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Prep for your next sales call

Build an agent that reads who you're meeting, what they probably care about, and what's already happened with the account — then produces a one-page brief with talking points and likely objections, in under sixty seconds.

Plus: three prompts that move sales prep from 'cramming five minutes before' to 'walking in already briefed' — every meeting, every time.

Audience Everyone · Admins
Time ~15 min
Prerequisites An Auxot account on any tier. [Create an agent from scratch](/tutorials/create-an-agent-from-scratch) finished — you've built at least one agent. Helpful: [Add your first context file](/tutorials/add-your-first-context-file) if you want to give the agent your sales playbook and ideal customer profile, [Add an MCP server](/tutorials/add-an-mcp-server) if you want it to pull deal history from your CRM directly, [Connect Slack to your agents](/tutorials/connect-slack-to-your-agents) if you want the brief delivered to Slack before each meeting.
You'll end up with A Call Prep agent that produces a one-page meeting brief — who they are, what they probably care about, what's already happened, talking points, and the three hardest objections you should expect — tested on a real upcoming meeting.

When a tutorial shows italic text in quotation marks, it usually mirrors a label or helper string inside Auxot. Product copy changes between releases — if something reads differently in your workspace, trust what you see on screen.

Callouts with a Worth knowing gold accent are meant as must-read context before you move on. Blockquotes that open with Tip are lighter, optional depth.

Why this matters

Prep is the single highest-leverage thing you do before a sales call. The reps who walk in already knowing what the prospect cares about, what’s been said in past touches, and what objections to expect — those are the reps who win deals the rest of the team didn’t even realize were winnable. The catch: doing prep right is 15 to 20 minutes per meeting. The night before a five-meeting day, nobody has 100 minutes. So prep gets cut, calls go in cold, and you spend the first ten minutes asking questions you could have answered ahead of time.

You don’t need a smarter way to prep. You need an agent that does the labor part (gather what’s public about the company and the person, pull what’s already happened with this account, and synthesize it into one page you can read in two minutes) and produces it on demand. The judgment stays yours. The labor moves. Today you build that agent. By next week, you walk into every call already briefed.

Quick start

  1. Sign in: open Auxot in your browser and log in.

  2. Open chat with the Admin Agent: click Chat in the left menu, make sure the agent picker reads “Admin Agent.”

  3. Build the Call Prep agent: paste this:

    I want a "Call Prep" agent. When I give it a company name, the person I'm meeting, and what kind of meeting it is, it should produce a one-page brief with: (1) who the company is and what they probably care about right now, (2) who the person is and what they're likely focused on given their role, (3) anything I already know about this account from past meetings or notes, (4) three to five talking points tailored to this call, and (5) the three hardest objections I should expect, with one-line responses to each. Give it a clear job description and make it ready to use.

  4. Answer the Admin Agent’s questions: what your ideal customer profile looks like, what your sales motion is (inbound, outbound, or account-based marketing), and what a good brief format looks like to you. Two or three exchanges.

  5. Test on a real upcoming meeting: pick something on your calendar this week. Paste the company, person, and meeting context into chat with Call Prep. Read what it produces. Compare it to what you’d have written yourself with 20 minutes.

Done? The agent is in Settings → Agents and selectable from the agent picker. Optional next step: wire your CRM to it (Add an MCP server) so it pulls deal history automatically, or wire your calendar so briefs land in Slack 30 minutes before each meeting.

The agent can do that?

A prep agent earns its keep on the parts most reps skip. These three prompts are where the brief stops being a Google-search summary and starts being something you’d actually walk in with.

1. Force a “what they probably care about” section based on role plus recent company moves

Open chat with Call Prep and ask:

For every brief from now on, include a section called "What they probably care about right now." It should combine two things: (a) what someone in this person's role typically cares about — a CFO is reading this differently than a VP of Engineering — and (b) what's actually happening at their company right now (a recent funding round, a public layoff, a new product launch, or a leadership change). One bullet per signal, max five bullets. If you can't find a recent signal, say so explicitly — don't make one up.

Why it’s non-obvious: Most prep stops at “here’s what the company does.” That’s where bad prep lives. The job-to-be-done isn’t to summarize the company: it’s to predict what’s on this specific person’s mind in this specific week. Forcing the agent to combine role-based pattern matching with fresh public signals gets you to “they just announced layoffs in their sales org, and the CFO is the one who approved it” — which changes how you open the call.

2. Add a sales-objection agent that pressure-tests the brief

Once Call Prep has been running for a week, head back to the Admin Agent:

Build a companion agent called "Sales Objections." Its job: read a brief from Call Prep and produce the five hardest objections this prospect is most likely to raise, ranked by likelihood. For each objection, write the response I'd actually use — not a generic answer, the one that fits this specific person and company. If two objections are basically the same, merge them. If an objection is a deal-breaker (we genuinely don't fit), say so out loud — don't draft a response that papers over it.

Why it’s non-obvious: Talking points are easy to generate; objections are the part most people half-ass. The sales-objection agent is not for reading on the way to the meeting — it’s for the night before, when you can actually rehearse. The “merge duplicates” and “name deal-breakers out loud” rules are what stop it from producing five flavors of the same objection or sandbagging you with a brave-face answer to a deal that won’t happen.

3. Auto-prep from your calendar — brief lands in Slack 30 minutes before each meeting

Inverted-usage move. Open chat with the Admin Agent:

Set up a workflow that runs every weekday at 8 AM. It should: (1) read my calendar for sales meetings happening today, (2) for each meeting, run Call Prep using the attendees and meeting title as input, and (3) drop the brief into a Slack DM to me 30 minutes before the meeting starts. If a meeting doesn't have an external attendee or doesn't look like a sales call, skip it. Wire calendar via MCP like Add an MCP server and Slack delivery like Connect Slack to your agents in the Auxot tutorials if those aren't already set up.

Why it’s non-obvious: Most people build the agent and then forget to use it. Auto-prep from calendar removes the “did I prep for this one?” decision — every external meeting gets a brief whether you remembered to ask for one or not. The 30-minute lead time is intentional: long enough to read, short enough that the brief is fresh in your head when the call starts. Pairs with Set up your Monday morning briefing — your whole week of meetings becomes prep’d by default, not on demand.

Go deeper

Why one agent, not several

Build your customer support agents explains support as three agents working together. Prep doesn’t split the same way — most of the value is in the synthesis, not in the gathering or the writing. If you split gather-and-write into separate agents, each handoff loses information that mattered to the synthesis. Keep Call Prep as one agent. The sales-objection agent in power move 2 is the only second agent worth running, and that’s because it’s a different kind of work — adversarial pressure-testing — not a different stage of the same work.

Where the inputs come from

Three sources, ranked by leverage:

  • Public web: company news, recent press releases, the person’s LinkedIn-public information. The agent can pull this if your account has web search wired (or via an MCP server, Add an MCP server). This is the “what’s happening right now” layer.
  • Your CRM: deal history, past meeting notes, prior outreach attempts. This is the “what’s already happened” layer. Almost certainly via an MCP server (Add an MCP server); most CRMs have one.
  • Your sales playbook and ideal customer profile: your definition of fit, your tone, what your reps consider strong vs weak signals. Lives as context files (Add your first context file).

The first two are ambient — agent goes and gets them. The third is foundational — the agent uses it to interpret what it gathered. Don’t skip the third; without it, the brief reads like a Wikipedia summary.

Brief format matters more than you’d think

The agent’s brief format becomes the contract. Once you fix it, every brief follows the same shape, which means you stop scanning for structure and start reading for content. A few format rules that earn their keep:

  • Fixed sections, fixed order. Don’t let the agent reorder sections by what feels relevant for this call. You want to know exactly where to look for “what they care about” every time.
  • Top-of-page summary, three lines max. If you only have 30 seconds before the call, this is what you read.
  • Confidence markers. When the agent’s pulling something from public news, it should say so. When it’s inferring from role, it should say so. Distinguish “they announced a $50M Series B last month” from “CFOs at companies this size are usually budget-constrained in Q4.”
  • Sources named, not linked. Each non-obvious claim should name where it came from in one or two words (“LinkedIn,” “press release,” or “your CRM notes from March”). Links are clutter.

Troubleshooting

  • The brief is making things up. Agent’s hallucinating because you didn’t constrain it to its sources. Edit the description to add: “If you can’t verify something from a real source, leave it out. Empty sections are fine — invented information is not.”
  • The brief is too long. Agent isn’t being told what to leave out. Add explicit length caps: “Each section: max 5 bullets. Talking points: max 5. Objections: 3 to 5.” Then trim the description to remove anything inviting it to elaborate.
  • The brief misses obvious objections. The agent doesn’t know your product’s actual weaknesses. Add a context file titled “Where we lose deals” with the real reasons — “price vs incumbent,” “missing SOC 2,” or “no native integration with X” — and tell the agent to consult it when generating objections.
  • The agent doesn’t know about recent news. Either web search isn’t wired, or the news is too recent for the model. The fix is an MCP server with web search (Add an MCP server). For news in the last 24 hours, you’re often better off pasting the headline into the prompt yourself.
  • Briefs are accurate but feel useless. The agent is summarizing instead of synthesizing. Push it harder: “For every meeting, end the brief with the single most important thing for me to remember walking in. One sentence. If you can’t pick one, pick the wrong one and explain why.” Forcing a one-sentence “if you remember nothing else” is what turns a summary into a brief.

Variations and edge cases

  • Inbound vs outbound first calls. Inbound: the brief leans on what they said in the form fill plus public signals. Outbound: the brief leans heavily on the “why this person, why now” justification — the agent’s job is to make the case for why you’re calling at all.
  • Account-based selling. Account-based marketing accounts get richer briefs because there’s more deal history to pull. Worth running Call Prep against the account weekly even when there’s no specific meeting: the brief becomes the running situational-awareness doc for the account.
  • Renewal calls vs first calls. Renewals lean on usage data and account health (consider Set up your Monday morning briefing feeding Call Prep). First calls lean on public discovery. Tell the agent which one: different inputs, different brief shape.
  • Internal meetings. Don’t use this for internal stand-ups or 1:1s. The agent’s structure is built around external prospects; using it for internal meetings produces uncanny output that misses what your colleagues actually need from a prep doc.
  • Free tier: Call Prep itself works at all tiers. Web-search and CRM integrations via MCP servers (Add an MCP server) work too. Calendar-driven auto-prep needs the workflow scheduling from Run a workflow — that’s tier-gated; check before you build that piece.

Walkthrough

Step 1: Open chat with the Admin Agent

Click Chat in the left menu. Make sure the agent picker at the top reads “Admin Agent.”

Step 2: Build the Call Prep agent

Paste this:

Build a "Call Prep" agent. Its job is to produce a one-page meeting brief on demand. Given a company name, the person I'm meeting, and what the meeting is about, it should produce these sections in this order:

1. One-paragraph summary — three lines max. The thing I'd want to remember if I only had 30 seconds.
2. Who the company is and what they probably care about right now — combine role-based pattern matching with recent public signals (news, funding, layoffs, or launches). Mark which is which.
3. Who the person is and what they're likely focused on — title, tenure, anything from their LinkedIn-public profile.
4. What's already happened with this account — past meetings, prior outreach, deal stage. Pull from the CRM if it's connected.
5. Three to five talking points tailored to this specific call.
6. The three to five hardest objections to expect, with a one-line response to each.

Rules: never invent facts. If you can't find something from a real source, leave it out and say so. Name your sources in one or two words after each non-obvious claim. Stay one page.

Ask me what context files to attach (sales playbook, ideal customer profile description, and examples of briefs I like) and make the agent ready to use.

The Admin Agent will ask follow-up questions: what your ideal customer profile is, what your sales motion looks like, and what a brief should and shouldn’t include for your style. Be concrete — “Ideal customer profile is 100 to 1,000-person SaaS companies in healthcare or fintech; we sell to VPs of Engineering or CTOs” beats “mid-market technical buyers.”

Step 3: Attach the right context files

Three context files do almost all the work:

  • Sales playbook: your discovery framework, your qualification criteria, and your standard objection responses. The agent uses this to interpret signals.
  • Ideal customer profile description with examples: explicit “this kind of company is a 5, this kind is a 2” language. The agent uses this to score fit and tailor talking points.
  • Briefs you’d want to clone: three to five of your best past briefs, or briefs from a senior rep you’d want this agent to imitate. This is the voice and depth calibration.

Add your first context file covers the mechanics. The third one is the highest-leverage — it’s what makes the agent’s briefs feel like yours.

Step 4: Test on a real upcoming meeting

Pick something on your calendar this week. Paste in the company name, the attendees, and one line of context — “discovery call, they came inbound from a webinar last week.” Read what Call Prep produces.

Verify against what you’d have written yourself:

  • Does the “what they care about” section name something specific or just generalities?
  • Are the talking points tailored to this person, or could they apply to any prospect?
  • Are the objections the actual hardest ones, or the easy ones?
  • Is the one-line summary something you’d want pinned at the top of your screen during the call?

If anything’s off, edit the agent’s description. “The talking points are too generic — push them harder; if you can’t make one specific to this prospect, drop it instead of substituting a generic one.”

Step 5: Wire it to your real inputs

Once the agent is producing briefs you’d use, plug it into the sources where the data actually lives:

Wire one at a time. CRM first if your deals have meaningful history; web search first if your meetings are mostly inbound first calls.

Step 6: (Optional) Build the sales-objection companion

Once Call Prep is running well, head back to the Admin Agent and use power move 2 to build the sales-objection agent. It reads briefs and pressure-tests them — best run the night before a high-stakes call, not five minutes before.

What’s next

Reference

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