Prep for a Discovery Call in Minutes with Notion AI

What This Does

A discovery call with a new lead goes better when you already know something about their business, but digging through their website and your own past email exchanges eats time you're not billing for. Notion AI can condense a page, a lead's notes, or a past thread into a short brief in a couple of minutes, so you walk into the call already oriented instead of improvising from a blank notepad.

Before You Start

• You have a Notion workspace and Notion AI turned on. It's a paid add-on layered on top of your existing Notion plan, ask your workspace admin if you don't see the AI icon on a page
• You've pasted or saved whatever background exists (the lead's website copy, past emails, a referral note) into a Notion page before starting
• For live-call transcription and auto-generated notes, you're using the desktop or mobile app rather than the browser

Steps

1. Gather what you already know into one page

Create or open a Notion page for the lead. Paste in anything relevant you already have: their website's About page text, the referral email that introduced you, any notes from an earlier phone screen.

2. Ask AI to summarize it into a brief

Click the AI icon at the top of the page and choose Summarize. Notion condenses the page into a short brief you can skim in under a minute. For a tighter result, tell it what you want: "Summarize this into a 3-sentence brief plus three questions I should ask on the call."

3. Review before the call

Read the brief for anything that sounds off or outdated, a lead's business can change between when a note was written and when the call actually happens, and correct anything you know to be wrong.

4. Use Meeting Notes to capture the call itself

If you're taking the call in the desktop or mobile app, use the Meeting Notes prompt that appears when you join, or trigger it manually inside the meeting page. Tell the client you're recording before you start, both as a courtesy and because some places require it. After the call ends, Notion generates a summary and a list of action items on the page automatically.

Real Example

Scenario: A referral just landed in your inbox for a small landscaping company that wants a new site. You have their current (dated) website URL and the two-sentence referral email, and the call is in twenty minutes.

What you do: Paste the website's About page text and the referral email into a new Notion page. Click the AI icon, choose Summarize, and ask: "Summarize this into a 3-sentence brief plus three questions I should ask on the call."

What you get: A brief noting their current site has no online booking, mentions two service areas, and hasn't been updated with recent project photos, plus three suggested questions about their booking process, service area growth, and current hosting situation.

What you do with it: You open the call already asking about their booking workflow instead of "so, tell me about your business," which reads as more prepared in the first ninety seconds than most competing quotes will.

Tips

• Keep the source page short and relevant. Feeding it your entire inbox history with a lead produces a vaguer brief than feeding it the three things that actually matter.
• The brief is a starting point, not a script. Skim it, then let the actual conversation go wherever the client takes it.
• If Meeting Notes captures something wrong (a technical term or a name misheard), fix it in the page right after the call while your own memory of the call is still fresh.

A Caution on Client Data

Discovery notes sometimes include a prospect's revenue, staffing details, or other information they'd consider private, especially if the referral email includes context you weren't supposed to pass along verbatim. Keep that kind of detail out of any page you might later share, template, or reuse for another client's brief.

Tool interfaces change. If a button has moved, look for similar AI or summarize options near the top of a Notion page.