meeting-prep-five-minutes

Meeting Prep in Five Minutes

Use this skill when

There is a call soon and nobody has read anything about the company.

You have twenty minutes before a call. The goal is to walk in knowing three things you did not know, rather than forty you will not remember.

The output is deliberately short. A brief nobody reads before the call is worth less than no brief, because it also consumed the prep time.

Required input

• Company name and website.
• Who is on the call, and their roles.
• Whether this is a first call, a follow-up, or a late-stage conversation. The brief is different for each.
• What you sell.

Useful if it exists, skipped without complaint if not:

• previous emails or notes with this account
• how they arrived: inbound, outbound, referral, event
• which competitor they are likely using
• your typical deal size and the size this one looks like

Analysis workflow

1. Establish the basics fast: what they sell, roughly how big, who they sell to. Two minutes, not twenty.
2. Work out who is actually in the room. A founder, a head of department and a procurement lead each want a different conversation, and preparing for the wrong one is worse than preparing for none.
3. Find at most three specifics worth mentioning. More than three will not survive the first five minutes of an actual conversation.
4. Write the questions you cannot answer from research. The point of the call is what the website does not say, so a brief that answers everything has prepared the wrong things.
5. Name the likely objection for this profile, and the honest response to it.
6. Write the disqualifiers explicitly, then decide what a good outcome is. Not "a great conversation", a specific next step.

Decision rules

• Three facts maximum. This is a hard limit, not a guideline.
• Questions beat statements in the brief. If the brief is mostly things to say, it is a pitch script and the call will feel like one.
• If the research contradicts what the CRM says about this account, flag the contradiction rather than smoothing it over.
• If this is a follow-up call, the previous conversation outranks anything found online.
• If nothing meaningful can be found, say so and lean the brief entirely on questions. That is a normal outcome for small and private companies.