Stop Making Your Prospects Think
Putting Your POV/Business Hypothesis into Action
Credit: Kyle Asay
This encapsulates the truth of what it’s like to be a buyer today - especially with AI. Last week, I discussed how to develop a unique point of view or business hypothesis based on existing data you have on a company.
This week I wanted to break down some of the success I’ve been seeing by applying the efforts above to my day to day.
This applies to:
Outreach
Discovery Calls
Stalled Deals
Multi-threading
Each section will cover tactics applying this thinking. It’s yielding positive results which is promising.
I mentioned last week that I use Poggio to do account specific research.
Outreach
One of the useful features of AI agents is they complete tasks for you. For example, say you want to reach tut to a CXO of company ABC.
Simply prompt your question and add a LinkedIn profile:
“How would you reach out to [insert LinkedIn prospect profile] about how [Your org] can help with [Insert Function/Team] based on the information you have provided and recent financial reports, annual or quarterly, or recent news releases?
This will give you ideas on how to reach out and what might be relevant to a potential prospect you don’t know much about.
This example, formulated with the prompt above (and account research) received a response within a couple of hours. Also worth noting, it was not a first touch. It took a few more minutes after the prompt output to refine how we can help under the context of the relevant info that would be actionable.
Multi-Threading
If you reached out to a senior level executive who opened, engaged, or even responded, you have some idea that your POV is validated.
“Some” is a key word. I wouldn’t hang validation on this but in the early stages of a cycle, attention is given for a reason. Attention is scarce - especially for busy executives.
You can take this and start going wider by tailoring that same messaging to different types of personas within an org, team, or division that your product or offering can help solve.
Becasue the upfront work and heavy lifting are done. All you need to do is take your initial hypothesis and spin it in a way that’s relevant to a team/persona function.
Discovery
For discovery calls, I’ve taken this a step further. Beforehand, I’m developing a business hypothesis of how that prospect might be able to use my product against the initiatives and business hypothesis I’ve formulated. You’re now armed with ideas for your prospect.
It’s a fall back but going through this exercise helps me think about how the prospect can use this to solve their problems.
Keep in mind that the above can certainly be refined further. Nevertheless I’m getting actionable content to build up and send in outreach.
The nice aspect of AI agents is finding the info is quick. It’s completed for you in a matter of minutes and if you don’t get third party supported data, just prompt for it.
Don’t take this at face value however. You need to apply critical thinking based on context, relevance, and even historical data. Make it your own.
Most importantly, balance what ideas you come with based on what is relevant and timely to prospect. In the case above I didn’t need to bring ideas to the table, the team had a lot of ideas and pains of their own throughout the discussion.
Stalled Deals
In this scenario, if a deal is stalled, there’s a couple of reasons why:
You might have missed the mark somewhere
Maybe it needs to be disqualified (this is still a good outcome - you can stop wasting time)
Further evaluation, additional approvals/stakeholder buy-in is happening in the background.
It’s not actually a priority
*I’m not including a multitude of other reasons why, like contract negotiations, a shift in internal priorities, missing integrations, changes in leadership … the list goes on.
If you are falling into numbers 1 or 4, revert to 2 or rethink your hypothesis and WHY you’re reaching out (ie is this timely? does this fall within my ICP?)
Use the ideas above and add an additional asset (ie eBooks, webinars, or articles that are relevant). If you don’t have an asset, you’re still armed with a lot of ammo from both developing you POV and now having an additional layer of context from discovery. Ideally you’ve planted some seeds into different team members before or shortly after.
Hope this helps.
If you have any questions on how to apply some of the tactics and processes above, , 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