Follow the Money: The One Question Every Top Sales Person Asks (Plus Prompts)
A tactical framework and AI prompts to uncover how a business makes money—and craft messaging that lands.
Hope that everyone closed out Q1 strong and has momentum going into Q2. To all the new subscribers and followers, thank you and welcome!
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I’ve been MIA due to travel, RFPs, and momentum building to kick off Q2. Will be back to our normal weekly cadence.
This week, I wanted to share a few tactical approaches to better understanding an account and how it can inform your outreach, including prompts:
Understanding How a Business Makes Money
How to Leverage in Account Outreach
Understanding How a Business Makes Money
Going back to basics after seeing this post from Jamal Reimer (if you’re not following Jamal, highly recommend). Below you’ll see an account research template that outlines fundamental questions to know about a current or prospective account:
The most important being:
How does a business make money?
Obvious? Yes.
Albeit, an important question to answer because it helps you understand:
Where the budget is
Where the priorities are
Where the potential pain is
Why an initiative is a focus
You can use the prompt below to quickly get a sense of how a target account might make make money. But don’t stop there.
Prompt
***Note that I’m using Perplexity. You can use ChatGPT, Claude, Grok - whatever suits you best. The prompt doesn’t outline the entire document since I want to ensure the quality of the answer I’m receiving. I find the longer the prompt, the less detail I get.
How to Leverage in Account Outreach
Once you get these outputs, think of it as a “step one” to better understanding a business you’re targeting. AI is all about efficiencies, but it’s not the magic bullet. The magic happens when you iterate and synthesize further from a human perspective.
Here’s an example of some questions to go deeper
What are the business units that are making money?
Strategic initiatives or significant source of cashflow, being lost or gained, are great ways to expand upon where you can potentially help.
Where is the majority of money being generated - how can my solution help amplify that?
What areas of the business are losing money - how can my solution help?
How is the business organized?
This exercise is particularly helpful for:
Knowing where to focus
Prospecting into a private company without public info
Dealing with a larger subset off accounts (ie SMB or MM). Although the application might be distilling trends/challenges - in which case I’d recommend giving Kellen Casebeer or Benyamin. Both have great content on X and LI for scaling messaging.
Action Items:
If you’re prospecting into a public company, combine the above with your 10k research or use these prompts for powerful account research. This will help you understand how the business is organized along with strategic initiatives that might be relevant to your product.
Then , use data that you have at your disposal:
Which prospects have engaged with us in the past, or are familiar with us?
This can be closed lost opportunities, promotions, or past users going to the target company.
Use LinkedIn to go deeper into business segments outlined in the 10k
You can use LinkedIn Sales Nav to start looking at target personas and how they play into the overarching segments of the business.
Another way to do this is to look at section Def14A, to take a top down approach of what executives are focused on and incentivized by.
Use gong to understand how your prospects are speaking when they refer to business initiatives, units, or challenges.
When you’re building messaging, distill those themes down into how it might be relevant to IC’s, managers, directors, and VP’s of a given unit or segment.
Most importantly, with Gong, use the same language that a customer uses helps establish social proof, if you can.
Organization lingo or acronyms, names of people in an organization - are always going to hold more weight than referencing things you can find in a public facing document.
Hope this helps in your outreach.
If you have any questions on this topic or thoughts, shoot me a DM or email to andrew@hackingsales.xyz.
As always, thanks for reading and see you all next week.
-Andrew K
PS - if you liked this article, feel free to give a “like”, “comment”, or “share” with your network