mardab96 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
- Establish the basics fast: what they sell, roughly how big, who they sell to. Two minutes, not twenty.
- 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.
- Find at most three specifics worth mentioning. More than three will not survive the first five minutes of an actual conversation.
- 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.
- Name the likely objection for this profile, and the honest response to it.
- 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.
Output format
Keep the whole thing to one screen.
Who they are
Two lines. What they sell, roughly how big.
Who is on the call
Name, role, and what someone in that role usually cares about here.
Three things worth knowing
Bullets. Each with its source.
Ask these
Four to six questions, ordered, the sharpest first in case the call runs short.
Likely objection
The one you will probably hear from this profile, and the honest answer.
Disqualify if
The two or three signals that mean this is not a fit, so it can be said out loud on the call rather than discovered in month three.
A good outcome looks like
One specific next step.
Practical example
A first call with a fifty-person recruitment agency, booked from a cold email, attended by the operations director.
The brief notes that the agency runs contract placements rather than permanent, which changes the entire billing conversation; that they have four offices, which suggests a coordination problem; and that they mention a specific applicant tracking system on their site.
The questions target how contract billing works today and where the manual work sits. The likely objection is that they already have the tracking system, and the honest answer separates what that system does from what it does not.
The disqualifier is written down before the call: under twenty placements a month means the manual work is not painful enough yet, and the right move then is to say so and set a reminder rather than push.
Guardrails
- Do not compile personal information beyond what is professionally relevant to the meeting.
- Do not invent facts about the company or the attendees. An empty section is better than a confident guess.
- Do not write a script. The output is a brief, and a call read from a script sounds like one.
- Do not skip the disqualifiers, even when the deal is wanted.
- Do not treat a LinkedIn headline as a job description. It states aspiration as often as reality.