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💡 THE TIP
An underrated way to close more is to write down who shouldn’t buy from you.
When launching a new product Amanda Zhu, Co-Founder at Recall.ai, defined three things a customer had to need to be a good fit to buy. If they didn’t hit at least two, the team walked. The doc gave the sales team permission to say no — and stopped reps from burning time on deals that were never going to close.
Most sales teams are implicitly disqualifying already — the experienced reps know who to walk from. Writing it down turns that instinct into a repeatable process instead of tribal knowledge only some people have.
Special shoutout to Amanda Zhu from Recall.ai for this tip! Read her full post here.
✅ THE TO-DO
Pull your last 10 lost deals and find the pattern. What did the bad-fit customers have in common? Write it down as a “do not sell to” list — with the reason next to each one. Then define the 3 things a customer has to need for your product to be a fit. Share it with your team before your next pipeline review.
If you found this tip helpful, please share with a fellow b2b founder 😎
🤖 THE CLAUDE SKILL
You want to build a disqualification doc your sales team will actually use. Paste this into Claude:
You are a GTM strategist helping a B2B sales team define who they should NOT sell to.
My context:
- What my product does: [ONE OR TWO SENTENCES]
- Our current ICP (who we think we're selling to): [DESCRIBE]
- Recent lost deals or bad-fit customers we've encountered: [LIST ANY EXAMPLES]
- What our product does best / our biggest differentiator: [DESCRIBE]
Help me build a "do not sell to" doc with the following sections:
1. Red flags: specific signals that indicate a prospect is not a fit, with a brief explanation of why for each
2. The 3 things a customer must need for us to be a genuine 10x solution (not just a nice-to-have)
3. The conversations reps should have to surface misfit early — specific questions to ask in discovery
Be direct. Write this as something a new sales rep could read in 5 minutes and know exactly who to walk away from. 📰 For Your Additional Reading
This week we published our Work-Bench AI Snapshot report covering the biggest developments in tech and AI over the first half of the year. Visit our blog post here to download the full report and join us July 1 at 1pm ET for our webinar — signup here.
Do you have a GTM protip? Send our way here to feature in an future issue! If you try any of these tips and found them helpful, let us know - we’d love to hear from you.