ISSUE #4 - April 8, 2026
Last week, my manager asked our CSM team for a Q2 plan, living on either a Google Doc or a Google Sheet, with context on all our accounts, tactics for how we’ll hit our goals.
Fairly standard request given the fact that we’re in Q2, but a decent amount of work.
📌 In this issue:
What I built and how fast
Where the leverage actually came from
The part that still required me
📥 WHAT I BUILT
I pulled:
all my active campaign data into Claude
live CRM deal data using the HubSpot MCP connector
Claude cross-referenced them, pacing against pipeline (what’s live, what’s stalled, what’s needed a conversation before the week was out).
It produced a structured breakdown by account. I reformatted it into what my manager asked for.
The whole thing took one session; an hour tops.
No manual reconciliation. No tab-switching. No building a view from scratch before I could even start thinking.
The data work happened in the background. The thinking happened up front.
🧠 WHERE THE LEVERAGE CAME FROM
It wasn't the document. The document was just the deliverable.
The leverage was in what I could see once the data was organized. Which accounts had the highest renewal probability but no active conversation. Where I was likely to find additional budget. Which one looked clean on paper but had context I knew from a call two weeks ago that changed the read entirely.
Those calls were mine. The synthesis was mine.
But I could make them clearly because I wasn't spending the hour before them building the view.
When you're not doing the assembly, you're doing the thinking.
🎯 THE PART THAT STILL REQUIRED ME
The honest version: what Claude built was a starting point.
The account notes needed my voice. The tactics needed real relationship context — things that don't live in a CRM field. One account looked like a straightforward renewal. I knew it wasn't. That knowledge came from a conversation, not a dashboard.
Claude didn't know that. It couldn't.
What I handed over was built by me. The data layer just took a fraction of the time it used to.
The judgment didn't get automated. The overhead around it did.
The way most people build a plan like this: open the spreadsheet, pull the data manually, reconcile three sources, stare at it until the picture forms.
By the time you've done all that, you're tired before the thinking starts.
The system I've built doesn't skip the thinking. It just means the thinking gets your full attention.
That's the whole trade.
— Chris
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🗞 IN THE NEWS
🛑 Stop optimizing everything → LINK. The best piece I read this week on what AI is actually for. His argument: AI should work in the background, handling what you don't want to do and what you can't do.
🤖 13-section interactive survival guide for Claude Cowork → LINK. I say this every week but this actually might be the best Cowork guide I’ve seen. It quite literally has everything you need to actually set Cowork up right.
🎓 This young woman opening her Ivy League decisions with her parents → LINK. Watch her face when she realizes what it means. Not everything worth your attention this week is about AI.
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