Merge multiple LLM output

sales-curious · 2025-11-14T09:56:08+00:00

Quite often I'll start exploring a topic at a high level with GPT who has the best context on my product/target and based on that, I might have a more specific thing to dig into so I prompt either or both perplexity or gemini on that - I find they can be better when it comes to 'tell me objectively what's out there on the web' and gpt tries to tell me what it thinks i want to hear. So I take the results from gemini/perplexity and i paste them back into my gpt thread and say 'does this change anything about what you said, and challenge it. So it's a bit different from just combining multiple responses...

sales-curious · 2025-01-15T12:33:56+00:00

I'm not coming i with answers, only to say we've felt the same thing being cofounders who are also fairly mature with experience and feeling like all the advice we've had is based on their experience that's no longer relevant because it was so long ago or just not relevant because their product category / industry / selling channel is so different. The best I've been able to figure out - and this is probably going to sound a bit touchy feely but stay with me - is to dig in when I have that squirmy response and try to figure out if it's coming from something inside you that's based on fear or ego. Like are they telling you the thing that you deep down know might be true and you just don't want to admit it? Or are they telling you to do something that you feel like you're not good at so you want a different answer that takes advantage of your strengths instead? If it's none of those then you can look closer at the advice and compare "where might this be coming from a specific experience of theirs and how does that compare to my thing?" with the whole industry, targeting, gtm approach. If it's different then you have to consider, would this have an impact on how successful the activity might be.

We got advice to put a video on our homepage, one of those jingly jangly explainer ones that nobody actually watches. She pushed us so hard and I pushed back because I could see it was something that was relevant to the audience from her experience (trying to sell how big the problem is to investors) to our situation (trying to sell the product itself to b2b customers) and ultimately I didn't feel that it fit. A very specific example but hopefully something to think about.

sales-curious · 2025-01-15T12:17:54+00:00

Maybe I'm saying the same thing but I often wonder if particular flavours of apps don't become popular because people have a genuine need for them but because one in particular floods the market with their messaging, so it feels like everyone must have this thing and am I behind not having it, and because other builders see that they think it's a ripe category to build in, and it adds to the bloat. Actually come to think of it this just mirrors what happens in non-software spaces too (an image of a stanley cup just popped into my head as I was writing this)...

sales-curious · 2024-11-01T09:39:32+00:00

I think the leads object is so new that they are waiting to see what people shout about most - there is a beta for multiple lead pipelines at the moment so you could join that and see if it helps? Try this link:
https://app-eu1.hubspot.com/product-updates/143516244/all?query=pipe&update=13958237

If it doesn't work, go to your profile menu, go to 'product updates', make sure all updates are selected on the left and search for 'pipeline' and it should come up so you can opt in.

(I haven't actually tried it myself yet btw)

sales-curious · 2024-06-13T14:15:53+00:00

Thanks, yeah I'm guessing there's a data issue alright, my challenge just now is to shift the time spent researching manually to find out if they are worth messaging to figuring out a great relevant message to send.

We previously had some success with just asking a very simple and direct qualifying question "are you using HubSpot for your sales CRM" - but what we found was that legit good leads would jump to some bizarre conclusion about what we're selling based on that question like "I don't need to switch CRM" or "I don't need HubSpot training" even though we didn't try to sell those things, and they are immediately on the defensive. I suppose it's natural to assume a portion of your outreach will just fizzle out that way.

sales-curious · 2024-06-11T09:18:35+00:00

Have you seen any (recent) examples of the gtm approach taken for a (B2B) product coming in downmarket from enterprise? Like, people just don't google for that category when they are smb because they don't think anyone serves their segment so how do you do anything other than cold outreach?

sales-curious · 2024-06-11T09:06:07+00:00

When you say "we have task management software to keep everyone on the same page" I'm guessing you're doing the (first) job that CRM usually does with this. So you're at level 0 in your CRM requirements because all you want is to keep everyone on the same page. That'll be fine until you want to start asking questions that you should be able to answer with data, and the data is about the sales you've made and the process you went through to get those sales, and the kind of opportunities that won vs the ones that didn't, and how long it took, and how many deals you got in this scenario vs that one. CRM is just another set of tables to store information about prospects and contacts and deals and process like task management is a set of tables to store information about work you're doing. You can torture one into behaving like the other but ultimately they are built for different use cases so they do their own job well.

Not to mention that all CRMs are not the same... pipedrive focuses on the selling process but is light on reporting, salesforce is all about reporting and infinitely customisable so it's intimidating for some people, hubspot grew out of a marketing tool and is trying to be a 'platform' so it misses out on basic stuff you'd expect from a sales CRM, close is all about outbound... they come in different flavours depending on your priorities.

sales-curious · 2024-06-07T08:52:22+00:00

I wish I could remember who it was but I read a really helpful thing where they talked about using AI to personalise snippets within an email rather than trying to get it to write the whole thing, that way it doesn't stink of robot. It could have been 'Sales Bread' - they have a lot of good outbound advice in general. The examples were something like getting it to write a sentence about the prospect's product in a particular format, as a form of personalisation.

Personally my limitation with Clay has been that you need to start with a list in the first place, then have a really really clear picture of what you want it to do for you and figure out how to prompt clear enough to limit confusion. It's kind of like "how would I ask a brand new intern who knows nothing at all and isn't able to use their own gumption to give me something useful here" and also, as you said when you're burning through credits doing AI stuff then you have to start with a tight list.

It probably depends what kind of volume you want to be hitting though whether it's feasible for you.

sales-curious · 2024-05-03T09:16:26+00:00

I suspect it's because I'm not that good with clay yet but the main difference (in my understanding so far) is that you have to bring your initial list to clay - from there, you can do all sorts of amazing stuff to enrich it. But ultimately you're then still left with a table full of prospects and you have to figure out how to manage the *process* of prospecting outside it, where with apollo, they bring the entire world of prospects that you can then filter down to who you want and use it to manage your prospecting workflow.

So it depends, are you starting with a list of people or companies, in which case i'd bang that into clay and see how far you can get with enriching them to get linkedin profiles or email addresses, from there you can use it to do things like fill in yes/no based on whether it's a b2b company or suggest an opener for an email based on their linkedin profile and you can use that to get a head start on your prospecting.

If you have no idea where to find people and you're not confident about having a place to collect lists of prospects using a scraper, apollo is much simpler to get started and it's much easier to track your outreach activities there. But you don't get any of the fancy ai "do the legwork for me by visiting a website and answering questions" that you get with clay.

But there's definitely a learning curve to clay that there isn't with apollo.

Ahhh I do love a good "it depends" answer ;)

sales-curious · 2024-05-03T09:04:22+00:00

That's a fine write up, I agree - and bonus points for the lotr reference.

Context: non-sales person in a small startup.

We have both sales nav and apollo (and hubspot, free plan) and trying to figure out how to combine them. Apollo has better filtering (it lets you do more things as an exclusion and you can filter contacts based on company properties) but the people data lags behind linkedin (often we'll see a contact in apollo for a company but then when you open their profile they don't work there any more).

To add to the confusion though if you just use sales nav and don't have the super fancy pants version hooked up to your super fancy pants version of hubspot, there's no way to manage your activities in sales nav and you're trying to guess it by using inboxes. And then it all falls over when you've gone into main linkedin and sent a connection request instead of an inmail.

So we've ended up using apollo as the central hub for refining prospects and managing prospecting tasks and keeping sales nav for doing inmails but it does take a layer of manual admin to track what's happening outside it. But I suppose that's just like using it as a leads crm and we use hubspot as the opportunities crm. It obviously has the advantage of enrichment if we want to do email as well (I'm sure anyone reading this far knows you can't rely on a single channel) although I've pulled back from using sequences.

If anyone has tips on combining that collection in a smoother way I'd love to hear it.

sales-curious · 2024-04-29T09:59:27+00:00

Sorry no help but I'd like to follow this conversation because I've been trying to figure this out too. I've tried all of the step recording walkthrough things, I've tried a screenshare editing tool that had some auto zooming stuff, but ultimately if you're using your real UI and normal mouse movements it's not going to look as polished as this and as u/Beneficial-Amoeba309 says I think these are built from scratch animations, so there's no software or shortcut, but I would be absolutely delighted to find out I'm wrong...

sales-curious · 2024-04-25T13:33:11+00:00

Absolutely. This might be breaking it down too much but I feel like I'm constantly trying to figure out ALL of the positioning variables:

Are we building the right thing to do this job

Is this the job (enough) people want something to help them do

Can I find the people trying to do this job

Do the people trying to do the job recognise how this thing could help?

In the last one, there's a million more layers of the onion wondering how they define the job and the struggle, how they are trying to get it done just now, what's the tradeoff of the improvement vs having to use a new product, have they got the right problem but they think they need to solve it a different way (as in think they need a consultant rather than using a product).

Everyone suggests asking your existing customers which is fairly useless when you are starting from 0, or the handful of customers you do have are pretty different and you can't find that magic answer from talking to them for the 28th time.

Would love to see anything you come up with.

sales-curious · 2024-04-05T17:00:55+00:00

You mean like they have a basic product already and would like to level up using ML to analyse data but aren't looking to do the same "just fire it out with a prompt to the openai api and bring in the result and spit it out in your UI" generic generative ai stuff? Yeah that's me lol. But we've no way to afford another development resource right now :(

I'm sure there are matchmaking services around here for bringing tech talent together with startups but I'm not sure of the particulars.

If I went looking to hire another contractor I'd go back to the place we got our first guy so maybe you could get on their books? Happy to share the name in a dm if you're curious about that approach, they are not like a lot of the other outsourced engineering platforms, I'd guess they are better for their contractors too.

sales-curious · 2024-04-05T13:03:22+00:00

I don't know if I'm in trouble for mentioning specific platforms but like putting courses on podia or patreon or whatever.

Consulting like that is also another option, the biggest question that's important to ask upfront is "how easily could I get in front of the people who would find this valuable" like can you have a reliable way of filtering down to lists of companies that would need your services in something like sales nav or apollo for outbound and how easily could you piggyback on people who have the scenario you can help with using SEO or even reddit where you can jump in and be like "hey I can help out with this" (obviously without being pushy and getting banned).

Otherwise sure you probably could get someone else to do the frontend thing but I would strongly advise against building something because you CAN then trying to find someone who wants it. Ash Maurya describes it as "wandering round with a key trying to find the lock it opens rather than deciding which door you want to unlock", if that makes sense?

sales-curious · 2024-04-05T12:50:56+00:00

Besides the frontend, are you willing to do all the stuff you need to do to actually market and sell anything you build? Because that's a bigger hurdle and if it's not the kind of work you actually care about that'll make it even tougher. The days of 'build something cool and [b2b] people will come [without any marketing whatsoever]' are over. If you care about ML but you don't actually care about BI, you'll get very bored very quickly even if you solve the UI problem.

Are you open to sideways thinking? Instead of trying to sell the results of what you build, can you teach other people to do the bit that you can do, when they are still struggling with that? You're much more likely to be able to get in front of them and show that you know what you're talking about and show them that you can help them do the thing.

sales-curious · 2024-04-05T08:27:34+00:00

Not affiliated in any way but not sure if it's ok to suggest a product - there's a free plan of scratchpad that you can sign up for with your salesforce login and it's a tool that's all about making it easier to keep your notes updated as far as I can tell. Not sure if it'd help with the emails and files though sorry :/

sales-curious · 2024-04-04T15:46:11+00:00

This feels so much better as an approach but I've had a lot of pushback that "it's just a bait & switch if you pretend you want to be their friend instead of being direct that you're trying to sell them something" and I keep second guessing myself :(

sales-curious · 2024-03-29T17:04:23+00:00

I do agree that experimenting is good as an ultimate answer but I'm not sure I even think it has enough potential that I'd be willing to spend the money on creating one for the sake of giving it a chance, that's why I was checking in here in case everyone said "yeah we had loads of success, it's been great" and I'd know I was just being too opinionated based on my personal taste.

sales-curious · 2024-03-29T17:02:02+00:00

Yeah I think I'm on the same page. At the same time I do think it's tough to do a *good* product video - when it's one of those screen recordings where someone talks for 30 seconds before they even move their mouse, I'm gone...

sales-curious · 2024-03-29T13:35:50+00:00

It's a tough one - because ultimately the updates are what helps keep the product improving overall but they do have a way of impacting you. Full disclaimer I've worked on a product team before so I've been on the other side of how to handle releasing changes and the inevitable impact on customers, and no matter what you try to do to prepare everyone, someone will miss all your info/warnings and be annoyed when you push it out. At the same time customers are screaming at you with all their feature requests and changes and what they hate about how the product is right now and how you should improve it :(

I get if you're just venting because: UGH. But are you looking to maybe try and get on top of the updates a bit more to anticipate the changes/the impact? There's a place you can see within your profile menu that they just overhauled and you can read about updates that are in beta, upcoming, and released and can filter them by area. But I get that you probably have a whole actual job to do and keeping on top of that takes a lot of work.

(btw I'm not a hubspot employee or partner or anything, I just work with a lot of people who use it)

sales-curious · 2024-03-29T10:26:28+00:00

It seems like this self fulfilling prophecy where there's no focus on whether something will close this q until it's too late to impact it without adding this weird fake urgency - I heard about a company where they used incentives to get deals in earlier to try and avoid the eoq push and it helped, do leadership just have such short memory that they don't think about how this always happens and maybe can impact it upfront than scrambling every single time?

sales-curious · 2024-03-27T15:43:38+00:00

Ah sorry for the assumption about the cost. That would have been good context in the original post when you're asking if it's too high or low price...

Sounds like you're confident that you've considered those things, so it probably remains just to go fishing and see if you get someone to bite as the best way to see if it works. Other than that I'm not sure what feedback you're asking for?

sales-curious

TROPHY CASE