Meeting Prep
Before a call, Ahoy pulls together a prep brief – who you’re meeting, their company, where the deal stands, and what’s worth focusing on – drawn from your CRM, your email history, and past meetings. It prepares one automatically for meetings that include someone from outside your company, and you can generate one yourself for any meeting coming up.
This guide covers:
- What’s in a meeting prep brief
- When briefs are prepared automatically
- Which meetings get one, and why some don’t
- Where to find your briefs
- What Ahoy does next
What’s in a meeting prep brief
A brief gathers what you’d otherwise need to dig up yourself before a call:
- Who you’re meeting – names, job titles, and the company behind them.
- Where the deal stands – the deals tied to those contacts, with stage and value.
- Recent history – how often you’ve met, recent email subjects and when they landed, notes on file, and when you last spoke.
- The agenda – the invite’s description, and any answers the other person gave when booking through a scheduling link.
- Open action items – anything still outstanding from past meeting notes.
- Last time, for recurring calls – a recurring meeting’s brief carries forward what happened in the previous session.
Near the top, Ahoy flags anything worth a heads-up – such as when someone new is joining the call – and offers two to four focus areas, its suggestions for what to concentrate on, drawn from all of the information we've gathered.
How full a brief is depends on how much Ahoy already knows. For a first call with someone brand new, it’ll have their name and company, the agenda, any booking answers, and research it has carried out on the company for you. For an established relationship you also get deal stages and amounts, your history together, open action items, and a flag for anyone new joining.
When briefs are prepared automatically
Ahoy looks about three days ahead. Once a day it prepares briefs for the qualifying meetings coming up in that window, and it tops that up in real time – book a meeting later today or tomorrow and Ahoy prepares its brief shortly after, rather than waiting for the next daily pass.
So it isn’t a countdown that fires “three days before” each meeting. A call four hours away and one three days out are handled together – anything inside the next three days is in scope.
Which meetings get one, and why some don’t
Ahoy prepares briefs automatically for meetings that include an external contact, someone from outside your company who’s in your CRM. Meetings it skips automatically:
- Internal-only meetings, with no outside attendee
- Meetings where the people invited aren’t in your CRM yet
- Cancelled meetings
If you find a meeting that doesn’t have a brief yet, you can quickly generate one. Open the meeting from your Calendar and in the Meeting prep section click 'Generate prep brief'.
Where to find your briefs
A brief lives on its meeting record, which you can find by clicking the meeting in your Calendar. It’s titled 'Prep: [Meeting name]', with a note of how long ago it was generated. Ahoy doesn’t send a notification when a brief is ready, so the meeting record is the place to look.
It stays after the meeting. The brief doesn’t disappear once the call is over. On a past meeting it sits just below the meeting summary on the same record, as a record of what was on the agenda, who was new, and what to follow up on.
What Ahoy does next
Two things happen around a brief that are worth knowing.
Fresh research. Preparing a brief can set off fresh web research on the people and companies involved – real searches that reach out to the web. That research is saved to the relevant contact and company records, and it may land there shortly after the brief rather than inside the brief itself, so the brief won’t always contain everything Ahoy found. Ahoy won’t re-research someone it looked into in the last week.
A possible follow-up action. Once a brief is ready, Ahoy may spot something worth acting on and raise it as an AI Action – which, like every AI Action, waits for your approval. Preparing the brief itself changes nothing and needs no approval; it’s only that downstream suggestion that does. You can find out more in the article on AI Actions.
FAQs
Why didn’t my meeting get a brief?
Automatic briefs are prepared for meetings that include an external contact who’s in your CRM. An internal meeting, or one where the attendees aren’t contacts yet, won’t get one on its own – open the meeting record and use Generate prep brief to make one.
My brief is out of date. How do I refresh it?
A brief is a snapshot from when it was generated, and it doesn’t update as new email or activity comes in. There’s one brief per meeting and no way to refresh it once it’s been created – so for a fast-moving deal, treat the brief as a starting point and check the meeting record itself for anything recent.
Do I need a meeting recorder for prep to work?
No. Prep works whether or not you use a recorder. For recurring meetings, notes from a past call feed into the next brief if you’ve had a notetaker running – but nothing about prep requires one.
Can I prep an internal meeting?
Yes – use Generate prep brief on the meeting record. The manual button works for internal and external meetings.
Does prep work on Microsoft as well as Google?
Yes. Prep reads from your CRM rather than from the calendar directly, so it works the same whether your meetings come from Google or Microsoft.