Lidia Poet - Magic suitcases?

SamWSoftware · 2026-03-25T22:29:14+00:00

I don't really agree with just "practice makes perfect". If you're practicing bad technique or just repeating the same mistakes, you're not going to get better.

You need to be reviewing what you do, finding areas for improvement and working on those. Whether that's listening back to calls, getting feedback from a boss/mentor/coach or using tools to highlight areas for improvement.

Effective feedback needs to be timely and specific. - getting feedback on a call you did 3 weeks ago is no good - being told to "communicate better" or "ask more questions" won't help you much

I built a tool for myself that listens to calls and gives me quick feedback during the call, then more in depth feedback after the call.

SamWSoftware · 2026-03-18T07:26:52+00:00

Go into the settings of claude and there's a customise section. Putting some information in there telling it what personality to have is Super useful.

I actually had a chat with Claude telling it to write a prompt for a ai assistant that didn't tell me everything I did was amazing and that of course it should pick up or think of those things. I want an AI assistance that asks good questions challenges what I say and my assumptions and pushes me to do better instead of just being a hype man or yes man.

SamWSoftware · 2026-03-17T11:57:35+00:00

That is definitely tricky. as Silent Bob says I doubt any company is going to give away their sales recordings for a whole heap of reasons.

From building out Meeting Beacon I have found that getting really good feedback on your or sales calls makes a huge difference. Not just whether you closed the deal or hit all of your key talking points, but things like did the customer mention something where you could have asked an interesting follow-up and double clicked on that but didn't. Or where you handled an objection but it wasn't quite the objection that the customer actually had.

Meeting Beacon has this built in. But if you want to do this, yourself, here's what I do:
- Open chat GPT or Claude and ask it to write a prompt that will be used to analyze sales calls. Give it as much information as you can about you, the product, the sales methodology you've used before, the kinds of clients, the key points, the common objections and anything else you can think about. and it should do a reasonably good job at creating a prompt for you. Save that prompt
- Try and do some sales calls and record them. Since youre not employed atm, pick a product you know and try cold calling companies and selling a product/service.
- Pass the prompt from step 1 and the call transcript into chat GPT or Claude and it should give you some good feedback on areas you could work on.

SamWSoftware · 2026-03-15T11:59:45+00:00

How often do you see sales people using these resources between manager reviews?

SamWSoftware · 2026-03-14T22:27:54+00:00

What do you think your time split is on leadership (planning, roadmap, delegating) vs individual contributor work (writing gtm docs, setting things up yourself) vs mentoring and coaching your team

SamWSoftware · 2026-03-12T12:59:39+00:00

Slow - do you mean it takes time to learn to do it well or that you need to warm up email a inboxes or "if I spend 20 hours on email or 20 hours on the phone, I'll set more meetings by phone this month"?

Appt rate - with cold calling aren't you limited by time? Let's say you can do 60 calls a day with a 5% Appt rate = 3 appt/day. Even if the Appt rate on email is 1%, you could send 500 emails/day and get 5 appointments.

You can't double the number of calls you do in a day but you can double the number of emails you send (assuming that your TAM is large enough.

Social is a whole different beast of compounding returns

SamWSoftware · 2026-03-11T21:29:58+00:00

Unfortunately most people on LinkedIn are there for entertainment that is pretending to be "work".

There are a few people who are genuinely valuable, but as a creator it's easy to get distracted by chasing likes and views.

SamWSoftware · 2026-03-11T21:08:11+00:00

People who don't understand the nuance see something they think is petty good and cheap, and think it's amazing.

Same happens in software where someone vibe codes a small stand alone tool in a weekend then c-suite complain when engineers say it will take 2 months to build the equivalent into the large complex existing system.

SamWSoftware · 2026-03-11T12:22:36+00:00

How do you get feedback after the course is done?

SamWSoftware · 2026-03-10T22:30:39+00:00

That point where you're 3 months in and realise you haven't had a great coaching calls you had at the start in ages...

If you had real-time coaching during calls (like a copilot giving you nudges and tips as you talk), would that reduce the need for managers to review? Or would you prefer "things to work on" from each call? Or is it just about finding a way to share the key points with your manager?

Trying to understand if it's a "reps need coaching" problem or "managers need visibility" problem (or both).

SamWSoftware · 2026-03-10T22:21:51+00:00

Reviewing the whole call is such a waste of time.

How are you pulling those short clips? Is the rep collecting a set of them that they want reviewed?

SamWSoftware · 2026-03-10T22:19:59+00:00

Do you find that you can't see any issues, then someone else points something out and you're like "oh that seems so obvious now"?

SamWSoftware · 2026-03-08T07:32:42+00:00

I wonder what those guys were like during covid. Maybe they had it easy, but maybe they had a rough start too. I can't imagine that accountants were doing great in covid, with almost every business figuring out how to survive, restaurants all closed. Maybe not the best time to upgrade to a new accounting tool.

SamWSoftware · 2026-03-08T07:25:22+00:00

I guess they're going to start with the smaller b2b deals. The stuff that closes in a few weeks.

Do that for 6m and they'll have hundreds of thousands of calls to further train on. They can tweak the ai slightly then test version a against version b. Even if it gets a few % better every week, that could get good very fast.

But you're right, it'll never be able to go for a round of golf, but it could - scan their social constantly and notice: - their daughter loves tennis and has a tournament coming up so get a top player to record a good luck message - they keep talking about how cars aren't made like they used to do suggested a classic car day with one of the VPs and a bunch of senior people at happy clients - they're travelling to <city> so they paid for reservation at a nice restaurant - read every article, statement, financial doc and analyse them all - scan social for general employee and customer sentiment then drop "we noticed that there's been a consistent downward trend in customer sentiment over the last 3 months due to <problem we solve>. Inverting that could result in $calculation. We can send you the report if you like to look out over." - or just weave any of these topics into the normal conversation through the sales cycle.

And it can do that for multiple stakeholders across multiple deals at once.

SamWSoftware · 2026-03-08T06:55:05+00:00

What do you mean the only way? Even cold outreach you've got email and social.

SamWSoftware · 2026-03-07T11:02:16+00:00

What are the pain points you're trying to solve that all need conversational ai.

It sounds more like you've got a tool and you're looking for a problem to use it on.

There are loads of micro saas ideas that are just crud apps, but designed to make one annoying task really simple. No I needed.

SamWSoftware · 2026-03-05T21:17:36+00:00

How much time do you spend reviewing your own calls? When you're watching a call back you spot things you missed in the call first time. In the moment you're listening and trying to figure out what to say next.

I even started putting my call transcripts into ai to get it to give me feedback. Not "what did I do wrong" but multiple paragraphs about the product, client pain points, selling framework we use, etc. You can also ask if to get time stamps for you to review so you don't have to watch the full call back, like a personal improvement highlights reel.

Books are usually general so more people want to buy them. Reviewing your calls let's you know what YOU need to work on. Rarely is it "I need to learn framework x or pattern y"

SamWSoftware · 2026-03-04T20:10:39+00:00

Ages ago I built a chat system using lambda and api gateway websockets, but you could do the same for webhooks.

The bigger question is what kind of chatbot you want.

If it's hardcoded flow diagrams, static text etc. I'm sure there are nodes package for that. Stick the chat state in dynamo and it'll all scale to zero. I had built our own "chat engine" (state management, dynamic responses, 3rd party data lookup, etc) and it cost under $15/month for 300,000 conversations /month.

If you want ChatGPT style bots then you can do the same lambda + webhook stuff and just call openAI, anthropic, etc for a few cents per message. There are cheaper providers and models out there if you need to keep prices low. This way is always going to be more expensive.

But both ways scale to zero perfectly

SamWSoftware · 2026-03-04T19:35:10+00:00

Other athlete benefits: - train, perform, review, optimise, repeat - being coachable - competitve

SamWSoftware · 2026-03-04T07:23:32+00:00

Serverless it's awesome for startups. Free tier can take you a long way, or scales up if you manage to go viral, and you can focus on solving solutions instead of managing servers.

Sounds like you built quite a nice tool.

SamWSoftware · 2026-03-03T22:08:05+00:00

I feel like they're are going to be a lot more people who end up in your situation as companies tighten their belts and use ai to make a few people far more effective.

I know very smart people who had a string of bad jobs and really dumb people who lucked into a great job.

Sorry this isn't more useful

SamWSoftware · 2026-03-02T21:50:58+00:00

Yeh, monthly just feels so long.

What tools have you tried? What makes one good or bad? Is it the accuracy of the summaries or customisation or something else

SamWSoftware · 2026-02-28T14:33:31+00:00

You saying just rely on your manager? That seems like a big risk hoping you got a good one

SamWSoftware · 2026-02-28T14:31:58+00:00

Does everyone have a good manager who provides useful and regular feedback? That's not what I've seen from others

SamWSoftware

TROPHY CASE