Last quarter I watched an SDR spend 25 minutes researching one account.
LinkedIn.
Company website.
News.
Podcast appearances.
Finally they wrote a cold email.
I stopped them and said: “Give me 5 minutes.”
“Act as a VP of Sales at a 200-person SaaS company. Based on this company’s
website and recent hiring trends, what are the 3 biggest problems their
revenue team is likely dealing with right now? Then write a cold email
referencing those problems.”
We pasted the company site.
Claude returned 3 extremely plausible problems:
- SDR productivity drop
- Pipeline coverage issues
- Territory inefficiency
But the email wasn’t the interesting part.
But the email wasn’t the interesting part.
Because now we had three angles to test instantly.
Instead of writing one email, we wrote three
pain-driven versions.
Version 1: Pipeline coverage angle
Version 2: SDR productivity angle
Version 3: Territory management angle
Each one took about 30 seconds to generate.
Total research time: 3 minutes.
But here’s the real trick.
Most sellers use AI to write the email.
Top sellers use AI to discover the pain.
Because once you know the likely pain…
Writing the message is easy.
The Prompt I Use For Every Account
When I prospect a company now, I drop this into GPT, Claude or Gemini:
“You are the CRO of this company. The company has ~[X] employees and sells
[product].
Based on their hiring, market, and likely growth stage:
- What revenue problems are they probably facing?
- What metrics are likely under pressure?
- What would keep the CRO awake at night?”
This produces better discovery than most sellers do live.
Then I turn those answers into outreach.
Example Message
Instead of this: “We help revenue teams improve pipeline generation.”
“Most SaaS companies around 200 employees hit the same outbound wall: pipeline
coverage drops below 3x once territories get saturated.
Curious if that’s happening for your team at [Company] right now?”
Now it sounds like you understand their world.
Even though the research took three minutes.
The Real AI Advantage
AI doesn’t replace sellers.
It replaces blank-page thinking.
Instead of asking: “What should I write?”
You start with: “What are the 3 likely problems this company has?”
Then you build your outreach around that.
Recap
• Problem discovery
• Angle generation
• Fast personalization + relevance
Because the seller who can test 5 angles per account
will always beat the seller testing one.
Alan "Modern Seller" Ruchtein
Act like +1400 heroes:
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