In partnership with
The ice cream shop that makes money when it's cold
28 Wishes sells ice cream in Los Angeles. Below 70°F, sales fall about 20%. The weather is out of their hands. Rent isn't.
So the owners started putting about $20 a day into Kalshi weather markets, taking the cold side. The days that keep customers away now pay something back.
This is hedging. Big companies have done it for decades, buying protection against bad weather, fuel spikes and rising rates. It used to take a broker, a trading desk, and an order size no corner shop could meet.
Kalshi opens it up. Contracts on weather, fuel prices, inflation, tariffs and regulation, starting at a few dollars. Take a position on the outcome that would hurt you. If it hits, the payout softens it. If it doesn't, the contract expires and the good month was the point.
GM to the Top 1% ☕
A few quarters back I walked out of a second meeting feeling like I had it. Good energy, real questions, a champion who stayed ten minutes late.
Two weeks later he forwarded me the internal doc his team had been working from. It was a side-by-side comparison of four vendors, built by his analyst using an AI tool, written before I ever got the first call. My column had three lines in it. One of them was wrong in a way that would have taken me forty seconds to correct.
I asked him why he never brought it up. He said something I still think about: "I figured if it mattered, you would have mentioned it."
He was not being difficult. He was being accurate. I had spent every minute of that meeting explaining what we did and zero minutes finding out what he had already been told about us.
💡 THE EVALUATION STARTED WITHOUT YOU
The numbers behind that deal are now the norm rather than the exception. Buyers spend roughly 83% of their evaluation time away from sellers entirely. About 92% say AI has shaped their vendor shortlist, and nearly half say it shaped it significantly. Around 71% use AI search tools specifically for vendor research, and the single most common thing they ask it to do is compare vendors head to head.
Sit with that last part. The highest-volume use of AI in your buyer's process is not learning what your product does. It is generating a comparison of you against your competitors, out of public material, with no one in the room who can correct it.
Most sellers respond to this by trying to get in earlier. That is the right instinct pointed at the wrong lever, because there is no "earlier" left to get to when the shortlist forms before the buyer has a name for the problem.
The move that actually works is smaller and stranger. Stop treating the first call as the start of the evaluation and start treating it as the first chance to audit an evaluation already in progress. Your job in that meeting is not to introduce yourself. It is to find out who already did it for you, and what they got wrong.
🔧 THE PRE-EXISTING STORY AUDIT
Four questions to run in your next first call, before you present anything.
1. Ask what they already found: "Before we met, what did your team turn up on us?" Not defensive, just curious. Most buyers will tell you plainly, and what they say is the actual brief you are pitching against.
2. Ask which comparison they are holding: "Who else is in the evaluation, and how are you seeing the differences?" You are not fishing for competitors. You are trying to see the shape of the grid your column sits in.
3. Correct exactly one thing, gently: Find the single most consequential inaccuracy and fix it with evidence in one sentence. Not a rebuttal tour. One correction lands as credibility; five land as insecurity.
4. Ask your own AI the same question they did: Prompt it to compare you against your two main competitors for their use case. Read what comes back as if you were the buyer. That output is the first impression you are actually making, and you can influence what feeds it.
🎯 THIS WEEK'S HOMEWORK
Pick your most common competitive matchup and run it yourself this week. Ask an AI tool to compare your company against that competitor for your primary use case, then write down every claim in the answer that is out of date, incomplete, or flatly wrong. Bring the top one to your next first call and correct it before the buyer has to.
❓ QUESTION OF THE DAY
What does your buyer believe about you right now that you have never once been given the chance to answer?
Reply with the belief. If you cannot name it, that is the finding.
See you tomorrow.
Edward
Founder, Morning Sales
P.S. The four audit questions above live in the discovery section of the 500 AI Sales Prompts manual, along with the comparison prompt I use to see my own deals the way a buyer's research tool does. 27 dollars, and it pays for itself the first time you catch a wrong claim before your champion does: https://store.edwardgorbis.com