The Two-Minute Pre-Call Research Routine
- No invented stats
- Written for UK readers
- 3 min read
- Published 19 September 2026
Pre-call research is the most respectable way to avoid making calls. It feels like work, it produces notes, and it can absorb twenty minutes per prospect without ever generating a conversation. Meanwhile the rep who spent two minutes and dialled has had four conversations in the time you spent reading a company's About Us page.
The argument isn't that research doesn't matter. It's that the returns fall off a cliff almost immediately, and nearly everything useful is available in about two minutes.
The routine
Set a timer if you have to. You're looking for four things, in this order.
- What they actually do, in your own words. Thirty seconds on their homepage. You need to be able to say what they sell and to whom without using their marketing language. If you can only parrot "we deliver innovative solutions", you don't know yet — click through to a product or services page.
- One thing that has changed. Thirty seconds. New site, new premises, a hiring push, an acquisition, a new service line, a director appointment. Change is what creates buying. Their LinkedIn page, their own news section and Companies House filings all surface this quickly.
- Who you're speaking to and how long they've been there. Thirty seconds on LinkedIn. Someone eight weeks into a role has a completely different conversation from someone eleven years in. New starters are looking to change things; long-tenured people built the thing you're proposing to replace.
- Your best guess at their problem, written down as one sentence. Thirty seconds of thinking, which is the part everyone skips.
That last step is the whole point. Research that doesn't end in a sentence you'll actually say on the call is just reading. Force yourself to complete: "I think the problem is that ______, and I'm going to open by asking about it."
What that sounds like on the call
The output of two minutes' work should be an opening that could only have been directed at this person. Not flattery — a hypothesis.
"Hi Priya — Sam from Fieldstack. I'll be quick. I noticed you've taken on the Leeds site as well as Sheffield since the spring. Usually when someone picks up a second site, the reporting that worked fine for one starts creaking. Is that fair, or have you got it sorted?"
Compare that with what twenty minutes of research typically produces: a rep who knows the company's founding year, its turnover, the CEO's name, and three of its clients, and who opens with "so tell me a bit about what you do." All that knowledge, none of it used.
When to spend longer — and how to earn it
The honest caveat: deal size changes the maths. If you're calling a two-hundred-person business where a signature is worth £80,000 and there are six stakeholders, two minutes is negligent. Enterprise deals justify an hour, because the cost of sounding uninformed is losing a rare opportunity, not losing one of forty dials.
Even then, I'd argue the extra time should go on different things — mapping who's involved, reading their last annual report, working out how they make money — rather than on a longer version of the same surface-level scan.
The test is simple. Ask yourself what you'd do differently on the call as a result of the next five minutes of reading. If the answer is "nothing, I'd just feel more prepared", that's not research, that's nerves. Dial.
If your list is so poor that no amount of research makes the calls worth making, the problem is upstream — see how to build a prospect list that's worth calling. And for what to do once they pick up, our cold calling framework covers the first thirty seconds in more depth.
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