How to Research a Prospect in 5 Minutes Before a Call

Why 5 minutes is actually enough

If you're a solo founder or freelancer, you probably don't have a research team. You have the 20 minutes before your call, half of which you'll spend making coffee and finding your notes from the last time you talked to this person.

The good news is you don't need an hour to research a prospect before a sales call. You need a routine. Something you run the same way every time, so you're not reinventing your process at 9:56am for a 10am call.

Below is the routine I actually use. It's built for speed, not for writing a dossier nobody will read.

The 4 things worth checking

Everything else is optional. These four are not.

1. Their website (60 seconds)

Skip the homepage fluff. Go straight to the "About" or "Team" page and the pricing or product page if they have one. You're looking for two things: what they actually sell, and what they emphasize about themselves.

If a company's homepage leads with "founded by two engineers frustrated with X," that's a talking point. It tells you what problem they think they're solving and how they see themselves.

2. Their LinkedIn (90 seconds)

Look at three things only: their current title and how long they've had it, their most recent post or share, and any job changes in the last 6 months. New role, new budget, new priorities. That's often the whole ballgame.

If they haven't posted anything in two years, don't force a talking point out of nothing. Move on.

3. Recent news or a press mention (60 seconds)

A quick search of the company name plus "news" or "funding" or "hires" can surface something useful: a product launch, a new office, a partnership. You're not writing a report on this. You're looking for one sentence you can casually reference.

If there's nothing recent, that's fine too. Not every prospect has news, and pretending they do sounds fake on a call.

4. Mutual connections (30 seconds)

Check LinkedIn for shared connections or shared groups. If you know someone who knows them, that's worth a mention early in the call. It's a faster way to build trust than anything you'll say about your product.

What to ignore

It's tempting to keep digging once you find one interesting thing. Resist it. Here's what not to bother with:

• Deep social media history. Nobody wants to hear you reference their vacation photos from 2019. It reads as creepy, not thoughtful.
• Company financials you can't verify. Unless they're public, guessing at revenue or headcount from third-party sites is often wrong and makes you look sloppy if you're off.
• Every single employee's LinkedIn. You're meeting one person. Research that person, not their entire org chart.
• Competitor comparisons. Save that for later in the sales process. It's not a pre-call task.

The goal when you research a prospect before a sales call is to walk in informed, not to walk in as a stalker with a spreadsheet.

Turning 5 minutes into 2 or 3 talking points

Research without a plan just sits in your head as trivia. The move is to convert what you found into short, usable references. I write these as a single line each, right at the top of my notes for the call:

• One opener: something to mention in the first 2 minutes to show you did your homework.
• One question: something specific to their situation, not a generic discovery question.
• One connector: a mutual contact, shared background, or common interest, if you found one.

If you can't fill in all three, that's okay. Two solid points beat three forced ones.

A filled-in example

Let's say you're about to call Maria Torres, Head of Operations at a fictional company called Fieldwork Supply Co., a small B2B distributor of outdoor gear to retailers.

Here's what a real 5-minute pass might turn up:

• Website: Their About page says they were "built by two former retail buyers who got tired of slow supplier response times." That tells you speed and responsiveness are core to their identity.
• LinkedIn: Maria became Head of Operations 4 months ago, promoted from Operations Manager. She shared a post last week about "finally getting our reorder process under control."
• News: A quick search shows Fieldwork Supply opened a second warehouse this year.
• Mutual connections: You share a connection, a former colleague named James who worked with Maria at her previous job.

Turned into talking points, that becomes:

• Opener: "Congrats on the new warehouse, that's a big step. How's the second location changing your day-to-day?"
• Question: "You mentioned getting the reorder process under control. Is that mostly a systems issue or a people issue right now?"
• Connector: "James mentioned you two worked together a few years back. Small world."

Notice none of this requires guessing at her budget or pretending you know more about her business than you do. It's specific, it's true, and it took under 5 minutes.

Where AI genuinely speeds this up

AI tools are good at compressing the boring parts of this routine. Summarizing a long About page into two sentences. Pulling the gist of a company's last few LinkedIn posts. Skimming a news article so you don't have to read the whole thing. That's a real time saver, especially if you're doing this five or six times a day before back-to-back calls.

Where Ungrind fits into this, if you're already using it as your CRM: since the Ungrind meeting bot has usually already logged your last call with a contact, transcribed it, and left a summary in the pipeline, your "research" for a second or third call is mostly just rereading what actually happened last time. That's often more useful than anything you'd find on LinkedIn.

Where AI will confidently make things up

This is the part worth being careful about. If you ask a general AI chatbot to "research" a company or person it doesn't have live access to, it can produce a very confident, very wrong summary. Made-up funding rounds. Invented job titles. A "recent acquisition" that never happened.

The failure mode is dangerous specifically because it sounds plausible. A wrong guess about someone's title is embarrassing. A wrong claim about their company's funding on a sales call is worse, because it signals you didn't actually check, you just trusted a tool that was guessing too.

The rule I use: anything AI tells me about a specific person or company, I verify with one real source (their actual LinkedIn, their actual website) before I say it out loud on a call. AI is great for summarizing what's true. It's not reliable for telling you what's true in the first place.

Make it a habit, not a one-off

The reason this works long term isn't the specific 4 steps. It's that you do the same 4 steps every time, so it stops feeling like a task and starts feeling automatic. Five minutes before every call, same order, same questions.

If you want to see more routines like this for running sales as a one-person operation, the Ungrind blog has more posts on the practical, non-glamorous side of solo selling. And if you're comparing CRMs that can handle the follow-up half of this equation (not just the research half), it's worth seeing how tools stack up, like this Ungrind vs Pipedrive comparison or the Ungrind vs HubSpot comparison.

If you want to try a CRM that automatically joins your calls, transcribes them, and updates your pipeline so your next round of research starts with real notes instead of a blank page, Ungrind has a 30-day free trial and doesn't ask for a credit card to start.