Find the signals behind your last 20 wins

What it does

The best signals aren’t on anyone’s list. They’re in your own wins: what was going on at each company right before they first talked to you. Look at 20 wins, and a few events show up again and again. Those are the signals worth watching, straight from your buyers.

What you need

• Your last 20 won deals, with the date of the first call or first reply
• An AI assistant with web search, like Perplexity, or Claude or ChatGPT with search on
• LinkedIn, for job changes and posts
• A spreadsheet

How it works

1. 1

   List the last 20 wins, with the first-call date

   The company, its website, the buyer, and the date they first talked to you or first replied. Twenty is enough to see a pattern. Fewer than ten is a hunch.

2. 2

   Look at the 60 days before each one

   Prompt for Perplexity, or Claude or ChatGPT with search on, once per company

   Company: [COMPANY] ([WEBSITE])
   Date they first talked to us: [DATE]
   
   List anything that happened at this company in the 60 days before that date:
   - job posts, especially for [ROLES THAT TOUCH WHAT YOU SELL]
   - funding rounds
   - new leaders, especially a new [THE BUYER'S TITLE]
   - launches, new markets or pricing changes
   - tools they added or dropped
   - posts by their founders or leaders about [THE PROBLEM YOU SOLVE]
   - trouble at a vendor they used
   
   Give the date and a source link for each. If you find nothing dated in that window, say so. Don't guess.

3. 3

   Ask your own records, too

   First emails and call notes often say why they reached out or replied. One line like “we just lost our second dispatcher” beats anything a search turns up. Add it to the row.

4. 4

   Count what repeats

   One column per kind of event, and a 1 for each win that had it. Anything in five or more of the 20 is a strong candidate for tier 1 or tier 2. Anything in two or three is worth watching.

   Google Sheets: paste into A1, one row per win, then fill row 2 down

   Company	First call	Hiring for the role	New leader	Funding	Posted about the problem	Dropped a tool or vendor	Other
   [COMPANY]	[DATE]	1	0	0	1	0	

5. 5

   Write how you’d catch each one

   For each candidate: where it shows up (job boards, funding news, LinkedIn, your website analytics), which tool can watch for it, and how fast you’d need to act. Then sort them into three tiers.

What good looks like

A short list of signals, each with a count from your own wins behind it: “11 of our last 20 wins had posted a dispatcher job in the two months before the first call.”

Mistakes to skip

• Starting from a generic signal list instead of your own wins. The generic ones are where everyone else is looking.
• Trusting an AI’s dates without the link. Check the source on anything you plan to act on.
• Counting events from after the first call. Only what happened before tells you when to reach out.