Do Your Homework for Free

Your discovery call should not open with "So, tell me a bit about your business." That isn't rapport. That's you outsourcing your homework to the buyer and hoping they're too polite to notice.

Last week I told you credits are camouflage — that the whole point of per-credit enrichment is to keep you from ever seeing the unit price. Fair to ask: okay, Claudine, then what do I use instead? So here's a free one. You can build it in twenty minutes, it costs you nothing beyond a Claude subscription you probably already have, and it replaces the $60-a-seat research tool your RevOps lead keeps trying to roll out to the whole team.

It's a Claude Code skill. Point it at a domain, name the buyer, and it hands you a one-page brief off public sources — the same sources you'd open eleven tabs to read yourself.

What it produces

One page. Not a data dump. A brief:

• What they actually do — in plain language, not their homepage adjectives.
• Trigger events — funding, leadership hires, a new product line, a job posting that implies a gap. The reasons now is a real conversation.
• Likely pains, mapped to your thing — not generic; tied to what you sell.
• Three talking points you can say out loud without sounding like a brochure.
• Two discovery questions sharp enough that the buyer has to think.

That's the whole product. Prep you'd spend forty minutes on, in ninety seconds, for free.

Build it

Make one folder and one file. That's the skill.

~/.claude/skills/precall-brief/SKILL.md

Put this in SKILL.md:

---
name: precall-brief
description: Turn a company domain (and optional buyer role) into a one-page pre-call brief from public sources. Use before any discovery or demo call.
---

You are prepping me for a sales call. I will give you a company domain and,
optionally, the buyer's name and title, plus what I sell.

Do this:
1. Read their website, recent news, and careers page using web search/fetch.
2. Write a brief with these sections and nothing else:
   - WHAT THEY DO (2 sentences, plain English)
   - TRIGGER EVENTS (up to 4 bullets, each with a source link and date)
   - LIKELY PAINS mapped to what I sell (3 bullets)
   - TALKING POINTS (3, sayable out loud, no jargon)
   - DISCOVERY QUESTIONS (2, open-ended, non-obvious)

Rules:
- Public sources only. Never invent a number, a name, or a trigger.
- If you can't verify something, write "unverified" next to it.
- Keep it to one page. Cut anything I wouldn't use on the call.
- Save it as brief-<company>.md in the current folder.

Then, in any scratch folder, launch Claude Code and say:

Use precall-brief for stripe.com. Buyer is a VP of Revenue Operations.
I sell forecasting software for SaaS finance teams.

You get brief-stripe.md. Read it in the elevator. Done.

Where it breaks — because it does

I'm not going to sell you autopilot. This works because it reads what's public, which means it's only as good as the company's footprint. A stealthy Series A with a one-page site will give you thin gruel — and the skill will tell you so, if you keep the "unverified" rule in. It will occasionally over-read a job posting into a "trigger" that's really just attrition. So the one non-negotiable: do not repeat a trigger event on a call until you've clicked the source link yourself. The model drafts; you verify. Cite something it hallucinated and that's on you, not the tool.

It also won't build your list, write your sequences, or run your outbound. It does one job. That's the point — a scalpel you trust beats a Swiss Army knife you have to babysit.

So what

Two moves, starting Monday.

First, batch it. Sunday night, run it against every account on next week's calendar. Fifteen minutes, and you walk into every call already knowing why you're there.

Second, do the math your procurement team should have done. Add up what your org pays per seat for the research and light-intent tools that mostly just summarize public pages. For a rep who's early-cycle and creative-heavy, a lot of that spend is buying you a nicer wrapper around the open web. This buys you the same thing for the price of clicking a link. Cancel one seat, prove it out, and you've paid for your whole stack's honesty.

The best enrichment tool for a broke AE is the one you own, can read the guts of, and never get an invoice for.

— C.B.