A one-page brief before every meeting

Walking into an external meeting without preparation is rarely a decision. It is what happens when preparation costs fifteen minutes and the gap between meetings is five.

A brief that writes itself changes the economics rather than your discipline.

Decide what you actually need on the page

Most meeting briefs fail by being complete. You will not read a page and a half in the ninety seconds before a call.

What earns its place: who is in the room and what they do, what we last said to each other, what is open, and one thing that has changed since. Everything else is padding you will scroll past.

Write the standing job

Every weekday at 7am, look at today's calendar for meetings with anyone
outside the company.

For each one, write a one-page brief into Documents:

  WHO      each external attendee, their role, and their company in a line
  HISTORY  what we last discussed and when, from the CRM
  OPEN     anything outstanding on our side or theirs
  CHANGED  anything notable about their company since we last spoke
  ASK      what I most likely want out of this meeting

Keep it to one page. If a section has nothing, leave it out.

If there are no external meetings today, say so and stop.

The history section is the one that matters

This is where a brief stops being a search result and becomes useful, and it is worth understanding where it comes from.

The CRM is part of Tenfold, so contacts, deals and logged activity are already there. Nothing needs connecting for that half. What the calendar adds is knowing who you are meeting today, which is why it is the one connector here.

The brief is only as good as your activity logging. If your last three conversations with a customer were never logged, HISTORY will be thin and the brief will read as if you have never spoken. That is not a research failure, it is a record failure, and it is worth knowing which one you have before blaming the tool.

Read one against a meeting you remember

Run it once for a customer you know well. You will see immediately whether the history is coming through, and whether CHANGED is finding real news or resurfacing something from two years ago.

Both are one-line prompt corrections. Neither is obvious until you check.

Put it where you will see it

A brief filed in Documents is a brief you have to remember to open. Have the employee mail it to you, or post it to the channel you already have open, so it arrives with everything else at 7am.

What good looks like

Ninety seconds before the call you know who you are talking to, what you last promised them, and one true thing about their year.

The measure is not the brief's quality. It is whether you stop opening calls with "remind me where we got to".

Also covers

Pulling the customer's whole history into the brief automatically. The HISTORY section above is doing this already, and it is worth being explicit about where it comes from, because it is the part people assume needs an integration.

The CRM is part of Tenfold. Contacts, organizations, deals and logged activities are all readable without connecting anything, so a brief can include every conversation you have recorded, what stage the deal is at, and what was promised last time.

If you want more of it, ask for more of it:

Add to each brief: every logged activity with this account in the last six
months, most recent first, in one line each. Then the current stage of any
open deal and its value.

If we have had no logged contact in more than 90 days, say so at the top.
That is more useful to me than the history itself.

That last line turns the brief into a warning when it needs to be one. Walking into a meeting not knowing you have ignored someone for three months is a worse surprise than an empty history section.