The first builds a tool that scans ad creative for legal trouble — copyrighted music, alcohol claims that break the rules in one country and not another, the kind of thing that gets a brand sued. He was leading his outbound with a screenshot of his dashboard. Here's what we found, look at this interface.

The second sells lending infrastructure to fintech companies. Roughly a thousand possible buyers in the whole world, a quarter-million-dollar contract, and a buying window that opens maybe once every few years. He had tried the standard approach, decided it was a timing problem, and moved to monitoring his entire market every fourteen days waiting for someone to twitch.

Neither of them had a copy problem. Neither of them had a targeting problem. Both of them were sitting on information their buyers would pay for and pitching their software instead.

Sales is game of power

And the power is unevenly distributed based on information asymmetry.

Think about what that means in practice. Almost every rep who reaches out to you knows less about your situation than you do. They know your headcount, your tech stack, maybe that you're hiring. You know your budget, your politics, what broke last quarter, which vendor already burned you. You are better informed than the person trying to sell to you, which is why you delete their email.

Now think about the reps who are actually good. They have sold to forty companies that look like yours. They know what happened to all forty. When they talk to you, they are bringing the compressed experience of everyone who walked this path before you — and that is worth taking a meeting for.

The lever is information. Subject lines and personalization tokens are rounding errors next to it. Whoever holds more information about the buyer's situation holds the power, and most of the outbound that reaches my inbox has handed it away.

The reason this matters more now than it did three years ago is that language models raised the floor and left the ceiling alone. Anyone can now generate the message an average rep would have written. "I saw you're hiring a benefits administrator, have you heard our product is the best solution for this?" That costs nothing to produce, so it's worth nothing to receive. The bar moved.

What didn't move is the stuff no model has ever seen. Nowhere on the public web has your customer been interviewed about why she got fired from her last job, or which vendor screwed her, or what she checks before she'll sign anything. That conversation exists in your call recordings and in your transaction tables and nowhere else on earth. No model trained on it, so no model can produce it for your competitor either.

That is your entire advantage. Almost none of the outbound I receive touches it.

You should know more about the buyer’s situation than they do

Here's how I get people to find their own asymmetry. Set your product aside completely and imagine one of your customers bought your company. They now have access to every piece of data that flows through your system, and they get one day with it.

What do they ask first?

Not "will this product work for us." That's a question about you. I mean the question that pays them back tomorrow — the one they'd want answered from the pooled behavior of every company like them that came before.

For the lending infrastructure company, that question is not hypothetical. Eighteen customers, three or four financial products launched apiece. That's somewhere north of fifty product launches sitting in his tables — how each one was structured, what the rates were, who actually picked them up. Someone about to launch their first credit card would give real money to see that. He'd never once thought of it as a thing he owned.

If the imaginary-acquisition framing doesn't land, try the version I like better: your customer's engineer breaks into your office, takes everyone hostage, gets full access to all your data, and can only do three things with it. Name the three things.

This is the same instinct behind the dossier — you are assembling a view of the buyer's situation that the buyer cannot assemble alone.

Who Gets This

The two worked examples below are the actual conversation — what each company had, what I told them to build with it, and the messages that came out the other side.

• Free: the shift, and the question that finds your asymmetry.

• $50/mo (most readers start here): everything below the line in this post, and every paid article.

• $2,499/yr: Every tool I ship. Edge Copilot is how you talk to all of it through Claude Code. Current tools: Edge Copilot, AutoClaygent, Agent 7, Who to Target and What to Say, Blueprint Cloud, Technology Finder, Video List Extractor, Competitor Monitor, LinkedIn Engagement, Domain & LinkedIn Finder, Dossier Builder, PDF Contact Finder, TAM Contact Harvester, Find a Rep, Blueprint Playbook, Crawford, JoJo. Whatever ships next is included. Plus all 3 courses + weekly Applied Office Hours. (Go annual — $2,499/yr.)

Below the line in this post:

• The backwards-from-the-lawsuit play, with the message it produces

• Why the compliance pitch beats the best-practices pitch, and the order to sell them in

• The full question set for mining your own customer data into outbound

• Every question from the room, with the answer

Start at $50/mo

Every week I run Applied Office Hours on Zoom — bring what you're building and we'll work it live.

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