Account research — pre-meeting brief in 5 minutes

TL;DR. Before a sales call, produce a tight one-page brief on the prospect — company shape, decision makers, recent news, likely pain, two opening questions. 30–45 minutes saved per brief, compounding across the sales team. The first 10 briefs need a manual fact-check; by brief 30, the prompt is tuned.

Job to be done#

Produce a tight one-page brief on a prospect or customer before a sales call or QBR. Tight means one page, cited, with one thing not to say.

Who runs it#

AE or SDR before a discovery call; CSM before a QBR.

Inputs (inbox/)#

• Company name and URL
• Contact name(s)
• Optional: sales notes file from prior calls
• Optional: connector to CRM for past activity

Outputs (output/)#

• account-brief-[company].docx — one page, structured
• talk-track.md with three opening questions and three likely objections

Prompt seed#

Research [company] using web sources.
Produce a one-page Word brief with:
1) Company shape (HQ, size, industry, ownership)
2) Recent moves (last 90 days — funding, exec changes, product launches)
3) Likely pain points based on industry + size
4) Two opening questions tied to a pain point
5) One thing to NOT say (e.g., recent layoffs)
Cite every source. Mark confidence per claim.
Save to /output/briefs/[company].docx.

Quality bar#

• Every claim has a source link or a [CLAIM-NO-SOURCE] tag.
• Recent moves are date-stamped, not paraphrased.
• Likely pain hedged ("companies of this size and industry typically …").
• Common trip-up: confident-sounding nonsense about a small private company. Always read the citations on the first ten briefs.

Time saved (typical)#

30–45 minutes per brief. Compounds across a sales team — a 10-AE team running 5 briefs a week each is saving 25–35 hours of selling time weekly.

Upgrade path#

• Connector to LinkedIn Sales Navigator (where allowed) or to CRM for past activity.
• Skill version that reads from the CRM and writes the brief back as a note on the account.

Tinkso's take#

Calibration is everything. The first ten briefs need a manual fact-check on the citations. By brief thirty, the prompt is tuned — right sources, right hedging — and the operator can trust it. Skipping the calibration step is the most common reason this workflow disappoints in week one. The team that does the calibration loves it; the team that skips it goes back to the old way.