The extra round before the meeting

Tomorrow, we are meeting a law firm for a discovery conversation about MAS.Ai.

The first round of preparation gave us the firm: its services, locations, growth and the roles of the people in the room. It was enough to avoid arriving uninformed. It was also enough to produce a fairly generic meeting.

Then we took one more round.

This time, we looked for the people behind the titles. What had they built? What had they written or spoken about? Which responsibilities had they carried over time? What could their public work tell us about how they might evaluate a new commercial intelligence system?

The extra round changed the preparation.

A job title became a history of building organisations and relationships. A partner profile became a combination of legal craft, entrepreneurship and commercial judgment. A systems responsibility became a clue that digitalisation would be assessed as a change in work, not simply as new technology.

None of this gave us the answer. It gave us better hypotheses.

We could now anticipate several reasonable objections: perhaps they already solve this through their network; perhaps the signal will arrive too late; perhaps lawyers will not act on it; perhaps the evidence will not be strong enough; perhaps the workflow will create more work than value; perhaps the economics will not justify another system.

Those objections may be wrong. That is not the point.

Their value is that they change the discovery questions. Instead of asking whether they want more leads, we can ask where their current process loses timing, relevance or ownership. Instead of presenting MAS.Ai as the answer, we can test whether there is a meaningful gap at all.

What changed: The preparation moved from a company brief to a set of testable hypotheses about the people, the room and the likely resistance.

What I think matters: Good meeting preparation is not about demonstrating how much research you have done. It is about retiring the lazy questions before the meeting, so the conversation can start closer to the real problem. The first round tells you who is coming. The extra round helps you understand how they may say no — and what you need to learn before you deserve a yes.

What remains uncertain: Public information shows traces, not internal truth. It cannot reveal current priorities, capacity or buying intent. The hypotheses must therefore remain disposable. Their job is to improve listening, not to make us fall in love with our own story.

Preparation does not give us the answer. It helps us discover it.