Prepare a one-page brief before meeting someone new

Preparing for a first meeting with a prospective client, a supplier, a funder or a partner agency usually goes one of two ways. You spend an hour clicking from the organization’s website to old news stories to a profile that may or may not be the right person, or you walk in cold and spend the opening minutes asking what they do. An assistant that searches the web can gather the public facts in a few minutes. Left to itself, it also mixes in last year’s leadership, a company with a similar name and a job title nobody ever held.

This tutorial gives the assistant a fixed one-page format and firm rules: a link behind every fact, and “not found” wherever it comes up empty. You open each link, strike what doesn’t hold up, and put the rest of your preparation into what to ask. It suits a sales rep before a discovery call, a fundraiser meeting a foundation, a recruiter meeting a new client, a buyer before a supplier’s pitch or a public servant meeting a residents’ association. The steps are the same in Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or Copilot.

By the end of this you’ll have a one-page brief for your next meeting, every fact checked against a source you opened yourself and five questions ready to ask, plus the template and prompts saved for the meeting after that.

What you’ll be able to do

• Finish a one-page brief on the organization and the person you’re meeting, in a fixed format, with a link behind every fact.
• Check every claim in one pass and strike what the source doesn’t support, including outdated job titles and look-alike organizations.
• Walk in with questions their website can’t answer and a reply ready for the objections they’re likely to raise.
• Start the next brief from the saved template and prompts, with this one’s time written down for comparison.

What you need

• An assistant with web search on. A free account is enough in all four of these (checked in October 2026):
  • Claude: click the + button at the lower left of the chat window and choose Web search. In the newer Claude experience there’s no switch; Claude searches when it helps.
  • ChatGPT: it searches on its own when a question needs current information. To make sure, choose View all tools, then Search, or type / in the message box and pick Search.
  • Gemini: it can use Google Search, and answers that cite sources show a Sources button below or within the response.
  • Copilot, with a personal Microsoft account: before you send, click Quick response below what you’ve typed and choose Search.
• The person’s name, their organization and its official website.
• A document for the brief, and about 45 minutes for the first one.

If no new meeting is coming up, practice on a large public organization, such as your city’s transit authority, with its chief executive as the person you’re “meeting”.

Steps

1. Write the purpose of the meeting in one line. Make it the outcome you want: “Find out whether our reading program fits their 2027 education grants” rather than “intro call”. The assistant uses that line to judge what’s relevant, and your questions grow out of it.

2. Run the research prompt. Find the organization’s official website yourself first: the address in the prompt is what keeps the assistant away from look-alikes. Start a new conversation with search on, fill in the brackets of the research prompt (below), paste the template where it says and send. If the answer has no links at all, the assistant didn’t search: switch search on and send it again.

3. Open every link. Copy the answer into your document. For each fact, open its link, search the page for a key word (Ctrl+F, or Cmd+F on a Mac) and check that it says what the brief says. Mark the fact Confirmed, or strike it if the link is dead, leads elsewhere or doesn’t support it. Leave every “not found” in place, because each one is a question for the meeting.

4. Check the dates. Mark any fact whose source is more than a year old as Dated. Titles change faster than the pages that mention them, so confirm the person’s current one on the organization’s own website or a recent press release. If you can’t, ask in the meeting: “I understand you look after the education grants. Is that still right?”

5. Add what you already know. Fill in section 5 by hand: how the meeting came about, earlier emails, what they’ve asked for. Typing them straight into your document keeps internal notes out of the chat; if you’d like the assistant to work with them, read Before you upload a client document first.

6. Ask for questions and objections. Paste your corrected sections 1 to 4 into the same conversation, add whatever from section 5 you’re comfortable sharing, then paste the questions prompt. Keep the questions you’d actually ask, and rewrite the answers in your own words, since you’re the one who will say them.

7. Trim it to one page and save the template. Cut anything you wouldn’t reread in the five minutes before the meeting. Save the empty template and both prompts in a note called “Meeting brief”, or keep them inside the assistant with Set up your AI assistant once. Write down how long this brief took, so the next one has a number to beat.

The template and two prompts

The brief template:

Meeting brief
Meeting: [name, role, organization] | [date, time, format]
Purpose: [one line: what I want to leave with]

1. The organization
   What it does, for whom, where, roughly how large. Up to 4 lines.
2. Recent news (last 12 months)
   Up to 3 items, each with its date.
3. The person
   Current role and since when, what they're responsible for, anything
   they've said or published about the topic of this meeting.
4. Likely priorities (guesses)
   Up to 3, each with the fact it's based on.
5. What I already know
   How the meeting came about, previous contact, what they've asked for.
6. Questions to ask
   Up to 5.
7. Objections they might raise
   Up to 3, each with my answer.

The research prompt:

Search the web and fill in sections 1 to 4 of the brief template below.
Leave sections 5 to 7 empty.

Person: [name], [role, if I know it]
Organization: [name], official website [address]
Purpose of the meeting: [one line]
My role: [for example, partnerships manager at a regional food bank]

Rules:
- Put a link to the source page after every fact. A fact with no link
  doesn't go in the brief.
- Give the date shown on each source page, or "no date".
- Prefer the organization's own website, annual reports, press releases
  and established news outlets. Mark anything else "third-party".
- If you can't find something, write "not found". Don't fill gaps from
  memory or with general statements about organizations like this one.
- Use only pages about the organization at the website above. List any
  organizations or people with similar names at the end, under
  "Similar names left out", with a link for each.
- For the person, use only professional information: their role, their
  work, and what they've said or published publicly.
- Label every item in section 4 "Guess" and give the fact it rests on.
- Keep sections 1 to 4 under 300 words.

[paste the brief template here]

The questions prompt:

Above is my checked brief for this meeting. Using only the brief and the
purpose of the meeting, write:

1. Five questions I could ask, each tied to something in the brief or to
   the purpose. Prefer questions their website can't answer.
2. Three objections they might raise about [what I'm proposing or asking
   for], each with an answer of one or two sentences and the fact from
   the brief that supports it. If an answer needs a fact the brief
   doesn't have, tell me what I'd need to find out.

What a checked brief looks like

For example, here is part of a literacy nonprofit’s brief for a meeting with a community fund, after steps 3 to 6. The organizations, the person and the sources are all made up.

Meeting: Nora Castillo, program officer, Harbor Valley Community Fund
Purpose: find out whether our after-school reading program fits
  their 2027 education grants

1. The organization
Grants to nonprofits in three counties, mainly education and housing.
  (annual report, 2025) Confirmed
Application dates for 2027: not found

2. Recent news
- New education strategy focused on early literacy.
  (press release, March 2026) Confirmed
- Opened a second office downtown.
  Struck: the page is about another fund with a similar name

3. The person
Program officer for education since 2024. (team page) Confirmed
Spoke on a panel about summer learning loss. (2023) Dated

4. Likely priorities (guesses)
Guess: literacy results they can measure (March 2026 strategy)

6. Questions to ask
- When do 2027 applications open, and can we talk before applying?
- How will you measure results under the new strategy?

7. Objections they might raise
- "Our strategy is early literacy, and your program is after school."
  Answer: two of our sites serve ages 5 to 7; we'd start there.
  (from section 5)

The struck line is what the check is for: a specific, confident fact that belonged to another organization. The dated panel stays in, labeled, because it still hints at what she cares about. And the “not found” became the first question.

What can go wrong and how to check

Links that don’t say what the brief says

An assistant can attach a real link to a fact the page never states, or to a page that has changed since. OpenAI’s own help page on ChatGPT search tells you to open a cited source and check that it supports the answer and when it was published, which is what steps 3 and 4 do with any assistant.

A different organization with a similar name

A company and its foundation, or two charities with nearly the same name: assistants blend these easily. Check that each link sits on the official website you gave, or that a third-party page names the right organization and city. If “Similar names left out” is empty for a common name, search the name yourself once.

Guesses that read like facts

Section 4 is the most useful part of the brief and the easiest to misuse. Keep the “Guess” label, and use guesses to choose questions rather than to make statements. “I saw your new literacy strategy; is that where most new grants will go?” gives them room to correct you.

Very little turns up

A small business or a local group may have a website and little else. A brief that’s half “not found” still tells you the meeting is for asking. When the organization is that small, or you already know it well, skip the assistant and fill in the template from its website yourself.

Where to go next

The brief gets you into the room ready, and the next win is the hour after it. Take meeting notes in three letters and send the follow-up within the hour shows how to mark your notes D, A or Q as the meeting runs and turn them into an email that reaches everyone while they still remember the conversation. Whatever they promise to send you goes into a six-column tracker for everything you’re waiting on. And if you’re meeting several suppliers or partners before choosing one, A comparison table for your next decision applies the same habit, a link behind every fact, to comparing them side by side.