A sales manager I know at a mid-size SaaS company ran a quiet experiment last year. He asked two reps to each take 10 demos in a given month. One rep was given an explicit prep protocol before each call. The other was left to his own process. The difference in close rates wasn’t subtle. The prepared rep closed at roughly twice the rate.
The finding isn’t surprising if you’ve been in sales for any length of time. What’s surprising is how rarely reps actually follow a consistent prep routine. Prep gets treated as optional, something to do when you have time. The reps who consistently outperform tend to treat it like the meeting itself.
This is a working checklist. Not an exhaustive framework, just the things that actually move the needle when done before the call rather than during it.
Research the person (not just the company)
Most reps research the company. Fewer research the specific person they’re meeting. This is a mistake.
Before any meeting, find out: how long they’ve been in their current role, what they did before, and whether they’ve posted or written anything about the problem you’re solving. LinkedIn takes three minutes. A quick Google of their name plus their company takes one more.
Why this matters: someone who’s been in a role for eight months is in a completely different headspace than someone who’s been there for six years. The eight-month person is still building credibility internally and may be looking for wins. The six-year veteran has survived multiple budget cycles and probably knows every vendor in your space already. Your approach should be different for each.
Also check: did you send them anything before this call? Did they open it? If you have an email tracking tool, a quick look at open/click activity tells you how engaged they actually are before you say hello.
Know what happened in the last conversation
This sounds obvious. It isn’t. CRM notes are often sparse, inaccurate, or written three days after the call when details have blurred. If you’re not keeping real notes, you will eventually show up to a meeting and ask a prospect something they already told you. That’s recoverable once. It isn’t after the second time.
Before the meeting, review your notes (or the actual recording if you have it) and pull out three things: what problem they described in their own words, what they said the timeline was, and any commitment you made. Bringing those specifics into the meeting opening signals to the prospect that you actually listened, which is rarer than it should be.
The 30-minute prep ritual that fits into a real schedule
If you have 30 minutes before a meeting, here’s how to use it:
- 8 minutes: Review the prospect’s LinkedIn. Look for recent role changes, posts about business challenges, mutual connections, anything they’ve been public about.
- 8 minutes: Check the company: recent news, funding announcements, job postings (job postings tell you a lot about where a company is investing). A quick look at their website for recent blog posts or press.
- 5 minutes: Open your CRM and read the full record, including any previous notes from your or other reps on the account.
- 5 minutes: Write three specific questions. Not generic questions from a template. Questions that reference what you know about this specific person and company.
- 4 minutes: Set one concrete objective for the meeting. Not “advance the deal.” What specific decision or commitment do you need by the end of this call?
That last one is the most important and the most skipped. If you walk into a meeting without a clear objective, you’ll default to presenting, which rarely moves things forward as well as having a real conversation does.
What you actually need to know cold
There’s a baseline of information every rep should have before a meeting without needing to look it up:
| Area | What to know |
|---|---|
| Their org | Who else is involved in this decision? Who’s the economic buyer if it’s not this person? |
| Budget cycle | When does their fiscal year end? Are they in a budget freeze period? |
| Competitors | What else are they evaluating? If you don’t know, assume they’re talking to at least two others. |
| Trigger events | What changed recently that made them look for a solution? New leadership, a failed project, a lost deal? |
If you don’t know any of these going in, your discovery questions during the call should surface them. But knowing them in advance means you can skip the basics and go deeper faster.
Presentation discipline
For first or second meetings, three slides is enough. More than that and you’re presenting, not talking. Prospects switch from participants to audience members at around slide four, and audience members don’t buy things.
The three slides that tend to work: one that shows you understand their situation (reference something specific, not generic), one that covers what you do and why it’s relevant to that situation, one that proposes a clear next step. That’s it. Everything else can wait for a technical deep-dive if they ask for one.
I’ll admit I’m skeptical that most reps follow this in practice. Showing a 47-slide deck is often more about the rep feeling prepared than about what the prospect actually needs. The prospect usually needs to feel understood, not impressed with volume.
Technical prep and the things that kill momentum
Technical failures are avoidable and disproportionately damaging to trust. Five things to check before any remote meeting:
- Your internet connection is stable (not just “working”). Run a speed test if you’re on wifi.
- Screen sharing is set up and tested with the correct window already open.
- Your background is neutral. A cluttered background is a small but real distraction.
- Notifications are off, including your phone.
- You’ve tested audio from the same device and microphone you’ll use in the actual meeting.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are over 1.5 million wholesale and manufacturing sales reps in the US alone, and competition for the same deals is intense. The reps who consistently win aren’t always better at selling. They’re often just better prepared, more organized, and harder to catch off-guard.
Craqly can help during the meeting itself, offering real-time context and suggestions for handling questions or objections as they come up. But the tools only augment what you bring in. If you walk in cold, no tool fixes that.
Post-meeting notes, and why immediately matters
The best time to update your CRM is within 23 minutes of hanging up. Not end of day. Not tomorrow. The specific language a prospect used, the hesitation in their voice when pricing came up, the side comment about their current vendor being “fine but not great,” these details decay fast.
A complete record from this meeting becomes your prep material for the next one. The reps who do this consistently are the ones who sound remarkably well-prepared to prospects across multiple calls. It’s not magic. It’s notes.