Learn to Read your Customer's Mind

Building a Business Hypothesis/Point of View for your customers with AI

“Getting to the right answer is an iterative process”

-Matt Slotnick, founder of Poggio.ai

Credit: Matt Slotnick via Matt Harney

This quote touches upon something relevant to both AI and humans. There is no magic wand to get to the outcome you want. You have to iterate - be it with AI/technology or humans.

You can’t “prompt” your way out of the actual work with “AI”.

You can’t just earn trust from a human customer after one good discovery call.

Both require iterative thinking because of the nuances involved, despite getting to a specific outcome (ie, a sale or making part of your workflow easier).

Last week we covered ways to identify the “right” customer. But once you find them, then what?

Today I wanted to walk through how I’m developing a “point of view” or “business hypothesis” that can not only help drive new meetings and accelerate deal cycles, but also entrench more value into a specific account.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

***Worth noting that this is a deep dive into working a larger account but the principles outlined can be modified to fit your GTM strategies.

• Overarching strategy to Enterprise Engagement

• Product Review: Poggio for account research

• Developing your POV for pointed communication

Overarching Strategy for Enterprise Engagement

Credit: BowTiedBrazil

BowTied Brazil does a great job in the post above breaking down the motion of penetrating a larger enterprise. A couple of things to keep in mind:

• If you’re purely net new you can adopt this strategy but limit it to a certain number of accounts that can net you significant upside.

• The rest in your book should be treated with the same cadence and approach as others (all this depending on personas and relative size of org).

• Given that you’re dealing with one big account, despite the size of employees, you still only have a limited number of “at bats” within an entire account list or within one account.

The process that BT Brazil maps out is as follows:

1. Review paperwork and contractual agreements

2. Understand the “why” via CS or AM

3. Identify Key DM’s within opportunities identified

4. Leverage existing champions and DM’s

5. Once you have the hypothesis - get intro’s to other DM’s

6. Engage in sales process

As BT Brazil points out: simple but not easy.

I’ll dive deeper into the “why” and developing the hypothesis/point of view later in this article. But first, wanted to share a quick review of Poggio (once again, thanks Matt Harney for the intro to Matt S) which I think will help save you a ton of time.

Product Review: Poggio for account research

Much of the work that I’ve been discussing around your AI stack, using AI agents or leveraging custom gpt’s is solved by leveraging this tool. I don’t think that all of the above no longer has a place - but Poggio does a ton of legwork to help with this upfront.

It has built in AI agents that help you to:

• Overview: key financials, recent news, key contacts

• Proposed business cases: problems to solve, value drivers, case studies, third party resources

• Product Differentiators: competitors, positioning, and relevant success with similar company profiles

• Account Plan: vision statement, POV on key challenges, relevant stakeholders and sample emails

The Account plan still requires you to think but for the most part, this gives a great snapshot to help you develop a plan of attack. You can also cross reference this with research via Perplexity , your own research of an account and lastly, your persona matrix.

The AI agents attack each of those bullet points for you and you can customize or add prompts as you need. You can also easily copy and paste templates to modify different tasks based on your needs.

There’s no affiliation here, just spreading the word on a solid product that will definitely have utility for your sales day to day. You can check it out and sign up for the early release by going to poggio.io.

Developing your POV for pointed communication

Let’s elaborate on the “why” and developing the hypothesis/point of view. This is largely manual (bummer I know). I haven’t been able to set up integrations with either GPT or other applications. Also, to my points above, no one can automate “critical thinking”.

Here are some ways I’m digging deeper into “why”.

• Surveying usage

I work in martech so most of the info that I’m finding are assets that will be in market. This paints a picture of what the business is focused on and allows me to cross reference executive interviews and financial documents to validate a point of view of where I can help. It’s critical to speak how your customer speaks, especially in outbound engagements and future discussions.

The tactic around “usage” will look different depending on what you’re selling. Maybe more, maybe less but all in all getting a snapshot of usage and initiatives will start pointing you in the direction you need to go.

Long story short, in both surveying customer patterns and financial documents, the rule of thumb is to follow the money.

• Using Gong Search

Outside of just looking at closed lost opportunities, leveraging Gong is a valuable way to get a snapshot of not just past conversations but also discussions with respective champions/influencers/decision makers on an account.

You can start getting a sense of what the business is focused on and where else in the organization you can align, and help, with those initiatives. You might even get names of groups or key stakeholders. I typically use keywords related to products or suites which could point me in the direction of other BU’s that can use our offering.

Both the above, along with the process that BT Brazil maps out should give you enough to distill down a few bullet points on your “why”.

• Your POV or Business Hypothesis

This should look like 2 or 3 bullet points that you can use in email, or discovery call, to quickly get to the point and going layers deeper than surface level pain. The value of taking this approach is that you are coming to an executive with more knowledge about the challenges of their business and how to help them accomplish it.

This will also give you an audience that can make decisions FAST. Be it in outbound engagement or in customer calls. It also insulates risk when you’ve confirmed there is a pain or challenge that can be solved with a higher up executive.

Real World Application

For example, I found through surveying usage, as well as Gong calls that a particular client was looking to:

Increase household penetration and drive down the average age of their target consumer. Along with two avatars they are focused on.

What I found was that they weren’t using us for comms and messaging development (which we can help with) for future campaigns. This is the “north star” of this business. All activity is aligned with meeting this one common goal and everyone in the business knows it. Discovery calls, upcoming tactics, all helped me saved 20 minutes on a call and dive even deeper into how we can help. Getting *right* to the point.

The added bonus is that it’s a pleasant customer experience as well. Refreshing from a customer point of view when you don’t have to repeat yourself and your AE comes to a call knowing what they need to know about the business eh?

Hope all this helps and of course if you have any questions, shoot a DM to askobylarz on X or an email to andrew@hackingsales.xyz.

As always, thanks for reading and see you all next week.

-Andrew K