Cookbook

Brief yourself on an account in one question

The five minutes before a call, done properly. Including the part almost no CRM will tell you, which is which of this somebody actually checked and which an agent worked out on its own.

The situation

You are three minutes from a call with an account you last touched five weeks ago. The usual version of this is opening four tabs and skimming: the company record, the open deal, the last email, whatever tasks are outstanding. You arrive on the call with most of it and no sense of which parts are reliable.

The whole brief is one question, and the answer carries its own sourcing.

What must be true when you are done

You know who is on the account, what is open, and what was last said.
You know which facts a person has confirmed and which an agent inferred.
You know what is outstanding on your side, so you are not surprised by it.
It took under a minute.

Ask once

You

I have Halden in three minutes. Brief me: who is there, what is open, what was said last, and what do I owe them.

Agent

Halden Systems customer, logistics softwarecontacts Marek Sowinski, VP Operations Ines Duarteopen deal Halden Systems renewallast contact 19 Aug, meetingopen on your side Send Halden the SSO answer in writing Escalation: data load stalled twice

That is one call rather than four tabs, and it is the same call whether the account has two contacts or fifty. Above a certain size it returns the most recent of each and says it has truncated, rather than silently returning the first twenty and letting you believe that is all of them.

The last conversation, in full

The brief gives you the shape. The thing you actually want in your head walking into the call is the last conversation, so ask for it.

You

What exactly was said on the nineteenth?

Agent

19 Aug, meeting Renewal call. Marek confirmed budget sits with him this year, not procurement. SSO is a hard requirement at renewal; SAML is acceptable, SCIM is not needed yet.

The part worth having: where each fact came from

This is the question that separates a brief you can act on from a brief you can only repeat. Every value on the record carries how it was come by, and you can ask for that directly.

You

Which of that has somebody actually confirmed, and which did you work out?

Agent

name imported from your CRM exportdomain imported from your CRM exportindustry imported from your CRM exportlifecycle imported from your CRM exportbudget owner observed from the 19 Aug call

Now you know which sentences to say as fact and which to open with a question. "You mentioned budget sits with you this year" is safe: somebody heard it said. "You're in logistics software" came out of a spreadsheet and might be four years old, so it is worth a light touch rather than a confident assertion.

That distinction is the entire reason this call is worth making instead of reading the record. A CRM that only shows values makes every value look equally solid, and the ones that embarrass you are always the imported ones nobody has looked at since.

Verify it

Check the brief against the account by eye, once. Not every time. Once, on an account you know well, so you learn what it does and does not include before you depend on it.
Ask for sourcing on something you know was guessed. If it comes back as observed rather than inferred, an agent has been recording its conclusions as if it had heard them, and that is worth correcting at the instruction level.
Notice what is missing. A brief with no recent contact and an open deal closing this month is telling you something, and it is easy to read past because nothing is wrong on the screen.

Run it again

Before every call, which is the point: it has to be cheap enough that skipping it is never the faster option. After the call, record what was said while it is still accurate, so the next person to run this brief gets the version you would have wanted.