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Right before a sales call, things can get messy fast.
Notes are scattered, tabs are piling up, and someone asks what the meeting is actually meant to accomplish as time runs out.
Pre-call planning is meant to stop that from happening.
When it’s done well, you walk into the call grounded and confident, focused on the conversation instead of catching yourself up.
This guide explains how pre-call planning works today, why the old habits no longer hold up, and how strong teams show up prepared without adding more stress to the day.
What is pre-call planning?
Pre-call planning is the act of gathering intelligence before a meeting. Pre-call planning is a high-stakes discipline of context synthesis. It is the process of aligning every internal stakeholder, the Account Executive, the Sales Engineer, and the Product Specialist, around a single version of the truth before a digital or physical room is entered.
Why “pre-call planning” is no longer just account research
In 2025, account research is a commodity. Anyone can find a company’s headcount or their recent Series C funding on LinkedIn or Crunchbase. True pre-call planning is now about Contextual Intelligence. It is the difference between knowing what a company does and knowing why they are talking to you right now.
It involves understanding the internal politics of the buying committee. It means knowing that the VP of engineering is worried about technical debt while the CFO is worried about vendor consolidation.
Account research is about data. Pre-call planning is about strategy.
How has the role of pre-call planning changed?
High-velocity deal environments have stripped away the luxury of time. AEs are tasked with crunching deal cycles.
Back in the good old sales days, an AE might have had three meetings a day. They had an hour to sit with a notebook and prepare.
In 2025, a successful AE might have eight to ten calls back-to-back. When the gap between meetings is only five minutes, the "role" of pre-call planning shifts from a deep-dive research project to a rapid-fire context download.
It has to be instantaneous.
If the preparation takes longer than the meeting itself, the model breaks. This is why we are moving away from manual "prep" and toward automated "readiness."
The most underrated benefit of pre-call planning is psychological. When a sales team enters a call, and they are still whispering to each other in Slack about who is taking the lead on the demo, the buyer feels that friction.
The real goal is to enter the call in a "flow state."
You want to be so well-versed in the history of the deal that you aren't thinking about what happened in the past. Instead, you are entirely focused on the person in front of you.
You are context-rich but mentally light. You aren't digging through your brain for facts; you are using your brain to solve the customer's problem.
Read on to find out the current state of pre-call planning, the evolved state that’s helping AEs close deals faster.
The 10-minute nightmare before a sales call
The ten minutes before a call are the most expensive in a sales organization. If you have an AE and an SE both preparing for a call, that is two high-salaried professionals spending 10 minutes on non-selling activities. Multiply that by 10 calls a week across a team of 50. The cost is staggering.
What are most AEs and SEs doing right before a call?
If you look at the screen of a typical AE at 9:55 AM, it is a disaster. They are looking at the CRM to see the last activity. They are opening a Gong transcript to remember the specific wording of a pain point. They are checking LinkedIn to see if the person they are meeting has changed roles recently.
Meanwhile, the SE is looking for a specific technical document or a previous "Proof of Concept" (POC) result. They are both doing "data retrieval" rather than "strategic alignment."
Why do scattered tools create last-minute panic?
The panic comes from the fear of the unknown. When your data lives in five different places, there is a high probability you will miss something. You might miss the fact that the prospect sent an email an hour ago saying they invited their boss to the call. Or you might miss a Slack message from a colleague warning you about a specific technical hurdle.
Scattered tools force the human brain to act like a concatenate formula on excel. We were not built for that. When we try to do it under a time crunch, we experience "context-switching fatigue." This lowers our EQ and our ability to react quickly during the call.
Why buyers immediately sense when teams aren’t prepared
Buyers are more sophisticated now than ever. They can feel the "prep-gap" within the first ninety seconds. It shows up when an AE repeats a question that was answered in discovery. It shows up when the SE spends ten minutes explaining a feature that the buyer already said they didn't need.
Every time you ask a buyer to repeat themselves, you are stealing their time. You are essentially saying: "My internal organization is so poor that I expect you to do the work of keeping us informed." That is a terrible way to start a partnership.
Anatomy of pre-call planning
Strategic preparation is driven by questions. If you don't know what you are looking for, you are just reading. Winning teams look for specific answers.
Do I fully understand where this buyer is in their journey?
Is this the first time they are seeing the product? Or are they at the 11th hour of a procurement cycle? If you treat a late-stage buyer like a discovery-stage prospect, they will get frustrated. You need to know the temperature of the deal.
Who’s on the call, and what role do they actually play?
Titles are often misleading. A "Director of IT" might be the decision-maker in one company and a recommender in another. Pre-call planning should tell you who the "Economic Buyer" is, who the "Champion" is, and most importantly, who the "Influencer" is that might kill the deal from the sidelines.
What was promised, implied, or de-scoped in earlier conversations?
Deals often fall apart because of "expectation drift." The SE might have said a feature was "on the roadmap," but the AE might be selling it as "available now." You must align on exactly what the prospect expects to see today. If you promised a deep-dive integration demo but show a high-level overview, the buyer will feel bait-and-switched.
What risks or red flags already exist in this deal?
Every deal has warts. Maybe they are looking at a competitor. Maybe their budget just got slashed. Maybe they have a history of being "difficult" during the sales process. You need to know these red flags so you can address them proactively.
What is the objective of this specific meeting?
This is the most important question. If the team is not aligned on the "Desired Next Action," the call will wander. Are we trying to get a verbal "yes"? Are we trying to clear a technical hurdle? Every piece of preparation should point toward this single goal.
How to know if your team has a pre-call planning problem
What your team’s browser tabs say before calls
Do a "tab audit." If your reps have 10+ tabs open before a meeting, they are suffering from tool fragmentation. The context is sitting across 3 email threads, 2 Slack channels, a partridge, and a pear tree.
How often do questions get re-asked or re-explained
Listen to your call recordings. Every time you hear a prospect say, "As I mentioned before," that is a signal that your prep infrastructure is failing. It’s more likely you’ll take two steps back before taking one step forward in your deal.
Why on-the-go access is now a requirement, not a nice-to-have
If your team can only prepare while sitting at a desk with three monitors, they aren't ready for the modern world of work. Context should be a click away, wherever they need it.
What happens if you don’t fix pre-call planning?
The cost of inaction is high.
Deals slow down between meetings
When preparation is poor, you have to spend the first 10 minutes of every call "recapping." This eats up 30% of your meeting time. Over a six-month cycle, this can add weeks to your deal length.
Buyers lose confidence without saying it
Buyers rarely tell you that you seem unprepared. They just stop returning your calls. They move toward the competitor who seems to understand their business better.
Context decay becomes a hidden revenue leak
Every time a rep forgets a detail, a small amount of "deal equity" is lost. Over time, this leads to lower win rates and smaller deal sizes.
The benefits of strong pre-call planning
Preparation is not just about avoiding embarrassment. It is a competitive advantage.
Faster trust-building with buyers
Trust is built on the feeling that you "get it." When you show up and say, "I know we talked about the Snowflake integration last week, so I brought our lead engineer to discuss that specifically," you are signaling that you are a partner, not just a vendor. You are showing that you listen.
Fewer awkward or repetitive questions
The "re-ask" is a deal killer. Strong pre-call planning ensures that the discovery process moves forward, not backward. Instead of asking "How many users do you have?", you say "Since you mentioned you have 500 users, I’ve mapped out a rollout plan for that scale."
Better AE–SE alignment during live calls
The "AE-SE dance" is what wins complex deals. When both parties are prepared, they can pass the ball back and forth seamlessly. The AE handles the business value, and the SE handles the technical validation. Without prep, they often talk over each other or contradict one another.
Shorter ramp-up time between meetings
If you have a library of context ready for you, you can move between different industries and use cases without mental friction. You can go from a call with a manufacturing company to a call with a software company in five minutes because the "infrastructure" has already prepared your brain for the switch.
More confident, controlled deal conversations
Confidence comes from knowing the answers before the questions are asked. When you are prepared, you aren't afraid of a difficult question from a CFO. You welcome it, because you’ve already anticipated it and have the data ready.
Skills required for pre-call planning
It is a tragedy that we hire brilliant salespeople and then force them to spend 30% of their time acting like librarians.
Rapid context synthesis across tools
Reps have developed a "hunter-gatherer" skill set for data. They are incredibly fast at scanning a CRM or a transcript. But this is a waste of their talent. We want them to synthesize strategy, not synthesize data.
Risk detection from past conversations
A good rep can listen to a recording and "hear" the hesitation in a buyer's voice. They learn to flag risks manually. But this requires hours of listening to playbacks.
Audience-aware communication
Salespeople have to learn how to translate technical notes into business value on the fly. This "translation" skill is currently being done manually in the minutes before a call.
Memory reconstruction instead of problem-solving
If you ask a rep about a deal from three weeks ago, they spend the first three minutes "reconstructing" the memory. They are trying to remember the faces, the names, and the objections. This is mental energy that should be spent on solving the customer's problem.
Pre-call planning infrastructure
In the future, a salesperson being "unprepared" will be seen as a failure of the company’s technology, not just the individual rep.
Why preparation must be embedded, not manual
We are moving toward a world of "Invisible Prep." The information you need should follow you. It should be in your calendar invite. It should be on your phone. It should be in your ear.
What winning teams will expect by default in 2026
By 2026, the idea of "doing research" for a call will seem as outdated as using a paper map to drive across the country. Readiness will be a utility, like electricity or the internet.
The companies that invest in this infrastructure today will be the ones that own the market tomorrow. They will be faster, smarter, and more trusted by their buyers.
Pre-call planning without AI - The old way
The "Old Way" is a relic of a slower era.
Going in cold and relying on instincts
Some reps still believe they can "wing it." They think their charisma will carry them through. This works in small, simple deals. It fails in enterprise sales. Charisma cannot answer a technical question about API limits or security protocols.
Manually researching accounts, people, and notes
This is the "Brute Force" method. It involves manually copying and pasting notes into a "Prep Doc." It is slow, prone to error, and results in a document that is out of date the moment a new email arrives.
Scheduling internal prep calls for basic alignment
We have all seen it: a 15-minute meeting scheduled to prepare for a 30-minute meeting. It is the most inefficient use of time in the corporate world. If the information were accessible and centralized, the "prep call" would be unnecessary.
Why this approach doesn’t scale with deal volume
As a company grows, the number of deals increases, but the number of hours in a day stays the same. The old way of prep creates a "ceiling" on how much a rep can sell. Eventually, they simply run out of time to prepare, and the quality of their meetings drops.
Pre-call planning, but with generic AI - not enough
A lot of companies think that giving their team a ChatGPT login solves this. It does not.
Prompting without deal awareness
Generic AI is like a smart person with amnesia. It knows how the world works, but it doesn't know your world. It doesn't know what was said in your last meeting. You have to "feed" it the context, which takes just as long as doing the research yourself.
Missing nuance across calls and stakeholders
Generic AI is bad at "connecting the dots" between different people. It might summarize one call, but it won't tell you that the person on today’s call contradicted the person on last week’s call.
Security risks with sensitive deal data
This is the big one. If your reps are pasting prospect data or internal strategy into a public AI tool, you are creating a massive liability.
Faster answers, but not better preparation
AI can give you a summary, but if you don't internalize that summary, you aren't prepared. True prep is about the rep's readiness, not the AI's output.
Pre-call planning with cross-platform AI - the SiftHub way
SiftHub represents a shift from "Manual Research" to "Automated Readiness."
Automatically assembling the deal context
SiftHub doesn't wait for you to ask. It constantly pulls data from your CRM, your technical documentation, your Slack threads, and your recorded calls. It builds a "living" profile of the deal.
Shared visibility for AEs and SEs
In SiftHub, the AE and the SE are looking at the same "truth." There is no need for a 15-minute sync call because the alignment is built into the platform.
Mobile-first call readiness in under 30 seconds
The modern salesperson is mobile. They are prepping for a call in the car, at the airport, or while walking to their home office. SiftHub provides a high-level "Deal Brief" that can be consumed in seconds on any device.
This is the way to go! - Try SiftHub
FAQs
1. What does pre-call planning look like with SiftHub?
Pre-call planning with SiftHub means opening a deal brief that already reflects the full history of the deal. Past calls, emails, CRM updates, technical questions, risks, and next steps are automatically pulled together so you are not piecing things together minutes before the meeting.
2. How does SiftHub improve pre-call planning compared to reviewing CRM notes?
CRM notes capture activity, but they rarely capture context. SiftHub improves pre-call planning by showing what matters right now, including what was promised, what is still unresolved, who is joining the call, and what the objective of the meeting should be.
3. How does SiftHub support pre-call planning for both AEs and Sales Engineers?
SiftHub supports pre-call planning by giving AEs and Sales Engineers the same shared deal context, while still surfacing role-specific insights. AEs see buyer priorities and deal movement, while Sales Engineers see technical history, open questions, and prior commitments, all in one place before the call starts.
4. How fast can teams complete pre-call planning with SiftHub?
Most teams can complete pre-call planning in under a minute. Instead of digging through tools or rewatching recordings, reps review a concise, up-to-date summary that is designed for quick consumption whether they are at a desk or on the move.
5. What pre-call planning work does SiftHub eliminate?
SiftHub eliminates manual pre-call planning work like searching Slack threads, reviewing call recordings, chasing down technical notes, and holding internal alignment calls. The product continuously assembles and updates deal context so preparation becomes a quick review rather than a time-consuming task.
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