One-page sales call brief with Claude

Four sections, about 400 words.

1. 1

   What they sell, and who they sell to. Two or three sentences.

2. 2

   News from the last two months. Launches, hires, announcements, with dates.

3. 3

   Their three closest competitors. Each with one line on how it differs from the prospect.

4. 4

   Three questions to ask on the call.

The brief needs current information, so Claude has to be able to search the web.

In the newer Claude layout there is no web search switch. Claude searches the web when it helps. In the older layout, click the plus button in the chat box and select Web search.

If you use Claude on a Team or Enterprise plan, an owner has to turn web search on first, in Organization settings under Capabilities. See Anthropic's help article, Enabling and using web search.

Open a new chat. Paste the prompt below. Fill in the prospect's website address, and their city if the site shows none.

Picture a six-person bookkeeping firm with a call booked on Thursday. The prospect is a commercial cleaning company in a mid-sized city, with two dozen cleaners and a website that lists office cleaning and post-construction cleaning.

The owner opens a new chat and pastes the prompt with the company's website address filled in. Claude searches the web and returns four short sections.

Section 1 says the company cleans offices and new builds for local businesses, and that its site stresses fast turnaround. Section 2 lists two items: a new service page added last month, and a hiring post for a team lead, each with a date and a link. Section 3 names three rivals. Claude says it found two of them by searching "commercial cleaning" plus the city, and the third in the results for "alternatives to" plus the company name. One line per rival says how it differs, for example "focuses on medical offices". Section 4 gives three questions, such as "You are hiring a team lead. Who handles the paperwork when you grow the crew?" One statement carries the label GUESS: "Probably pays staff weekly."

Now the owner does the skeptic step. She opens the links behind the hiring post and the new service page, and both match what Claude wrote. She turns the GUESS into a call question: "How do you run payroll for your cleaners today?" She also notices that one rival is a national chain, which is not who a local office manager compares against. She replies with the two local firms she knows, and Claude redoes section 3. She walks into the call with a half-page of facts she has checked and four sharp questions.

Before the call, do two checks.

• Click two links. Pick the two facts you plan to mention and open their sources. If a link does not support the claim, cross the claim out.
• Turn each GUESS into a question. A GUESS is a hypothesis. Something like "Probably slow on emergency calls" becomes "How do you handle urgent requests today?"

If the brief has no links at all, you cannot do the first check. Treat every line as a GUESS. Open a new chat, confirm web search is on, and run the prompt again before you rely on any of it.

Common mistakes

• Pasting only a company name. Names are ambiguous, and Claude may brief the wrong company. Paste the website address, and make sure the address is the one the prospect really uses.
• Skipping the city. Competitors for a local service depend on place. If the site shows no city, tell Claude the city, or it will search too wide and list firms the prospect's buyers never consider.
• Treating old news as fresh. Check the date on each item. If you open the call with a launch from last year, you look like you did not prepare.

A brief that only reads the prospect's own website repeats what they already say about themselves. Searching the way their buyer would shows who they are measured against.

Buyers rarely pick the first option they see. They line up two or three options and compare price, speed and fit. If you know who is on that list, you can guess which objections your prospect hears from their own customers, and you can speak to them without sounding scripted. Keeping the brief to about 400 words matters too: you will read it once, in the minute before you dial, so it has to be short enough to remember.

You can also reuse this method by hand: search their service plus their city, search "alternatives to" plus their name, and read the reviews on the industry sites. Keep the three names that show up most often, and note one line on how each differs from the prospect.

When a brief looks thin, the cause is often a small prospect with little public information. That is fine. A short brief with honest GUESS labels beats a long one that filled the gaps with invention.