Send the recap while the call is warm

The gap between a good call and a written recap is where deals lose their shape. Everyone leaves agreeing; a week later two people remember two different commitments, and the version that gets acted on is whoever wrote something down.

Writing it down should not depend on who was least tired.

Upload the recording as soon as it ends

The recap is only useful while the call is warm, so this playbook is really about latency. Add the recording to Meetings and let it transcribe.

Draft from the transcript, in your voice

Write a recap email to the customer from this call.

Cover only: what we agreed, what each side is doing next and by when, and
anything explicitly left open.

Use their words for what they asked for, not our framing of it.

Do not include anything that was discussed and not concluded. Do not add a
summary of the meeting's mood, and do not thank them more than once.

If something was agreed vaguely, write it as vaguely as it was agreed. Do
not sharpen "we'll look at March" into a March date.

"Do not sharpen a vague agreement" is the most valuable line here, and the most tempting to break. A recap that turns "we'll look at March" into "as agreed, March" is doing something specific: it is using the customer's politeness as a commitment. It usually works once, and it costs you the credibility that made the recap worth sending.

Send it yourself, within the hour

Hold the draft for approval. Read the "what each side is doing" list, because that is the part that will be quoted back at you.

Then send it while it is still the same afternoon. A recap sent two days later is a document; a recap sent in an hour is part of the conversation.

Turn the commitments into work

Your half of that list is a set of tasks. The meeting page already proposes action items from the transcript; accepting them means the things you just promised in writing exist somewhere other than in an email.

That link is what stops the recap from being a nicely written way to forget.

What good looks like

Within the hour, both sides have the same short document about what was agreed, in the customer's own terms, and your half of it is already tracked work.

The failure to watch for is the recap that reads better than the call went. If your recaps are consistently more decisive than the meetings, they are flattering the deal rather than recording it.