Brief yourself before every call
AI pre-call brief is an Agent Skill: a written method your AI applies on demand, in Zealos or in any client that reads SKILL.md.
AI pre-call brief is an Agent Skill: a written method your AI applies on demand, in Zealos or in any client that reads SKILL.md.
A pre-call brief is worth writing only if it changes what you ask: who is in the room, what they are measured on, what happened last time, and the one question you cannot afford to leave without answering.
| name | discovery-questions |
|---|---|
| description | The discovery question bank and which questions belong at which stage. Use when preparing for a first call, writing a call plan, or reviewing whether a discovery call actually discovered anything. |
| allowed-tools | none — this skill adds judgement, not reach |
| compatibility | Zealos, Claude Code, Cursor, Codex and any client that reads SKILL.md |
| license | Free to use and edit |
--- name: discovery-questions description: The discovery question bank and which questions belong at which stage. Use when preparing for a first call, writing a call plan, or reviewing whether a discovery call actually discovered anything. --- # Discovery questions Ask about what happened, not about what they want. People are reliable historians and unreliable architects. ## Opening (situation) - "Walk me through how this works today, start to finish." - "Who touches it besides you?" - "How long has it worked this way?" ## Pain (the part most calls skip) - "When did this last go wrong? What happened?" - "What did that cost — time, money, or a customer?" - "What have you already tried?" *(Reveals budget, urgency and internal politics in one answer.)* - "What happens if this is still true in six months?" ## Consequence - "Who else feels it when this breaks?" - "Is anyone measured on this?" - "What is this competing with for budget?" ## Process - "If you decided this was worth doing, what happens next?" - "Who has told you no before on something like this?" ## Rules - One question at a time. Stacked questions get the easy one answered. - After an answer, count to two before speaking. The second half of the answer is the useful half. - Never ask a question whose answer is in the CRM. - If you leave without a number and a date, it was not a discovery call.
The brief lands before the call rather than being something you meant to write. You walk in knowing the CFO joined last quarter and that the champion has been asked to justify the spend twice.
Coaching stops being a conversation about a call you did not hear. The brief and the recap together show whether the rep asked the question they said they would.
A renewal conversation opens with the two support tickets that shaped their year rather than a generic how-are-things — which is the difference between a check-in and a renewal.
The things that are visible in the record: whether a next step was agreed, whether the questions were about what happened rather than what the buyer wants, and whether commitments from last time were kept. Judgement stays with the manager.
Notes are what was said. A brief is what to do about it — the open loop, the unknown, and the one question worth spending the first five minutes on.
Early enough to change your preparation and late enough to include this morning's email. In practice that means the hour before the meeting, not the night before.
Post-call automation turns a recorded conversation into the three things that outlive it: the commitments each side made, the fields that changed, and the follow-up that has to go out today.
/call-recap-formatAI email triage is worth having only when it sorts by consequence rather than by recency: what blocks a deal, what someone is waiting on you for, and what can be read at the end of the week.
/email-rulesCRM data hygiene survives AI only if one rule is written down first: a field left blank is a known unknown, while a field filled in by inference is an unknown unknown that will be reported on as fact.
/crm-field-conventionsAccount research earns its time only when it changes the first sentence you write, which means looking for what recently changed rather than assembling a profile anyone could have found.
/our-icpQualification is a claim about evidence, not a score: a deal is qualified when every criterion has a source you can quote, and unevidenced criteria are named rather than filled in optimistically.
/meddiccA follow-up gets a reply when it opens with the specific commitment made on the call, stays under 120 words, and asks for exactly one thing the recipient can answer in a sentence.
/email-rules