One page on the prospect, five minutes before the call

What is the exact prompt?

“I have a call with [name], [title] at [company], at [time]. Give me one page, in this order. (1) What the company does, two sentences, plain words, and not their tagline. (2) Anything already between us: search my email for their domain, check the CRM for their company, note any colleague who has talked to them and about what. (3) What [name] owns there and roughly how long they have been in the seat. (4) The company’s last two real announcements or changes, with dates: funding, launches, leadership. (5) One connection point that is actually true, such as a shared customer, a shared investor, or a tool they use that we work with. (6) One opening question that neither their homepage nor a generic discovery script would produce. If a section comes up empty, write ‘nothing found’ and move on. Five minutes. A late answer is a useless answer.”

The inside-out order matters more than any single section. “Your colleague exchanged four emails with their CTO in March” changes the whole call.

Ask one good question, not seven talking points

Talking points make calls worse. A rep armed with seven facts performs the research at the prospect ("I saw you raised a Series B") instead of having a conversation. One question, specific enough to prove you prepared and open enough that they do the talking, beats the list.

The question doubles as the quality check. "What are your priorities this quarter?" means the research connected to nothing. "You hired three data engineers in two months, is the warehouse migration what is driving that?" could only exist if sections 3 and 4 were actually read.

Running it before every meeting

A routine reads tomorrow’s calendar each evening and writes a one-pager per external meeting, waiting in your inbox or Slack by morning. Six meetings, six briefs, none of which you started. The prompt does not change, only the trigger does.

Batch mode needs one extra rule: “skip internal meetings and any recurring call I have had more than three times.” What happens after the call is the meeting follow-ups playbook, and the account-level version is meeting prep research.

What do you check before the call?

The freshness of section 4.

A "recent" funding round from two years ago is the classic miss, which is why the prompt demands dates. If a date is missing or old, drop the fact rather than open with it.

Treat section 2 as high-trust, since it came out of your own accounts, and section 5 as verify-before-using. A claimed mutual customer is a great opener right up until it is wrong. The hundreds-of-rows version of this job is prospect research at scale.

Frequently asked questions