For salespeople who want to walk into every call already knowing the account — set the research up once, and let the machine do the legwork from then on.
The single most useful thing most salespeople can do with AI right now is build a standing pre-call research protocol and save it as a reusable prompt. You write out everything you want to know before a sales call one time, in detail, and after that, prepping for any call is a single instruction: “Run my standard pre-call research on Acme Pharmaceuticals.” The research that used to take an hour, or more often didn’t happen at all because you were slammed, now takes about two minutes and comes in a format you can actually use in the meeting.
That’s a bigger deal than it sounds. In Salesforce’s most recent State of Sales survey, which covered just over 4,000 sales professionals across 22 countries, sellers said they expect AI to cut the time they spend on prospect research by about a third once they have it working the way they want. A third of your research time back is real money, and it’s available to you this week, without buying anything you probably don’t already have access to. And if you do it right, you’ll get more than a third back. Bet on it.
There’s a lot of noise around AI in sales right now. One camp treats it as the answer to every question, and figures anybody not betting the whole operation on it is already behind. The other camp has decided it’s all hype and won’t touch it. The winning stance is in between, and it’s not sexy but it works: AI is a set of tools that make a good salesperson faster at certain specific jobs, and the skill is knowing which jobs those are. Pre-call research is the one I’d start with.
What should the research actually cover?
Before you can hand the work to a machine, you have to know what good preparation looks like, because the AI is only going to be as useful as the instructions you give it. As I’ve said before, think of AI as an intern – high IQ, 20 college degrees, and no street smarts. The street smarts are your job. This is what I’d want to know before walking into a first conversation with a company, and you can adjust it for what you sell.
Start with the company itself. What do they do, how do they make money, how big are they, and where are they located. Then the recent history: any news in the last year worth knowing, like an acquisition, an expansion, a new facility, a leadership change, or a round of layoffs. Those events tell you what’s on their mind right now, and they give you a reason for the call that isn’t about you.
Then the industry they operate in. What pressures is that industry under this year, what’s changing, and what does it mean for a company their size. If you sell into a field you don’t live in every day, this is where AI earns its keep, because it can get you conversational in an unfamiliar industry in about ten minutes.
Then the person you’re meeting. Their role, how long they’ve been there, what they likely own, and what somebody in their position usually cares about and gets measured on. You’re trying to walk in with a working theory of what keeps this specific person up at night, so you spend the call asking about their world instead of talking about yours. People care about their world – not yours.
Finally, the bridge to what you sell. Given everything above, what problems are they likely to have that you can solve, and what smart questions should you be ready to ask. Not a pitch, but a short list of hypotheses you can test in the conversation.
Having said that, I need to give you a warning. No matter how much it has evolved, AI gets facts wrong, confidently, and it will hand you a bad headcount or a merger that never happened in the same tone it uses for the correct facts. Treat the output as a well-prepared first draft of your prep, not gospel, and confirm anything you’re going to use in the meeting. Good apps (I prefer Claude or Perplexity) can give you links in the body of the research, so verification is a mouse click or phone tap away, and only takes a few seconds.
How do I turn that into a standing prompt?
A protocol you have to rebuild from scratch every time is one you’ll quit using by next Thursday, so the correct technique is to write it down once and store it.
Write the whole thing out in plain language, the way you’d brief a sharp new assistant. List the categories above in the order you want them, tell it how long you want the answer and in what shape (I’d ask for short bulleted sections, with a flag on anything that changes how I should approach the account), and tell it what to do when it isn’t sure of a fact. Then save that as a reusable prompt. Most of the tools now let you store this, whether they call it a saved prompt, a custom instruction, or a little project you set up once.
From then on, the whole brief runs off one line: “Do my standard pre-call research on [company]. I’m meeting [name, title].” You’ll tune it over the first few weeks as you notice what’s useful and what’s noise, and inside a month you’ll have a research process better than what most salespeople ever build, running in the time it takes to pour a cup of coffee.
You can even take it a step farther. If you’re in a role where you’re making in-person drop-in sales calls (I know there are still a few of you), you can even set it up so that all you have to do is snap a picture of the sign, have the app execute the research and figure out who to talk to, and Bob’s your uncle – you get to make a far more informed cold call than your competitors.
If you get stumped on how to create your prompt, there’s a simple solution. Ask your AI app. Your AI app is probably the best trainer on how to get the most out of itself – and that’s one place where it’s a hell of a lot better than an intern!
And if you manage a team, build one good version of this and hand it to everybody, so your whole group is prepping to the same standard instead of fifteen people winging it fifteen different ways.
Where else does AI actually help a salesperson?
Research is the best place to start, but it isn’t the only honest use. A few others worth your time:
Drafting the first version of emails and follow-ups. It’s faster at a blank page than you are, and your job becomes editing it into your own voice rather than starting cold. Don’t send it as-is, because it’ll sound like everybody else’s if you do.
Making sense of long documents. Feed it an RFP, an annual report, or a dense contract and ask it to pull out what matters to you. It’s genuinely good at finding the three things in forty pages that you actually need to know. This is probably one of my most consistent uses.
Rehearsing a tough call. Tell it the situation and have it play the skeptical CFO you’re about to sit across from. It’s a low-stakes way to find your footing before a high-stakes meeting. Nearly every AI allows voice prompting now, so you don’t even have to type. You can talk it out.
Cleaning up your notes and drafting next steps right after a call, so the follow-up actually happens instead of living in your head until it’s gone cold. I have Claude connected to my HubSpot, so that I do this exact technique and have Claude both clean up my notes and log them to CRM. Not all AI’s and CRM’s play nicely together, so you’ll have to see what yours does.
It’s worth being just as clear about what AI doesn’t do. It doesn’t build the relationship, it doesn’t run the discovery conversation for you, and it doesn’t replace the judgment you’ve spent years developing about when to push and when to wait. It makes the preparation faster so that you have more of yourself left for the parts of the job that are still, and will stay, human.
Isn’t this all going to change in six months?
Yes, and that’s my honest caveat to everything above. AI in sales is a moving target. The specific tools, what they can do, and the best way to use them will look different a few months from now than they do today, and some of what I’ve told you here will be dated by spring. So take this as a snapshot of what’s useful right now rather than a permanent answer, and expect me to come back to this subject before long, because the ground will have moved and there will be something new worth telling you about. The principle underneath won’t move, though. Find the specific jobs where the tool makes you faster, build a repeatable way to do them, and keep the human work human.
And thinking. “Well, I’ll just wait until the next evolution” isn’t the right approach. You’ll be that much farther behind the technological curve and behind your competition.
If your sales calls are landing flat because you’re walking in cold, this is a fix you can make this week. Build the protocol, save it, and never prep from scratch again.
Frequently asked questions
What AI tool should I use for pre-call research?
Whatever general assistant you already have access to will handle this fine. The protocol matters far more than the brand. Start with what’s in front of you, get the process working, and worry about specialized tools later, if you ever need them at all.
How long does it take to set up a standing research prompt?
Writing a solid first version takes maybe half an hour, and then you refine it over your first few weeks of use. The time you spend building it comes back the first week you put it to work.
Can I trust what the AI tells me about a prospect?
Not blindly. AI will state wrong facts as confidently as right ones, so treat the research as a strong first draft and confirm anything load-bearing, like a headcount, a piece of news, or a name, before you build your call around it.
Will AI replace salespeople?
No, but salespeople who use it well will replace the ones who don’t. It takes over the preparation and the busywork. It doesn’t take over the relationship, the discovery, or the judgment, which is where the job actually lives.
