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Turn a discovery call into a findings memo

Today

You get off a ninety minute call with four pages of notes and a strong feeling about what is wrong. Three days later you write it up, and half of what you send back is what you already believed walking in, because the actual quotes have gone cold.

With Claude

You paste the notes the same afternoon and get findings that each carry the line they came from, the contradictions in what the client told you sitting side by side, and the questions you still need answered before anyone prices the work.

The prompt

Paste this into claude.ai and replace anything in brackets.

You are helping me turn a discovery call into a findings memo for a client engagement.

Call notes or transcript: [paste your raw notes or the transcript here]
Who was on the call and their roles: [list names or titles, for example COO, VP of Operations]
What the client asked us to look at: [one or two sentences]
What I already know about this client from prior work: [paste it, or write SEE PROJECT KNOWLEDGE, or NONE]

Rules you must follow:
1. Use only the material I gave you. If something is not in it, write NOT STATED rather than filling the gap.
2. Keep three categories strictly separate: what the client said, what I appear to have inferred, and what is still unknown.
3. Do not add industry benchmarks, market figures, or comparisons to other companies. Not one.

Produce the memo in this order:
1. The situation in five sentences, in language the client would recognize as their own.
2. Findings. For each one give the finding in a single sentence, the exact note or quote it rests on, and how strong that evidence is: stated directly, implied, or thin.
3. Root causes: where two or more findings are probably the same underlying problem, and why you think so.
4. Open questions, ordered by how much the answer would change our recommendation. Mark the three I should ask before writing any proposal.
5. Contradictions: anything the client said that does not square with something else they said, quoted side by side.
6. The words and phrases they used repeatedly that we should mirror back in our writing.

Then stop and ask me up to five questions that would materially improve the memo.

What to skip in consulting and professional services firms

  • Anything your MSA, NDA, or client data policy does not clearly allow. Professional services contracts routinely restrict where client material can go, and many now carry specific AI or subprocessor language, so read the agreement and get written approval before you paste a client's documents anywhere. Know what your plan does too: on Free, Pro, and Max accounts your chats are used to improve Anthropic's models only if you turn that on in Privacy Settings, and Incognito chats are never used for it, while Team and Enterprise sit under the Commercial Terms, where inputs and outputs are not used for model training by default. When in doubt, work from anonymized material and keep the client's name out of it.
  • Any finding, benchmark, or figure in a client deliverable that Claude produced rather than you. No industry averages, no market sizes, no comparison companies, no percentages it filled in because the sentence wanted one. Paste your own analysis and let Claude write the argument around your numbers. A single invented benchmark that a client's team can disprove ends the engagement and the referral behind it.
  • Anything that requires seeing your systems. In the browser Claude cannot open your project tool, time tracker, billing, or the client's data room, so it cannot tell you where a project stands, whether you are over on hours, or what changed in an account this week. It knows only what you put in the chat or the project knowledge, and it does not know what happened after its training data ends unless you paste it in or have it search the web.

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Before you try it

More for consulting and professional services firms

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