AI-Powered Seller

How To Make Your Forecast Bulletproof

• Jake Dunlap • Season 1 • Episode 16

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Bulletproof your sales deals in just 5 minutes with this custom AI tool that reveals what your prospects REALLY want. In this episode, I'll show you how AI can uncover hidden motivations that traditional discovery completely misses.

Most sellers lose deals because they never truly understand what their buyers care about, even when prospects tell them directly! This revolutionary post-call analysis framework will transform your close rates and is my most tactical, game-changing episode yet.

Discover how to decode subtle buyer signals, identify true priorities, and catch objection precursors before they derail your deals. I'll reveal the exact custom GPT prompt that my team and I use on our own deals, and we're giving it to you for FREE. This is the intelligence gap that separates reps hitting 120% quota from those struggling at 85%.

Key Takeaways

🔴 Sales Trends. Buyers are hiding their true motivations. Learn why traditional discovery is failing and how AI can uncover what prospects aren't telling you directly.

🔴 Tech Trends. Post-call AI analysis is revolutionizing deal intelligence. Get the exact custom GPT prompt we use to bulletproof our own deals.

🔴 Bonus: In Practice. See a real-world example of how this AI tool analyzed my actual sales call and revealed priorities I missed.

🔴 Tactical Action Plan. Implement this 5-minute post-call routine to transform your close rates immediately.

📍 Chapters

00:00 Introduction

01:38 Why Traditional Discovery is Failing

05:41 The AI-Powered Deal Analysis Framework

09:34 Real-World Example & Results

11:00 How to Implement This Today

#AIPoweredSeller #SalesIntelligence #AIforSales #customGPT #modernsales #discoveryprocess #salespsychology #dealintelligence #salesautomation #innovativeseller #createthefuture #2025salesstrategy #salesleadership #salessuccess #b2bsales #aiforsales #b2bsalestips

Jake Dunlap, CEO and Founder of Skaled Consulting is an industry influencer and C-Level Sales leader with more than a decade of experience. Jake has developed and led high-performing sales and operational functions for Fortune 500, Global 2000, and start-up organizations. Jake and the team at Skaled specialize in building out repeatable, sustainable processes. As a thought leader with more than 22,000 followers across his platforms, Jake's audience gains valuable insights into scaling an organization, sales best practices, and general career motivation. Prior to Skaled, Jake was the first sales hire and VP of Sales at Glassdoor which was acquired by Recruit Holdings for $1.2Billion in 2018.

► Connect with Jake Dunlap

LinkedIn: /jakedunlap

Instagram: /jake_dunlap_

Twitter: https://x.com/jaketdunlap

Website: https://www.jakedunlap.com/

Speaker 1:

My friends, this episode of AI Powered Seller, I think, will go down as the most tactical and impactful episode I've ever done. The output that you are going to see from the custom GPT that we have built and are going to give to you for free 100%, is going to change the way you think about selling. It is going to change the way that you analyze calls, it's going to change the way you interact with your leader, and you are going to become a better seller almost immediately, and so I am excited to jump in and show you exactly what you need to do to master this new era of discovery, with behavior driven AI insights using custom GPTs. So let's jump into it, everybody. I watched a rep last week lose a deal that they literally said was 95% set to close, and the worst part is the buyer literally told them why they wouldn't buy. The rep just didn't hear it. Today, my friends, I'm gonna show you how AI can uncover what your prospects really care about, versus what they say they care about in discovery calls. Imagine this is like going that psychological layer deep. You know, I see all these tools like Gong, et cetera. They're missing the context they're good at like oh, he said this. This could mean this, but it's not good at like going three levels deeper around. But when human beings do this, then they're actually more ready to buy, or this is actually an issue, right? And this is the hidden intelligence that's making the difference between, you know, reps hitting 120% of quota and reps hitting 85%. All right, we're going to talk about how to make your forecasting 100% bulletproof in today's episode of AI Powered Seller.

Speaker 1:

Bulletproof in today's episode of AI Powered Seller. What's up everybody? This is Jake Dunlap, ceo of Scaled, co-founder of RevOptics. I'm also the CEO of Journey. We'll talk more about Journey later, so welcome to today's episode. This is going to be one where you have to stick around to the end. Also, if you are not watching this on YouTube, no, no worries. Um, continue to to listen along.

Speaker 1:

And then I want you to go to YouTube once you are safely parked, or whatever you're doing, and I want you to watch the output from the custom GPT that I'm going to show you. Right, how do we? How do we get to that next layer of context? Okay, you know why. Why. Why do the questions we ask not really uncover like real issues or numerical priorities? You know how do we decode body language and subtle things people are saying, and this exact AI framework that I'm going to give you, literally, guys, we're going to give you this custom GPT. This thing is insane, and we're actually building out the ability to put this straight into people's Salesforce too, which is just going to be bonkers, right, but this five minute post-call analysis process that I'm going to talk about in today's episode is really going to transform the quality of your deals, and I'm also convinced what this another thing that this helped to convince me of is look, is there going to be a world in the future where, you know, sales managers are brought in, you know, to help here and there, but I can maybe manage 20 or 30 people because it can also, you know, really dive, dive into some of these things as a part of it.

Speaker 1:

So for me, look, traditional discovery is failing because buyers have gotten better at hiding their true motivations. They're more skeptical than ever. They're like don't just get to the information. My answers are short, and it's not you Sometimes. I mean sometimes it's you. The questions suck, right, but a lot of times it really just comes down to you know, they might not know or they're just tired. Maybe you're the third demo, the third person that they've talked to, and so it's because of that, you know, they're feeling a little sick of it. They don't want to walk through it for the 15th time. So the fundamental problem that I see with the traditional discovery process is your prospect has already told you exactly what they care about, but maybe just not in the actual call. Maybe it's in the subtle things that they're doing in email, interacting with you on LinkedIn and other little digital breadcrumbs. If you guys watch the Innovative Seller Show that's live on YouTube every other week. I talked about digital breadcrumbs in one of the recent episodes and how important those are to the deal cycle, and so if you're trying to understand what the buyer really cares about, look when you're in the moment you're in that 30 to 45 minute call.

Speaker 1:

It is very difficult to be looking at everything, and especially in the Zoom era where I'm like I'm looking at the camera, then I'm looking at you in the camera and looking at myself. Like you know the ability to read body language slash. You know intonations. I think intonations are also much more difficult in this kind of Zoom. Buyer, you know world. So what we've got to get better at at sellers is we've got to do this analysis post-game. If we're in the moment we're running the discovery process, we have got to get better at our post-game analysis, and that's exactly what you're going to learn on this episode is how to run a post-game analysis that will literally bulletproof your deals.

Speaker 1:

This thing is silly, okay, so I'm excited to jump into that, and a lot of this goes into the better the questions that you can get from them. The answers you can get from the questions that you ask is great, right. And when you ask questions like what keeps you up at night, you kind of get rehearsed answers, right. They're like, oh well, it's this or that. And you don. You kind of get rehearsed answers, right. They're like, oh well, it's this or that, and you don't, kind of, you know, go two layers deep, and sometimes you don't even know that you didn't go two layers deep. Right, a good discovery process. You know, I talk about this all the time. Whenever I lose deals, it's almost always because I didn't ask the second layer question, and I go back and say, dang, I didn't do that.

Speaker 1:

So, again, I want you to think about those things that you may not remember exactly what you did in the call. You may not remember the exact way they phrased something you may not, in the moment, have recognized. Oh, I didn't ask this, so that led to this. And I need to ask this follow-up question. And you're not getting that from some gong summary or, even worse, from yes, know, we've, yes, we've, implemented, you know, insert tool and yeah, it's feeding Salesforce, but it's not telling me the nuances of the deal. It's giving me these like data, risk factors, but it's not getting like to the nitty gritty on the behavior of the person, the language patterns of the person in emails and calls, et cetera. All those things are not being looked at by Clary, right, they're like positive, negative. This seems good, you forgot this, but you and I both know, like you know, to go a few layers deep is much, much better.

Speaker 1:

So, without further ado, I hope you guys are ready. This is out of all the episodes I've done with just me, with Katie, I think this one has the potential to shape more behavior change than any episode we've ever done. Okay, so what are you going to need to be successful with this custom GPT? We're gonna give it to you in the form of a prompt and actually I think we will give it to you in the form of a custom GPT. So stay tuned. And what do you need to be successful, you're going to need a call recording software. Hopefully most of you have that. There's Otter, there's a bunch of the other ones that are free. There's a Sales Kin somebody told me about as well, too. Elephants, another one. I just heard about Firefly. Any of those I don't really care.

Speaker 1:

The next thing is you're going to download this custom instructions that we're going to include in the episode. It's in the show notes. If you're watching on YouTube, check it out. It's in the show notes as well, too. And then you have to promise me you are going to one, leave a review if you're listening to this on podcast. If you're on YouTube, you have to promise me, after you run this, you're going to leave a comment and tell me what you thought the result on the results. So, if you've got, you've got your call recording tool, maybe you got gone. Whatever you got, okay, um, you've got now the custom GPT.

Speaker 1:

The next thing that you're going to need to do and I've already done this and set it up, so you know we'll, we'll jump through it is you're going to need to be able to. Um, you're going to want to copy and paste or PDF the emails of the back and forth between you and the person. It just takes like two seconds. I just copied and pasted mine into Google Doc, for example. It took me like literally two minutes, or you can print page, depending on what email client you use. You're going to get the call transcripts from your last couple of calls. If you've only had one call, that's great too. I like just actually doing it right after the discovery call and then you can see what you might have missed. And then you're also then going to want to tell it, like any other interactions that you've had. So you're going to give it your emails and then you're going to give it your call transcript and then any other things, like I connected with a guy on LinkedIn, stuff like that.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so let's get into it. We're going to create a custom GPT for you guys, so then you won't even have to. You won't even have to get into. You know, you don't even have to get into what it can do and what the details are from the prompt. We'll just share the prompt with you. You can see that the output from this is a long one, but let's get into what the prompt actually looks like here. Everyone Okay.

Speaker 1:

So what we're going to tell it here is we're saying okay, I want you to input the following sources to analyze Email exchanges, call meetings, any website data, social media, any previous things like I should know, like for this one, for example, this is a warm introduction from one of our sister companies. So I told that I said, hey, we got the lead this way. Why is that important? Well, lead sources matter, right? If I get a warm referral from somebody who's done business with one of our sister companies, guess what? Those deals close at a better rate and I don't need to tell it that. It just knows it as a part of it. The next thing I'm going to start to do is I'm going to start to program it right, and I'm basically telling it to be a psychologist.

Speaker 1:

All right, what number one is? I want you to do a true priorities assessment. You know what? You tell me what you heard, not what I think I heard. Identify the explicit priorities, uncover implicit priorities, note any inconsistencies, love that Between stated and behavioral priorities. This is so good. I want you to think about that. We hear the words, but how are they? You know what's the behavior like, what's the enthusiasm level like, highlight topics. They repeated Flag emotional triggers that are detected in their language. Okay, then I want you to do a buying motivation analysis. Make this a little bit bigger for everybody. There we go. Buying motivation analysis. All right, I want to know. Okay, pain avoidance Is that what they're buying?

Speaker 1:

Is they're solving a problem to avoid pain? Are they looking to gain something? Do they want a competitive advantage? Risk mitigation, cost what are we hearing in this call? That would be their motivation. Decision. Time frame indicators. Language that suggests urgency.

Speaker 1:

Identify behavioral signals. Note references to fiscal periods, budget cycles, et cetera. Detect signals for immediacy and future. These are all the subtle stuff. Look, as sellers, you guys know this. These subtle little things that sometimes we don't pick up on everything. And then the other, the other issues. Then our boss is just asking us for, like a bunch of dumb data that look they need. That's not applicable. This is the stuff you need, sellers. You know all my AI powered sellers out there. These are the things you need to be successful. Okay, content engagement patterns Again, this one's really applicable if you've got website data right or something.

Speaker 1:

Objection precursors this one is awesome, right. Identify early signals of potential objections. Again, it's like, well, what did I miss? Or like, what could be some objections here and you're going to see your boy here. He missed himself. That's a part of it. Flags consistently avoid discussing dude, this is so good, right, dude, shout out to the team for developing this. This is this is good. Um, I, you know, you know me. Guys, I've got a group of people behind me that help with a lot of this. Uh, so, communication preference analysis determine their preferred communication style, their most responsive times and channels, anything that they bring up, analyze their question patterns, etc. Then I want you to kind of, you know, give me that information back in a very kind of tight format priorities, motivations, engagements, communications and tactical next steps. Okay, include specific examples from the data to support. Be honest about confidence levels in your analysis. Okay, so that's what we have. That's kind of phase one here, okay, is? I want you all to think about that. Imagine having a world.

Speaker 1:

And now here's a really cool part with this custom GPT and some of you might be playing with it right now. We will already have this programmed on the backend for you If you don't have a paid chat GPT. Just do me a favor. Just, in the comments, drop, give me the prompt and we'll give you the full prompt as well too. So if you don't have the ability to use the custom GPT, it'll save you a lot of time. Just drop in the comments, give me the prompt and I'll make sure the team shares the prompt with you as well too, which I think will be great. Okay, so there we go. So now we Okay.

Speaker 1:

It then asked me a follow-up question. It said okay, thanks for sharing. Do you have any other details you want me to know? Social media website. I didn't have that in this case. I was like no, but here is how they found us. Okay, so I did give it like that little piece of additional information because I thought it was somewhat relevant. Anytime you get a warm referral, I think that's something that they need to know. So, who is ready to see the output? Who is ready to see the beautifulness of what this thing came up with? Alright, the wait is over.

Speaker 1:

So, for all of you listening along, I'm going to talk you through it very detailed, so you're gonna be able to see what this looks like. For those of you watching, just enjoy, just enjoy as a part of this. So let's jump into this detail. So, again, I obviously removed all the details from a client, so it does an executive summary first. Okay, here's what they're looking for. They want HubSpot, reporting dashboard, sales playbook, the immediate objectives. So, again, I would call this more of like the brass tacks I think a lot of the AI tools I see can do this like okay, right, they're seeking an expert to support the implemented structure.

Speaker 1:

Their strategic initiative aligns with abccom's internal timeline. And again, because I also gave it a copy, one thing I gave it the copy of, I gave it a copy of the statement of work I put together. So I gave it the call recording transcripts, emails and the statement of work that I put together. Okay, priority matrix. So that's the first thing it does. Okay, so what did it hear as the top priority? Okay, implement robust reporting dashboards. High priority, immediate, right, the urgency is driven by current deficiencies in reporting and forecasting. Leadership lacks quick insight into the pipeline. Both Alex and Chris are pushing for this as an immediate need to improve visibility for leadership and investor updates. The cool part is look, guys, it cited its sources. Right, it pulled that straight from the transcript as a part of it. There we go. We talked about timeline. Okay, the next thing standardized pipeline management and forecasting. They also noted that as a high priority and immediate.

Speaker 1:

Currently, the team is new to HubSpot and transitioning from a less structured system leading to inconsistencies. Standardizing the sales process with clear stage definitions, required fields, is going to be critical. Love that. Develop comprehensive playbook medium priority, near term. This is huge. If you'd have listened to this call, you would have heard that they talked about the playbook medium priority, near term. This is huge.

Speaker 1:

Okay, if you'd have listened to this call, um, you would have heard that they talked about the playbook and they were enthusiastic and I will see if it, if it called out their enthusiasm around it. But long story short, it called out like hey, they kept talking about the other stuff. They did talk about this. Alex said that this is the second thing on his list after is building the sales engine. Explore AI integration. This is a strategic priority, a phase one analysis. It's like great. I talked.

Speaker 1:

The consultant, aka Jake, talked about this as a part of this. I talked about the report, but again it didn't say we all get happy errors. How many of you sellers out there. You like to talk about a certain number of features or certain features, like, oh, I like this one, but you know you can say here, it's like it didn't flag it as like look, alex and Mike, you know, rearrange their priorities and said that was priority one. So that to me, is a good reminder. It's like OK, jake, like chill on the AI stuff. Obviously you're listening to the podcast, so you're not chilling on it. So, okay, motivation profile Alex is driven by a need for strategic visibility and scalable growth.

Speaker 1:

He's a CEO concerned. The lack of robust reporting and process could impede investor confidence and a company's revenue predictability. He's conscious of efficiency and other things and again, for those of you who are just listening along, just understand like I'm paraphrasing these paragraphs are very, very robust, right. If every single rep read this after every call, I mean I think your close rate is going to go up 10, 20%, easy, right. What Chris said? Chris, it says is more operational excellence and performance accountability. As the head of sales he's responsible for day to day-day. He's used HubSpot. He wants to use HubSpot to understand what potential is possible. But since the team is new, he wants to get the system structured properly as soon as possible. They also talked about this OKR alignment and I mentioned that HubSpot can connect to some of those tools.

Speaker 1:

But it's long. It talks about what I'm interested in, what I talked about. This is where it starts to get really interesting. Engagement pattern analysis this is the type of thing that, again, usually you just kind of sit there. You guess You're like, oh, based on what I heard, I think that they're interested or what they said, but I don't remember. This engagement is structured as a short-term project with a defined scope, followed by an option for ongoing support. So it kind of highlights what I had talked about. It highlights who should be involved Chris will be the day-to-day, chris will coordinate schedules, et cetera. The workflow talks about scale, teams, audits and how we get involved with ABC systems, calls out the number of reps and things that they have. Again, it says, hey, as you're going through the audit, this is how you should go through the audit, like dashboard and reporting, overhauls, sales, playbook development, et cetera. And again, at the end of this scope there should be a final review. So this is kind of the you know hey, did you get it right? Because it has the calls and it has a statement of work so it's able to do that. Okay.

Speaker 1:

Communication recommendations establish a clear communication cadence and channels from day one. Given the initial scheduling mix up where Chris wasn't on an email thread listen to this. That's what happened with this call the CEO. We got introduced to the CEO. He gave my EA the details but he forgot to put his head of sales on the email thread and we didn't catch it. So we actually had to cancel the first meeting because he's like I really need Chris on this. So it's like it literally called this out because we talked about it in the call. So it was able to listen to the call and the start of the call and say, hey, jake, you know, guys, you need to get clear on communication from day one because you've already had this one mix up even wasn't really you know our mix up. But again, leverage the existing note-taking practice for best practices. They used Otterai. Continue this practice. Tailor communication style to the stakeholder.

Speaker 1:

Alex is most interested in high-level outcomes and strategic alignment. When communicating with Alex, frame updates in terms of business impact. I'm going to give some examples. Encourage open feedback. Both companies foster an environment where feedback is shared and again, I could have given it a link to the company too, and it could have cited in some sources from their mission and values. Again, define decision-making authority, keep communication lines open.

Speaker 1:

Tactical next steps, review and approve SOW, schedule, project kickoff Again, you put a date in the thing and then provide access to systems and data. That's always a part of our kickoff. And then it starts to go into more of the details. This thing's about eight, about six, seven pages or so. Set up regular process views, complete deliverables and briefs as well too. Okay, another thing I ran a flavor of this before One of the last versions I ran. What it also put together is it also called out and, by the way, you can always do this, keep in mind, chatgpt isn't perfect, right? It doesn't always pull in the exact instructions the exact same way every time.

Speaker 1:

I did another version of this and one of the things that it called out, and obviously I had to scrub the company name because I didn't want to use a real company name in here as a part of this. But one thing it called out let me see if I can find this for you real quick, guys. It called out some additional questions tactical next steps. It also called out additional questions that I probably should have asked. So this version, it said the tactical next steps it said was you know which specific metrics or reports do you think your board has to have? And I think in the meeting I said, look, we already know what that is. You know there are parts of your sales process that you feel are working that we should preserve right. So, anyway, it called out some really good questions. Another thing it called out it called me out for which I thought was really good. Is it said in the objections called me out for which I thought was really good. Is it said in the objections, the potential objections it called out.

Speaker 1:

It said cold or skip topics budget costs. Not once did the company bring up budget on the call. This science can be discussed offline or they're deferring it In the meeting itself. They focus on the needs and solution, not cost. This indicates that during the discovery phase, content and fit mattered more than pricing. But you know it's like you probably should have asked and talked budget and I'm like you know what You're probably right, I should have.

Speaker 1:

And so you know I want you to imagine using a tool like this on every call. I want you to imagine a tool that will look behind the discovery questions you ask and it will pull out all the little subtle nuances and triangulate them for you and say Jake, these are the exact questions that you need to follow up on. Here is what you missed. You didn't ask to talk about pricing. These are the things that you need to do. So then, in between now and the next call, guess what? We're cleaning up all this. I'm asking these questions asynchronously and talking about budget asynchronously, and so the beautiful part is, with this again, with this custom GPT, we're calling it the motivation analyzer GPT. I think that's the name Motivational Analyzer GPT work in progress. You will never miss a nuance of a deal again.

Speaker 1:

And look, and you know how we roll at Scaled. We are always trying to provide tactical insights that this isn't stuff for your RevOps team, this is for you, and I think that too many times I'm seeing people deploy generative AI for the RevOps team and they aren't deploying generative AI that actually salespeople want to use. My friends again, with this GPT, literally all you're going to have to do is give it the transcript, the emails. You know, maybe if there's any LinkedIn correspondence. Like I said, I had a statement of work, so I gave it the statement of work. And again, you know, this to me is the type of deployment of generative AI that every company needs to be doing, and so again, obviously, if you're interested or need support you know who's doing this, so definitely reach out. I'm having probably five to ten conversations a week with companies trying to figure out use cases like this, so hopefully this one is helpful for all you, my, my AI powered sellers out there, and and that's that's.

Speaker 1:

That's today's episode. You know, today's episode. I hope, like I said in the very beginning, I really feel like this could be the most tactical, impactful episode. The ability to get behind the scenes, under the covers of all the little nuances of that are happening, with having a little third-party gut check that sees everything and connect the dots like a psychologist, is really a game changer. Right, your prospects are already telling you everything you need to know to win the business. Ai is now just helping you finally understand what they've been saying all along, my friends, and that's it.

Speaker 1:

So thanks for watching or listening along everybody. Make sure to subscribe if you're listening on podcast, leave a review. Love to get more reviews as a part of that. Make sure, if you haven't, go check out the Innovative Seller book bestseller USA Today bestseller book as well. Also, we're going to put a link in here to make sure, if you are listening or if you are watching, make sure you sign up for the AI Powered Seller Newsletter. Guys, it's a free resource. Brian and our team is putting out bonkers stuff like hey, the O3 model just came out. What does that mean? Go check out the newsletter. So the newsletter is kind of the twin to the podcast. So make sure you go check that out. So thank you again, everybody for tuning in. This was a fun episode. I hope you guys got a ton out of it and excited. We've got some great new content in the works. Excited for that to drop. So that's what we've got everyone. That's the latest episode, ai Powered Seller. Have a great rest of your week and we will see you on the next one.

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