The LABEL Method: How To Use LinkedIn And AI To Walk Into Every Call Prepared

That’s the whole idea behind what we’ve been building out. LinkedIn and AI are a perfect pair, and nowhere is that more true than in pre-call planning. There’s a mountain of publicly available information sitting right there on someone’s profile, and if you’re not using it before a discovery call or a first sales conversation, you’re leaving the easiest kind of preparation on the table.

So because we can never resist a good acronym, we built a method. We’re calling it LABEL.

L Is For LinkedIn Profile Download

Before any call with a prospect or client, you want to know who you’re talking to. Most people visit the profile and scan it. That works, but it’s easy to miss things that way. Instead, download the profile as a PDF. It’s a free LinkedIn feature, no Sales Navigator required. Go to their profile, click the “More” tab, and you’ll see the option to save as PDF sitting right there.

Here’s what I love about it. You don’t have to be connected to someone to do this. Third degree, beyond, doesn’t matter. You get the full profile in a document you can actually reference, which means you catch details you’d have scanned right past.

A Is For Analyze The Priorities

This is the step most people skip entirely. Once you have the profile, use it to understand what this person’s job actually involves day to day. If you can find a job description on the company website, even better, since that lets you get specific about their responsibilities and bridge your conversation directly to their role.

Sometimes you won’t find a formal job description, especially if someone’s been in the role a while. That’s fine. Take their LinkedIn profile and ask AI what their responsibilities likely are based on the role and how what you offer connects to what they’re trying to achieve.

This matters because every buyer in the room cares about something different. A CFO is thinking about the investment. The person who owns the actual decision has a completely different set of pressures. You need to frame the conversation around what’s important to the specific person in front of you and how it helps them personally hit their goals, not a generic pitch that could apply to anyone.

B Is For Build The Ecosystem

Most deals involve more than one buyer, and it helps enormously to know who those people are before you ever get on a call.

If you have Sales Navigator, you can map the org chart directly. If you don’t, you can still work from the titles that typically show up in this kind of buying journey and go find those people on LinkedIn by name. You might not get everyone, but starting with an educated guess of who’s likely involved puts you miles ahead of walking in blind.

Once you know who they are, you can start socially surrounding them. Follow them on LinkedIn and engage with their content. You don’t need to connect yet, that can come after your first conversation.

And here’s a detail worth paying attention to. In that first call, you’re often talking to what we call the shopper, not the full buying committee. Once you’ve had that first conversation and earned the right to move forward, you can name the people who’d typically be looped in next and ask directly if you can get access to their calendars. You’re not asking who the CFO is because you already know. You’re asking permission to bring them in.

That distinction changes everything. Instead of asking “who else would be involved in a decision like this,” you get to ask “is Brynne Tillman involved in this type of decision?” Doing the research in advance makes their life easier and makes you look a whole lot sharper.

E Is For Equip AI With A Really Good Prompt

A well-built prompt is the difference between AI giving you something generic and AI giving you something you can actually use on the call. We use our CRISPY framework for this, which we wrote an entire book on, but here’s the shape of it for pre-call planning specifically.

Context. Start simple: you want to prepare for a call by deeply understanding the person or people you’re meeting with. You can go deeper too, adding the type of company, the market, and the problems they’re likely facing.

Role. Tell the AI what it’s acting as. Something like a strategic sales preparation and research assistant that understands your company deeply.

Inspiration. This is what you want the output to feel like. For us, that’s a conversation that comes across as informed and respectful of the other person’s priorities, curious rather than heavy on discovery, focused on learning with the intention of bringing value.

Scope. This might be the most important piece. Spell out exactly what you want back. A pre-call planning summary with a SWOT, likely competitors, their professional priorities and challenges, the solution they provide, the clients they serve if you can find them, topics they might care about, influencers they follow. You can also ask it to list your discovery questions and bridge each one to what you now know about their priorities. We use our CHIRP discovery framework here, but this works with whatever framework you already run.

Prohibitions. I keep a long list of these in my standing instructions. No assumptions beyond what’s actually in the profile and the website. No salesy questions that don’t lead somewhere useful. Depending on the call, I’ll even tell it to stay away from budget and authority and timing early on and focus instead on the challenge, the history of trying to solve it, the impact on the business, and the risk of not changing anything.

You. This is where you ask the AI to ask you questions, one at a time. Upload the PDF or PDFs of the people you’re meeting with. Share the website. Add any notes on how the meeting got set up. That’s what pulls everything together into something you can actually use.

All of this gives you the information to have an effective conversation, but you’re the one who brings the personality into it. You don’t know where the conversation is going to go. How someone answers, their tone, their body language, that’s where you read the room and adjust. AI can’t do that part. That’s where the humanity comes in.

So once you’ve got the bridged discovery questions back, don’t walk in and read them cold. Take another fifteen or twenty minutes, read through your notes, understand the bridge, understand their positioning. Know it well enough that it sounds like you, not like a script.

L Is For Leverage Shared Relationships For Intel

This last one could honestly come first. Before you get on a call, look at who you already know is connected to the people you’re meeting with.

Say you’ve got a call scheduled next week and you notice a colleague is connected to the person you’re meeting. Ask them how well they know each other. If the answer is “we worked together for years, he’s the greatest guy,” ask if you can mention that you spoke.

Then when you get on the call, in that first warm moment, you mention it. Their name came up with someone they know. That one line warms up the whole room.

That’s LABEL. LinkedIn profile download, analyze the priorities, build the ecosystem, equip AI with a good prompt, and leverage shared relationships for intel. None of it requires a premium LinkedIn account. All of it makes you walk into a call more prepared, more relevant, and a lot more likely to earn the next conversation.

If you want to dig into this further, join us for Be Our Guest Coaching, every third Thursday at 1PM Eastern. Check socialsaleslink.com/events for that and everything else we’ve got coming up, including our challenge weeks.

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