Sales call prep with AI is a Skill: one saved prompt reads the prospect's website and your notes and writes a one-page brief before a discovery call, and each brief takes ten to twenty minutes in one sitting. Setting up the prompt the first time takes about an hour, and you reuse it for every call after that. The brief tells you what the business does, what on their site connects to what you sell, what you suspect they need, and the questions that will tell you whether you are right. It turns the first ten minutes of the call from "so tell me about your business" into a real conversation about their problem. The AI does the reading. You do the listening.
- Shape
- Skill
- Sitting
- one sitting
The shape: Skill
This job is a Skill because all of it rests on one well-built prompt and the material you put under it. There is nothing to connect and no chain of steps to automate. You paste the same prompt every time, change the prospect's details, and read what comes back.
It is also a job most owners skip, and the reason is time, not judgment. Reading a prospect's whole website the hour before a call is tedious, and it is easy to skim the homepage and miss the services page that tells you what they actually sell. The AI reads every page you give it, and it does not get bored on page six.
The output is a page, not a script. A script makes you talk. A brief makes you ask better questions, which is what a discovery call is for. You read it once before the call, keep it beside you, and add to it while they talk.
If your AI can open web pages, it can read the prospect's site directly from the address. If it cannot, or if it returns a summary that looks thin, paste the text of the pages yourself. Pasting takes five extra minutes and removes a common failure, which is an AI describing a website it did not actually read.
What you give the AI
Put these in one message, labeled, so the AI can tell your facts from the prospect's.
- The prospect's website address and the pages that matter: the homepage, the services or products page, the about page, and any pricing or FAQ page they publish.
- What they told you when they booked: the booking form answers, the email that started the conversation, or the referral note, copied word for word.
- Who you are meeting: their name and role as they gave it to you, and whether anyone else will be on the call.
- What you sell, in plain lines: each service or package in one sentence, with what it includes and what it does not.
- Who you are a good fit for: the kind of business you do your best work with, in two or three sentences.
- Who you are not a fit for: the size, budget, timeline or type of work you turn down, so the AI can flag warning signs.
- The questions you always want answered: budget range, timeline, who decides, and the one or two questions specific to your work.
- Anything you already know from before: a past quote, an earlier conversation, or the person who referred them.
The booking answers matter most. A prospect who wrote "our website is embarrassing and we're losing jobs to the company down the road" has told you more than their whole website will. Make sure the AI sees those words exactly as they wrote them.
Keep it to what the business published about itself and what the prospect told you. A personal social media profile, a home address or anything about their family has no place in the brief.
What comes back
Paste this prompt once, save it, and reuse it for every call.
You are preparing a small business owner for a first sales call, often called a discovery call.
Below is the material: the prospect's website pages, what the prospect said when they booked,
who will be on the call, what the owner sells, who the owner is and is not a good fit for,
the questions the owner always wants answered, and anything already known.
Read every page of the prospect's website, from the pages pasted below or the addresses given, before you write anything.
If a page is missing or you could not read it, say so at the top and do not guess what it says.
Write one page with these five sections:
1. What they do: three or four plain sentences on what the business sells, to whom, and where.
2. What connects: the parts of their site or their booking answers that relate to what the owner sells.
Quote the line from their site or their message in brackets after each point.
3. Best guesses about what they need: two or three guesses, each marked as a guess,
each with the line it came from in brackets.
4. Questions for the call: six to eight short, open questions in plain words.
Include the owner's standard questions, plus questions that would confirm or disprove each guess.
Put the most important question first.
5. Possible poor fit: anything in the material that matches who the owner is not a fit for,
with the line it came from. If nothing matches, say so.
Rules:
- Use only the material below. Do not invent facts about the prospect, their revenue, their staff,
their competitors or their problems.
- Do not write a pitch, an opening line, or anything to read aloud.
- Plain words. No sales jargon.
- The whole page fits on one printed sheet.What comes back is a single page in five sections. The bracketed lines are the part to trust most, because each one shows exactly where a point came from. A guess with a real quote under it is worth asking about. A guess with no quote under it is the AI filling a gap, and it goes.
The questions section is the one you will use on the call. You may only get to three or four of the eight, and that is fine. The others are there so you are never stuck for the next question.
Save the prompt in a note, a text file or a saved project in your AI, so the next call is a paste and a swap of the prospect's details. After the call, add one line to the brief about what turned out to be true, and keep it with the prospect's notes.
How to judge it
Reject the brief, or the part of it, that shows one of these signs:
- It describes a website it did not read: generic lines like "a trusted provider committed to quality" that could describe any business, or services the prospect does not offer.
- It states guesses as facts: "they are struggling with lead generation" with no line from their site or message behind it.
- It invents numbers: revenue, staff counts, years in business or customer counts that appear nowhere in the material.
- It pitches: an opening line, a solution, or a list of what you will do for them, which belongs after you have listened, not before.
- Its questions are closed: "Do you want more customers?" gets a yes and nothing else, where "What made you reach out now?" gets a story.
- It misses the fit check: the prospect wrote that they need it done by Friday and your work takes a month, and the brief says nothing.
- It runs long: a page you cannot take in during the five minutes before the call will not get read.
Then check two facts by hand. Open their website and confirm the business name and the main service match what the brief says. If either is wrong, the AI read the wrong site or none at all, and the rest of the page is not worth keeping.
What stays with you
The AI can read their website. It cannot read the person. A website says what the business wanted the public to see, often written years ago, and the real reason they booked a call is usually not on it. The brief gives you guesses. The call is where you find out which ones are true.
Listening is yours. No brief notices the pause before they answer the budget question, or that the person on the call is not the person who decides. Write down their exact words when they describe the problem, because those words are worth more than anything the AI wrote.
The fit decision is yours. The brief can flag a warning sign. Whether to take the work, refer them elsewhere, or say plainly that you are not the right choice is a judgment only you can make.
Privacy is yours to respect. Stay with what the business published and what the prospect told you. Do not open the call by reciting what you read, and never bring up anything personal you happened to find.
The follow-up is yours too. What you say after the call, and when, often matters as much as the call itself. Our guide to quote follow-up emails covers that message.
Before the call and after it
The brief is one piece of a short routine.
| When | What you do | Time |
|---|---|---|
| The day before | Gather the website address and booking answers, paste them under the saved prompt | Five minutes |
| Before the call | Read the brief, cross out wrong guesses, star the three questions you most want answered | Five to ten minutes |
| On the call | Ask, listen, write their exact words on the brief | The call |
| After the call | Add what was true, what was not, and the next step you agreed | Five minutes |
If the same worry comes up on call after call, it belongs on your objection handling sheet, so you have a calm, true answer ready. If prospects keep naming the same alternative, a short competitor analysis tells you what they are comparing you to. And the exact words prospects use to describe their problem are the raw material for customer interviews, your website copy and your social posts.
An editorial example
This is an invented business, used only to show the job. Say you run a one-person bookkeeping practice, and a call is booked with the owner of a small landscaping company. Her booking form says she is "two quarters behind and the accountant keeps asking for things."
You paste her website pages and the booking answer under the saved prompt. The brief comes back. Under "what connects," it quotes her services page, which lists both residential maintenance and commercial contracts, and points out that commercial contracts often mean invoices on terms. Under "best guesses," it suggests the backlog may be in matching payments to invoices, marked as a guess, with her booking line quoted.
It also wrote that she has "a team of twelve crew members," with no line from her site behind it. That goes.
The questions section leads with "What does the accountant keep asking for?" That question alone is worth the ten minutes. You star it, star two more, and dial in.
That is where the example stops. Nothing in this example is a real business, a real call or a real outcome.
When to skip the brief
Not every call needs one. A returning customer, a referral from someone who already explained the job in detail, or a quick scheduling call does not need a page of guesses. Save the brief for first calls with people you know little about, where ten minutes of reading changes the conversation.
Of every job on this list, social media is the one that comes back every week, and Boomp is software that does that one for you. See ten posts made from your website, free
