AI Research For Discovery

AI Research for Discovery Meetings

Stop Guessing, Start Selling: Use AI to Research Your Prospect in 5 Minutes.

This week on Sales Zen AI, host Kevin Currie cuts the research time from hours to minutes using the Human + AI Hybrid Model. Learn the actionable, three-step workflow that moves you past basic facts and straight to leverage-able insights for your next discovery call.

In this quick-hitting episode, you'll learn:

• The 360-Degree Company Profile Prompt: How to command your Generative AI partner to act as a competitive intelligence analyst and uncover recent business signals, customer sentiment, and crucial media mix weaknesses.
• The Top 5 Strategic Initiatives: How to immediately synthesize research to identify the client's top five strategic initiatives for the next 6-12 months, allowing you to align your pitch with their executive goals.
• The Killer Discovery Questions: The final prompt technique that transforms those strategic initiatives into three open-ended, high-value discovery questions guaranteed to capture your prospect's attention and unlock the true pain points.

Stop wasting time with mandatory manual research. Start investing your time analyzing AI-delivered insights. This workflow is powered by secure tools, including Gemini for Google Workspace and NotebookLM, and gives you the intelligence to sound like you're already on the board of directors.

The full, copy-and-paste prompts are waiting for you now at saleszenai.com/prompts.

The Keywords Section Remains Unchanged:

Keywords: AI Prospecting, Discovery Meetings, Sales Research, Competitive Intelligence, Ad Sales Prompts, Gemini Workflow, NotebookLM, Sales Enablement, Ad Sales Strategy.

Transcript

Sarah 0:00

From the heart of Silicon Valley, Welcome to SalesZen AI, the quick-hitting podcast for advertising sales professionals, media leaders, and adtech execs who want to master the future of selling. Join your host, Kevin Currie, a veteran of giants like Meta and the NFL, and a certified Google Generative AI Leader. Kevin is here to show you how to leverage the Human, AI Hybrid Model to consistently blow past quota. In every fast-paced episode, you get one actionable, real-world workflow, executed with secure, powerful AI tools that you can implement today. Now your host, Kevin Currie.

Kevin 0:38

All right, thanks Sarah. Welcome to the first revamped episode of Sales Zen as we've transitioned to Sales Zen AI, if you listen to the trailer, you know, some of the backstory. I still am a firm believer in cognitive selling. it's still what separates the best advertising salespeople from the rest. However. times are changing and we need to change with them. And so the goal of this pivot in my business and in this podcast is to really unleash the power of AI through the cognitive selling framework that I had in earlier episodes. So if you haven't checked those out, spend some time with them. pretty short, quick hitting as this will be as well. Today we're tackling the biggest time suck in the pre-call prep. The deep insightful client research for that initial discovery meeting. Now, I know you've seen them as I have the posts on LinkedIn from prospective buyers complaining that sales reps are not doing research before, they reach out before they schedule a meeting. And I think there's some validity to that. I've always felt that as a buyer, you are just as responsible for the partnership as the seller is. not everybody feels that way, but on the other side of that, there is some truth. And I've seen a lot of sellers just do outreach without doing any type of research, or at best they take a look at the about us page on the website, or maybe skim a quick press release. to me that is a quota killer. So we're gonna use AI to be the strategic partner in this research before we even get on the call. And the best part is it's super efficient. So as we sit here, in October of 2025, AI is evolving. So we call this the analyst to anchor workflow. So you need to anchor your conversation in their world, not in yours. So to do this, you need an analyst brain, which I gotta be honest with you, most salespeople don't. numbers are a distant reach for me as I look to solve problems and sell my product or solution, to help my clients. So step one is the competitor and market shift deep dive. Think about it. You walk into a discovery meeting and the client expects you to know them. Likely they know more about you than you do about them if you haven't done your research So we need to be telling AI to think like a strategic marketing analyst to uncover three specific things, their top three direct competitors, any major recent market shifts that have happened in say the last 12 to 18 months, and what their primary target audience is doing right now. This is about the external pressure points that they're facing. It's a step beyond just, Hey, here's what we can do for you. It's really putting that lens into the challenges that they face on a daily basis. Then we need to use a prompt that gives your Gen ai the analyst role. The key variables that you're gonna plug in are the client name, the client industry, and their core product line, if that's applicable. Step two is extracting the strategic priorities from public data. The CEOs and CMOs talk all the time about their strategic goals, but it's typically buried in earnings calls, investor decks, press releases, maybe podcasts that they've been on. We need to figure out what their hot button, language is and use those words to represent their biggest priorities and fears. Here's the key. We're not asking AI to summarize the mission statement. We're asking it to be a strategic language extractor. We're inputting a block of text, maybe their last quarterly earnings summary, a recent executive interview, or any number of press releases that the company's putting out, and we're asking AI to pull out the top five strategic initiatives and specific measurable goals tied to them. They may say things like doubling market share or reducing customer acquisition costs by 15%. These are huge triggers that you now can have AI researching, so you can uncover again from the client lens, not from your lens. And you can have them process that research and summarize for you. Again, that strategic language extractor is critical here. We want AI to go in and find out what those pain points are and understand that if it's reducing customer acquisition costs by 15%, we're now armed for our outreach or our next meeting to talk their language, not ours. Then you simply need to paste these into that tool. And ask for a bulleted list. This is another critical piece that people miss when they're prompting AI is what format do you want this in? For this, we're looking for a bulleted list of their top five strategic initiatives. It makes it really easy for you to connect your solution to their C-Suite goals. And when you use a tool like Notebook, lm, it's secure. Then we want to introduce what problem we're solving, and this is the moment of truth. So we have the research, we've identified really what their pain points and goals are. Now, how do you turn all that data into a conversation starter that makes the client sit up and say, finally, a seller who gets it. Right? You can make it really easy. In fact, put in the comments, Hey, I spent some time on your company and what you're focused on. Does this, this, and this sound like your top initiatives? If so, let's talk. So we need our questions that pivot from our product to their problem. Next, we're gonna teach at the strategy. We're using AI as an insight to inquiry generator. Right. We're feeding the output from step one, the competitors and market shifts, and step two, the strategic priorities and instructing it to generate three open-ended discovery questions. These questions must connect a specific challenge to one of their priorities. For example, given your goal of doubling market share and the aggressive moves by competitor X, how are you currently measuring the success of your top of funnel brand awareness efforts? That's a really powerful question and definitely leans into executive presence, which is critical when talking to C-level. This prepares you not just for the call, but for a follow-up proposal, because if they answer that, those are their strategic initiatives now you know what you can build on from a solution standpoint. This is the power of the human and AI hybrid model. You the expert seller, set the strategy, review the output. AI handles the hours of grinding research and data synthesis. You show up prepared, authoritative and zen. Now it's time for you to take action. Don't just listen to this. Open your AI right now, use the process we discussed and put the technology to work for you. If you want the specifics on this prompt, visit saleszenai.com/prompts. Until next time, bring the Zen and let the AI handle the grind.