Know Your Customer
The Cheap, 30-Minute Intelligence Setup That Makes You a Better Partner
Every account team I've run has had the same "must do": deep-dive on each client every quarter.
But quarterly isn't enough. Things move too fast. The real edge comes from a constant feed of updates on your clients — so when something significant breaks, you catch it, and when a key meeting hits the calendar, you've already mined the talking points.
I'm not reading every word. I'm scanning. Most of it I ignore. But when something matters, I dig in. Over time, I use the same stream to feed content for upcoming calls — figuring out how to weave a client's lingo and priorities into how our team or product can add value to what they actually care about.
That's the compounding part. If you're managing a client over months and years, constantly reading and thinking about them, you start to talk to them in their language. You learn what they care about and how they frame it.
Instead of opening a call with "hey, how have things been going?", you can say: "I saw X about your company, and it made me think of how we could do Y to help with that initiative — you could probably see Z results."
That nuance is what separates good business partners from great ones.
A few prompts with your favorite AI platform will get you something like the setup below. About 20–30 minutes to build. What you get:
Weekly company summaries
Alerts for major news
Topic-specific monitoring
Minimal maintenance
AI-filtered signal instead of endless noise
Step 1: Google Alerts (5 minutes)
Go to Google Alerts and create alerts for:
Company names "Qualtrics", "Medallia", "Sprinklr"
Important topics
"Qualtrics" AND AI
"Qualtrics" AND layoffs
"Qualtrics" AND acquisition
"Qualtrics" AND partnership
"Qualtrics" AND enterprise
Leadership
"Zig Serafin"
"CEO" AND "Qualtrics"
Settings I use
Delivery: At most once a day
Sources: Automatic
Region: Any
Quality: Only best results
This becomes your baseline signal feed.
Step 2: Feedly Free (10 minutes)
Create a free Feedly account and add:
Company blogs
Industry news
Competitors
TechCrunch
CX/AI publications
LinkedIn blog feeds where available
Suggested folders: Companies, Competitors, AI/CX Trends, Leadership Moves.
Good sources to start: TechCrunch, Crunchbase News, VentureBeat AI, The Information, CMSWire.
Why this matters: one place instead of twenty tabs. Easy to scan. Mobile-friendly. Even the free plan has useful AI features.
Step 3: LinkedIn Signals (5 minutes)
Follow company pages, CEOs, CROs, CS leaders, recruiters, and product leaders. Turn on notifications selectively.
This catches what doesn't always hit the press: reorgs, hiring patterns, quiet strategy shifts, and "excited to announce..." posts that go up before the official announcements.
Step 4: The Friday AI Summary (5 minutes/week)
Every Friday, paste your top alerts and articles into ChatGPT (or Claude, or whatever you use) and prompt:
Summarize the most important developments this week involving [company]. Focus on leadership changes, AI initiatives, enterprise sales strategy, customer experience, acquisitions, layoffs, partnerships, and overall business momentum. Tell me why each item matters.
This is where AI earns its keep. It strips duplicates, highlights what actually matters, and gives you strategic interpretation instead of headlines.
Optional: Instant Alerts for the Big Stuff
For events you can't afford to miss — layoffs, CEO changes, funding, acquisitions — create separate Google Alerts and set them to as-it-happens:
"Company" AND layoffs
"Company" AND acquired
"Company" AND funding
"Company" AND restructuring
Everything else stays on a daily or weekly digest.
What This Actually Looks Like
Daily: Five minutes in Feedly. Ignore 90% of it. Save one or two meaningful items.
Weekly: Paste the saved items into your AI tool. Get an executive-level summary. Pull out the implications.
Total time: roughly 10 minutes a day, 15 minutes once a week.
That's the whole system. Twenty minutes to set up, fifteen minutes a week to maintain — and over a year, you'll know your accounts better than most internal employees do. More importantly, you'll show up to every conversation with something to say that proves it.