How I automated my knowledge (not AI)

Earlier this week, something unexpected happened: I went into what I thought was an ordinary, early-stage sales meeting. But when I showed up, I found the key decision maker there—ready to talk deal terms. I wasn’t ready for that!

If this happened to me last year, I would have panicked. I’d have said all the wrong things and spent the rest of the day stressing about it.

What I’ve since learned is that a big part of being a solopreneur is automating your knowledge. What do I mean by that?

In any given day, you need to make a huge number of decisions:

• What should the first sentence of this LinkedIn post be to get maximum traction?

• What should I say to this prospect who's gone cold on me?

• Should I first respond to this customer service email, or fix this bug?

Make better quality decisions: get paid. Make worse: lose money. It’s that simple.

The harder you need to think about each decision, the slower you go and the more tired you get.

But the good news is that the more experience you gain, the easier each decision becomes. You’ve seen it before and know what to do: the answer is automatic.

This is called unconscious competence: you've automated what you know so deeply that when you're tired, stressed, or bored, you still do the right thing.

But until you’re an expert, what can you do? I want to tell you about how I calmly handled that meeting with a simple trick.

Automate it

Rewind the clock to earlier this year. By that point, I’d given deal terms to a handful of prospects and botched it a few times. What I told them was confusing, overly-complicated, and incomplete.

I knew something needed to change.

What I realized is that whenever a prospect asked about terms, the answer was never that different:

• I offer an annual enterprise software agreement

• For on-prem software

• For a certain price

• With a certain amount of usage

• I offer commercial support with a set response time

• Through a variety of channels

• I help with on-boarding

• And prioritize things from paying customers

• Along with some warranty guarantees

I wanted to say that perfectly in each conversation, so I did something obvious: I wrote it down, in exactly the order I wanted to say it each time. In other words, I automated my knowledge with a little help.

Back to that meeting.

When I was caught off guard about the agenda, I fluidly pulled up my notes and stayed in the flow of conversation.

I said exactly what I wanted to say without getting anxious. Afterwards, I retrospected on the outcome for a minute or two and went back to coding.

I have no idea if I’ll win the deal, but the point is that I did precisely what I intended without overthinking.

My response was automatic.