Meeting prep
The five minutes before a call decide the first five in it.
Most advice about preparing for a meeting is about the agenda. This is about the people in it — what to look for, how long it should take, and when to stop.
Definition
What is meeting prep?
Meeting prep is deciding, before a meeting starts, what you want out of it and what you need to know about the people in it — so the conversation begins on something real instead of on small talk.
For internal meetings that mostly means an agenda. For external ones — a first sales call, an investor meeting, a client kickoff — the agenda is the easy half. The harder half is knowing who you're talking to.
What good prep actually covers
Ask people how they prepare for an external meeting and you'll mostly hear about the company: what it does, how big it is, what it raised. That's the half that's easy to look up, which is why it's the half everyone does.
The part that changes the conversation is the other half — the people. Three things are worth knowing before you walk in:
- What they're working on. Not their job title, the thing they've actually been pushing this year.
- What they've said in public. A talk, an article, an interview — anything they chose to put their name to.
- What changed recently. A new role, a launch, a funding round, a reorganisation.
None of that is about being charming. It's about being able to ask a question worth answering in the first two minutes, rather than spending them establishing what you could have read beforehand.
How long meeting prep should take
Long enough to find one specific thing, and no longer. In practice that's five minutes for a first external call — the time it takes to make coffee.
The reason to cap it isn't efficiency, it's diminishing returns. The first useful detail changes how the conversation opens. The fifth one doesn't: you won't get to it, and trying to work it in makes you sound like you're reciting a file.
If you're preparing for a meeting that's already deep in a deal, the useful context is in your own record — what was promised, who objected, what the last call surfaced. That's a different exercise, and your CRM is the place for it.
Prepare for the people, not just the account
Account research answers whether a meeting is worth having. It doesn't help you once you're in the room, because nobody wants to hear their own funding history read back to them.
Person-level prep is what produces an opener. The test is simple: can you say one sentence, out loud, that shows you know something specific and current about them — and that they'd be glad to talk about?
Two failure modes to avoid. The first is generic (“I saw you're growing fast”), which signals no preparation at all. The second is too close — anything from their private life, or anything they'd be surprised you found. If knowing it would make them uncomfortable, it isn't preparation, it's surveillance.
A five-minute routine before any external call
- Two minutes on the people. Who's actually attending, what each of them does, and one recent thing per person.
- Two minutes on the company. Only what's changed lately — an announcement, a launch, a market shift. Skip the boilerplate.
- One minute writing the opener. One sentence, in your own words, that you could say without notes.
Then stop. If the meeting turns out to need more, it'll be the kind of detail no amount of prep would have predicted.
Meeting prep, handled
The five minutes before a call, done for you.
Big Talk reads the public record on everyone in the meeting and returns three hooks with their sources, plus one opener you can say as it stands — before the call, not after it.
- Three hooks per person, each with its source.
- One spoken opener, ready to use.
- Nothing invented: if the sourcing is thin, the brief says so.
Wrote about why most partner programmes stall in year two.
Meridian blog · Jun 2026Common questions
What should I prepare before a first sales call?
One specific, current thing about each person attending, and one sentence you can open with. Company background matters less than it feels: it's easy to look up and rarely useful to say out loud.
How long should meeting prep take?
About five minutes for a first external call. The first useful detail changes the opening; the fifth won't get used.
What's the difference between meeting prep and account research?
Account research decides whether the meeting is worth having. Meeting prep decides how the first two minutes go. They use different sources and answer different questions.
Is it weird to research someone before a meeting?
Not if you stay in the professional record — talks, articles, role history, company news. It becomes weird when it moves to private life, or to anything the person would be surprised you found.
What if I can't find anything about them?
Then work from the company or the sector, and open with a question instead of an observation. A generic opener is better than a wrong one.
Open your next call warm.
Three hooks and one spoken opener, sourced, before the call.
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