For me, it started in 2015 with an unexpected email from the CEO of Salesforce:

The next week, I was on a plane to San Francisco to meet with some of the company’s top executives. As a 24-year-old software developer who had just launched Crystal, this felt like an abrupt call-up to the Big Leagues.

I was an introverted, inexperienced hacker, and way out of my comfort zone. I felt unprepared and unqualified. "Pitch" meetings always ended the same way for me:

That same week, WIRED and CNN both wrote stories about our company and I suddenly found myself in many more of these conversations: Fortune 500 executives, investors, media, and other intimidating business leaders.

Out of necessity, I prepared obsessively for these conversations. To start a meeting with confidence, I needed to feel over-prepared, right up to the point of being creepy. I wanted the other person to think, “Wow, this guy really did his homework.”

Research became my specialty. I quickly learned that the first 60 seconds of a call were the most important, and how to consistently make a good impression with a simple, thoughtful, specific observation about the other person. By proving that I cared enough to do my research, I could turn any skeptic into a champion.

And you know what? It worked. Over time, my colleagues and I used this strategy to build relationships with leaders at Salesforce, HubSpot, and many of our top clients. What we lacked in experience, charisma, and talent, we made up for in research, consistency, and practice.

For the past decade, we’ve had a front row seat to watch many CEOs, executives, and GTM professionals who have truly mastered the pre-meeting strategy.

They establish credibility almost immediately. Their tone is relaxed, but still projecting authority. They control the conversation without dominating. They can anticipate the toughest questions, objections, and pain points ahead of time. They're prepared.

Every company wants their GTM team to perform like this. But most companies haven’t even defined a pre-meeting strategy to scale in the first place; it’s too costly, too labor-intensive, or simply too complicated to scale. 

Keep growing,