Meeting Prep in 5 Minutes: What to Know Before a Call or Coffee

You have a call in ten minutes with someone you connected with two years ago. You remember the face. You think it was a conference. You're not sure if they still work at the same company, and you have a nagging feeling they commented on one of your posts recently.

Most meeting prep advice tells you to read their company's website, scan their last ten posts, and find a news hook. That's useful for a sales call with a stranger. For people already in your network, you're missing the most valuable layer: what's already happened between the two of you. That's quicker to find, and it's what makes the first two minutes of the call feel warm instead of formal.

What the research says about the first few minutes

Three findings are worth knowing, because they tell you what your prep is actually for.

Questions, especially follow-ups, make people like you more

In a set of studies of live conversations, Huang and colleagues found that "people who ask more questions, particularly follow-up questions, are better liked by their conversation partners." They also found that people don't anticipate this benefit.^[1] An independent audit published in 2025 corrected some minor reporting errors and confirmed that the paper's conclusions hold.^[1]

So the real job of prep is to have good questions ready, so you can spend the call listening and asking the next one.

Common ground helps, if it's real and specific

Burger and colleagues found that people were more likely to agree to a request when they believed they shared something small with the person asking, like a birthday or a first name. The effect disappeared when people thought the shared feature was common.^[2] The lesson for prep: "we both work in tech" does nothing. "We were both at that 2023 payments meetup" or "you commented on my post about pricing" is specific to the two of you.

You'll come across better than you think

Boothby and colleagues found that after conversations, "people systematically underestimated how much their conversation partners liked them and enjoyed their company." They call it the liking gap, and it showed up with strangers in a lab, first-year college students getting to know their dorm mates, and adults at a personal development workshop.^[3] Five minutes of prep won't fix nerves, but it's worth knowing the other person probably enjoyed it more than you'll assume afterwards.

The four things to know before any call

1. Who they are now

Current title, company, and how long they've been there. This is the bare minimum, and the one people get wrong most often, because LinkedIn connections age quietly. Someone you met as a product manager may be a VP now, or at a different company.

Don't count on your feed to tell you. LinkedIn lets members choose whether to notify their network about job changes, education changes and work anniversaries.^[4] If they switched that off, the only way to know is to look.

2. Your shared history

• When did you connect? A connection date often tells you where you met: a conference that month, a previous job, an intro.
• Have you messaged before? Scan the last thread. Did you promise to send something? Did they ask for something you never followed up on?
• Did you work at the same company, or in the same city, at the same time?

If you've exported your connections, the "Connected On" column has the date. Our guide to the LinkedIn connections export covers what else is in there.

3. What changed since you connected

Compare their work history with your connection date. Anything that started after you connected is news to you, and it's the most natural thing to ask about.

• New role at the same company: "You moved into partnerships since we last spoke. What made you switch?"
• New company: "How are the first months at [company] going?"
• Nothing changed in years: that's information too. They may be deep in one problem, which is a good thing to ask about.

4. How they've engaged with you

This is the most overlooked layer. If they liked or commented on your posts, you already know what they care about. A comment is the best: it's their own words, on a topic you picked.

It works the other way too. If you've commented on their posts, they may remember you from that. Mentioning it lightly ("I enjoyed your post on onboarding, the bit about the first week stuck with me") is a specific, real bit of common ground.

The 5-minute checklist

That's it. Skip the company's funding history unless it's a sales call. Skip their last ten posts unless they're a regular poster and the meeting is about their work. You're looking for the overlap between their life and yours.

What a good result looks like

Say you're having coffee with a former colleague who left your old company three years ago. Five minutes gives you: she's now head of customer success at a scale-up, started 14 months ago; you connected when you both worked on the same launch; your last message was congratulations on the new role, and she said "let's grab coffee soon," which is this coffee; she commented on your post about hiring last month, saying her team struggled with the same thing.

Your opener: "Finally, the coffee we promised each other. How's the first year at [company] been?" Your questions: what changed in how she runs the team since the old days, what her team found hardest about hiring (her own comment), and what she'd do differently if she started the role again. None of these needed a single news article.

Doing it with Claude

If you've connected wait who? to Claude, you can do the whole checklist with one question. Claude looks up the person in your synced network and gets their role, work history with dates, when you connected, whether you've messaged them, and how they engaged with your posts, including what they wrote in comments. A few prompts that work well:

• "I have a call with [name] in 10 minutes. What should I know? Include when we connected, what changed since, and how they've engaged with my posts."
• "Look up [name]. Based on their work history and comments on my posts, suggest one opener and three questions, including one follow-up question about something they wrote."
• "I'm meeting [name] for coffee. Did anything change in their career since we connected?"
• "I have three calls tomorrow: [name], [name] and [name]. Give me a five-line brief on each."
• "Who else do I know at [company]? I'm meeting [name] there tomorrow."

Two cautions. Claude only knows what's in your synced network, so if your last sync was weeks ago, check their profile for anything newer. And treat the summary as notes to check, especially dates and titles, before you repeat them to the person's face.

Doing it without any tools

1. Open their LinkedIn profile. Read the Experience section for current role and start date.
2. Open your message thread with them and scroll to the last exchange.
3. Check your connections export or your notes for when you connected.
4. Look at the reactions and comments on your last few posts, and search the comments for their name.
5. Write the opener and three questions on a sticky note or the top of your meeting doc.

This takes closer to ten minutes than five, mostly because step four is slow. It still beats walking in cold.

After the call: two minutes that make the next prep instant

• Write down one personal detail and one work detail they told you.
• Note anything you promised, with a date.
• Send the thing you promised within 24 hours. A short follow-up beats a perfect one sent next week.

Next time you meet, your prep starts from these notes. Over a year, that's how a loose connection turns into a real relationship. If you're trying to build that habit across your whole network, our guide to staying in touch without being annoying picks up from here.

FAQ

Sources

1. It doesn't hurt to ask: Question-asking increases liking (Huang, Yeomans, Brooks, Minson and Gino), with the 2025 correction notice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2017; correction 2025. PubMed record.
2. What a coincidence! The effects of incidental similarity on compliance (Burger, Messian, Patel, del Prado and Anderson). Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2004. PubMed record.
3. The Liking Gap in Conversations: Do People Like Us More Than We Think? (Boothby, Cooney, Sandstrom and Clark). Psychological Science, 2018. PubMed record.
4. Share profile updates. LinkedIn Help.