Automate your sales client trend reporting with ChatGPT, Zapier, and Feedly

TLDR Summary:

• Automate reporting on market trends to your leadership.
• Use Feedly to aggregate client and market articles.
• Use ChatGPT to synthesize them into an email.
• Use Zapier to automate the process from start to finish.

Read time: Under 4 minutes

Implementation time: 20 minutes

Produced with AI from Elevenlabs.

Weekly sales revenue reporting is a tax.

Most sellers have to write weekly reports to their leadership on the state of their clients, sales pipeline, and trends they're hearing from clients.

3 challenges most people face:

• But it's time-consuming to think and write these up.
• Your leadership, one or two levels up the hierarchy, often craves broad trends over single client insights, and it's hard to see those on the ground.
• You have to submit them every week, and it is challenging to continue to come up with new insights each time.

Most sellers's approach could be better.

Most people don't design intelligent systems to stand out in their most consistent interactions with their bosses.

Instead, they try to brute force a poor solution:

• Block out significant time each week on their calendar.
• Do just enough to 'check the box' but not enough to impress.
• Do what's easy: repeat insights and report on bland client status calls instead of novel trends leadership can take action on.

My AI workflow to automate weekly trend reporting

I recommend aggregating recent articles on your clients and industry with an RSS reader so that you can capture the latest developments.

To digest all that quickly and separate the signal from noise, I get ChatGPT to summarize the metadata from that feed of articles. I also adjusted the prompt to give me the output I could easily package into my report.

I use Zapier to automate and streamline the process. It pulls all the articles once a week, ports them to the ChatGPT prompt, runs it, and then formats the output into an email it sends me.

Recommended steps to build this AI client trend reporting

1. Collect the articles: You could use most RSS readers, but I like Feedly because of the UI and the AI topic finder, making it easy to find articles on any topic instead of finding specific publications like most RSS readers. Set up an AI feed. Input all of your client names (e.g., Wealthfront), the industries they're in (e.g., personal finance), the primary tools and platforms you use (e.g., Google Ads), and any sub-culture industry topics (e.g., Fat Fire).
   
   
2. Refine article feed: Look at the list of articles included. Adjust the specific names and quantity of topics to get a representative list that is as relevant to your client base as possible. Include any topic exclusions (e.g., Europe, foreign policy).
   
   
3. Set up Zapier workflow: Create a new "zap" or workflow. Add your Feedly board feed as the trigger. Add the trigger event to start when a new article is added to the Feedly board. This will be the event that kicks off the workflow to start.
   
   
4. Aggregate the articles: In Zapier, use the "Digest by Zapier" as the next step to bring all the articles into one place on a specific day of the week. The "entry" should be the "Feedly article URL" and "Feedly Article Content (no HTML)."
   
5. Automate ChatGPT prompt: The next Zapier step should be to "Write Email in ChatGPT."
   1. Experiment with writing your prompt in the regular chat interface to get it as you want.
   2. Include instructions on the output structure (e.g., format into Headwinds, Tailwinds, Action Items, Comments).
   3. Include the "Current Digest" summary from the previous step.
   4. Configure it: Tone—formal, Body Type—plain, Model—latest available, Max Tokens—500 (this Should be sufficient for your computing need with protection that it doesn't use all of your capacity), Temperature—0.7, Top P—0.7.
   
   
   
6. Send Email: The next Zapier step is to package all of that into an email format and send it to yourself. Use the "Email by Zapier" app to "Send Outbound Email in Email by Zapier." In the body of the email, insert the Chat GPT data for the subject line and body. Add your email to the sender's field.
   
   
7. Optimize and turn on the Zap: Run a test. You'll need to tweak each step to make it as helpful as possible. Tweaking the quality of the Feedly article feed will improve ChatGPT's output.
8. Refine the costs of the workflow: The pricing and features for each tool are constantly changing. You can set up Feedly for free but pay for more advanced features. Zapier has a free tier and trial for more volume and advanced features. ChatGPT requires you to use their API to make this work, so it will need your credit card. Set the Zap only to run once a week and set the max tokens to 500 to keep the cost to a few dollars per run, which has been well worth the time savings for me. Experiment and balance the value add, convenience, and cost to see which works best for you.

If this is too much to set up, start with some of it this week. I suggest copying the Feedly articles into ChatGPT to summarize. Then, tweak it a little next week and take one more step.

Let me know how you're implementing this. Where are you getting stuck? Where are you getting excited about this new capability? Which use cases are you using this for? How have you made it even better that our community can benefit from it?