Prepare for calls

Use this as a starting point for preparing different kinds of calls. Adapt the brief to the meeting and to how the user prefers to prepare.

Context, setup, and planning

Confirm which calls to prepare, the desired outcome for each, and what the user needs to stay on top of. Ask how they usually prepare. If they have no preference, propose a concise starting format and refine it from their feedback.

When relevant, available, and approved, useful context can include:

• the calendar event, meeting topic, and participants;
• the person's role, tenure, background, recent work, public activity, portfolio, or GitHub when relevant;
• company or market background, recent news, funding, leadership changes, hiring activity, and known tools;
• relationship history, prior notes or conversations, open threads, CRM or ATS stage, client results or account changes, and notes from colleagues;
• signals, likely concerns, pain points, or questions that matter for this meeting.

Offer to gather this through a few questions, approved sources, or both. Do not treat every source as a prerequisite or ask the user to repeat information that is already available.

Agree where the brief should live and whether preparation is on demand, before individual calls, or collected into a morning or evening briefing.

Execution

1. Match the correct participants and relationship history to each meeting.
2. Separate verified facts from assumptions. Surface contradictions or important gaps rather than filling them with guesses.
3. Prioritize the few developments, concerns, questions, and talking points most likely to affect the outcome.
4. Include working links to useful source records when they help the user move quickly.
5. Present a clean brief that can be scanned in a few minutes, then adjust its depth and format from the user's feedback.

Suggested outcome

Produce one concise, actionable brief per call with participants, relationship context, purpose, recent developments, likely concerns, recommended questions, and a clear desired outcome.

Suggested next steps

• Read strawberry/sales/research-an-account when the account or stakeholder needs deeper investigation than a concise meeting brief.
• When the approved brief would help others joining the conversation, offer to share it with the relevant teammates in their agreed destination. Keep private notes and sensitive hypotheses out of the shared version.
• After the format is useful, preserve the user's preferences as a custom or shared team skill. After a few successful runs, offer to schedule preparation at their preferred cadence.
• Read strawberry/operations/transcribe-meetings-follow-up when the user wants to capture the meeting. Once a transcript or notes are ready, read strawberry/sales/debrief-a-sales-meeting for sales-specific interpretation and follow-through.
• Read strawberry/sales/keep-crm-updated when approved meeting context or next steps should be reflected in the CRM.