
The Most Common Prompt Mistakes
Robertson outlines four mistakes he sees most often, roughly in order of frequency. Prompts that are too short and skip necessary context top the list, followed by prompts that give no format instruction and leave the structure entirely up to the model’s default choices. Next are prompts that never specify an intended audience, which tend to produce writing aimed at everyone and therefore no one in particular. Last are prompts that bundle several distinct requests into one, splitting the model’s focus across goals that would each be served better on their own. Addressing those four issues, Robertson says, tends to produce a dramatic and fairly immediate jump in output quality.
Chaining Prompts and Building a Prompt Library
Once individual prompts are working reliably, Robertson recommends chaining them together. The output of one becomes the input for the next, so a research prompt feeds a synthesis prompt, which feeds a draft prompt, which in turn feeds a review prompt. That chaining, he says, is how a business builds AI workflows capable of producing client-ready output without a person stationed in the middle of every single step. He also advises teams to maintain a prompt library: a documented, organized collection of their best templates by use case, so the work of refining a good prompt only has to happen once rather than being repeated by every person on the team.
About Dr. Connor Robertson
Dr. Connor Robertson is an entrepreneur, author, and strategic advisor based in Pittsburgh. He is the founder of Elixir Consulting Group, host of The Prospecting Show, publisher of The Pittsburgh Wire, and founder of The Grant Finder. He is also a six-time published author, with titles including The 7 Minute Phone Call, Buying Wealth, Creative Acquisitions, and Built to Run, available at drconnorrobertsonbooks.com.
