"Outcome Independence": Systematizing Macro Trends
How to Quickly Surface Patterns and Trends with Perplexity AI
This post from BowTiedCocoon resonated because outcomes really are dependent on the strategy, processes, and systems you have in place. A “North Star” so to speak.
If you read the thread you’ll notice it’s catered towards interviewing. However, the principle of systems and processes holds equally true in sales.
Today we’ll cover a few things:
Two attributes that helped me (and can help you) this year:
Sales Strategy
AI
Progress on Next Year’s Strategy
Research with Perplexity AI
Now all the above being true, it’s still MUCH easier said than done.
Easier to sell when you have options. Less pressure when you aren’t dependent on ONE thing. True in sales, true in life.
We’ve all been there before. I’ve personally been on both sides. There’s been times where sales are good, life is good, and things are feeling like:
On the other side it’s been more like:
Credit: Corporate Bro
This past weekend I did an annual audit on buckets spanning personal and professional goals. It’s a personal system in place that’s visited on a monthly, quarterly, and annual cadence.
After reviewing, I realized although not every milestone was hit, everything is trending in the right direction. A majority of the bigger items I had in place to accomplish this year have been moved either moved forward or accomplished.
All thanks to having a “North Star”in place.
Two Attributes that Helped Me (and can help you) This Year
From a professional standpoint I’m fortunate enough to be in a position where hitting over 100% of my target is likely *knock on wood*. Reflecting on the “how” can be attributed back to two things:
Sales Strategy
AI
Sales Strategy
I’ve written out a (free) course that walks through the framework I’ve used. It helped me land multiple offers and execute in my current role. If you’re a subscriber, hit me up if you can’t find it. If you’re not currently subscribed and would like access - you know what to do.
PS - I’ll be updating the course using all the AI frameworks I’ve been highlighting in recent posts.
AI
I’ve written in previous posts about how I had been using ChatGPT to learn faster, as well as doing customer research and financial research.
Most recently, you’ll see how I’ve been utilizing custom GPT’s and how to think about using your own GPTs.
All of this has helped surface better questions to find patterns and trends that I can layer on top of things like intent and personas. It’s also helped me execute at a much faster pace.
It goes without saying that there’s tactics and hard work in all of this. No silver bullets. Strategy informed the day to day. AI helped me execute faster.
Progress on Next Year’s Strategy
Last week I walked through how custom GPTs might not be best for larger workflows. That said, it still provided me with better questions that made me rethink my overall sales strategy going into next year.
Here’s where I’m at:
Tackling fiscal years and contracts was pretty straightforward. Assuming a company is public, I just plugged into chatGPT and got a response.
Most recently I’ve been focused on trying to understand more macro trends occurring on a seasonal basis and by industry segments. I was running into cookie cutter answers with ChatGPT.
Enter Perplexity AI
A big thanks to Matt Harney over at SaaSLetter for introducing me to this.
A quick breakdown on why I like Perplexity over ChatGPT for the purposes of deeper research
Much quicker responses to questions you ask, longer form/complex questions take a bit to produce even with web browsing in ChatGPT
Provides you with variations or additional follow up questions based on your original query (it’s further refined using CoPilot)
Cites sources that it’s pulling from when doing research
Research with AI: Perplexity
The example below is done with the free version Perplexity AI
Below is a quick example of a financial account and an analysis of the credit card segment. You don’t need to overcomplicate this, it’s just a quick way to surface more insights on the industry and help formulate how I go after a certain segment or account.
I’m selling into brands and consumer insights so most of the questions would be geared towards better understanding media trends and product innovation cycles.
Key findings:
Credit card media spend trends up towards holidays (this might be common sense but I didn’t connect the dots on this, whoops)
A breakdown of media strategy/spend across a 3 year horizon.
Using research on 10k’s along with what you hear from customers, one major initiative of the org isi shifting towards the digital landscape.
Questions that populated after the answer above, all useful info.
Insight into cornerstone campaigns and clues to their insight process (ding ding)
I won’t belabor you with the entirety of the chat. What might have taken me hours is now taking me minutes. I’ve been able to piece together some useful info:
If this was my account, I can trace back to competitors and match the same trends (more ROI on my research for similar segments to reach out to)
Taking this a step further I can cross reference with internal customer data to see what trends line up
This can help me prioritize not only what accounts to prioritize, but WHO I should be targeting based on this info. Outreach can be much more relevant, especially layered in with intent and trigger events.
From here I can start systematizing segments that are in my book, along with deeper research into accounts.
The goal is capitalize on the trends I can find which can not only help me capture revenue faster, but also get ahead of how I can develop larger contract values based on these seasonal trends.
Ie, easier to have a convo about developing a larger strategy earlier in the year for holidays vs October.
This is something that you can start putting together quickly combining what you know about your industry and your book.
Given the time of year and downtime, I’ll start exploring how I can combine this with Python and create AI agents to help me surface more of the info I want with less work. If that’s something that sounds interesting to you, check out this post by Beauty of SaaS.
If you have any questions, shoot a note to andrew@hackingsales.xyz or schedule some time to chat with me.
As always, thank you for reading.
See you next week,
-Andrew K