How to research someone before a meeting
To research someone before a meeting, work through five sources in order — their LinkedIn profile, their company's website, recent news, your mutual connections, and your own email history — then condense what you find into a short brief you can skim beforehand. Done thoroughly, this takes about 30 to 35 minutes per person.
Below is the full method, with a realistic time estimate for each step. If you have back-to-back meetings and cannot spend half an hour on each, skip to automating it at the end.
Step 1. Start with their LinkedIn profile
~10 minutesLinkedIn is the fastest way to understand someone professionally. Note their current role and how long they have held it, their career path (especially any former employer you share), their education, and the headline they chose to describe themselves — it tells you how they want to be seen. If they post, skim their recent activity for what is top of mind.
Step 2. Read their company's website
~5 minutesUnderstand what the company actually does, who its customers are, and what it is prioritizing right now. Check the team or about page to see where your contact sits and who they report to. This is what turns a generic pitch into one that speaks to their situation.
Step 3. Search for recent news
~5 minutesSearch the person's name and their company for anything from the last few months: a funding round, a product launch, a leadership change, a conference talk. A single recent, specific detail is the most reliable way to show you did your homework — and it is exactly the kind of context that goes stale, so a profile alone will not surface it.
Step 4. Look for mutual connections
~5 minutesCheck who you both know. A shared connection is worth more than any cold opener: it gives you a warm reference, a possible introduction, and a read on the person from someone you trust. On LinkedIn, mutual connections are listed on the profile; it is worth a quick message to a mutual contact before an important meeting.
Step 5. Review your email history with them
~5 minutesSearch your inbox for the person's name and email address. Prior correspondence tells you how you already know each other — who introduced you, what you last discussed, and any commitments left open. This is the single most overlooked step, and the one that most changes how a conversation opens, because it is personal to you and invisible to anyone researching the same person.
Step 6. Write it into a short brief
~5 minutesPull the useful pieces into a few lines you can skim right before the meeting: who they are, why the meeting matters, how you know them, and two or three talking points. The act of condensing is what makes the research usable — a page of notes you never reread does not help you in the room.
What good pre-meeting research produces
The point of the exercise is not to know everything — it is to walk in with three things: a clear picture of who the person is and what they care about, an honest read on how you already know them, and a couple of specific, non-generic openers. If your notes give you those, they are doing their job. If they are a wall of copied text you will never reread, you over-collected and under-synthesized.
The 60-second version
These are exactly the steps RunDossier automates. You enter a name (optionally with a company or title to disambiguate), and it locates the person's LinkedIn profile, adds context from web search, and — if you connect Gmail — searches your own correspondence for how you already know them. It then synthesizes all of it into one brief: an executive summary, professional background, relationship context, and suggested talking points. The whole thing takes under 60 seconds, and every fact comes from the gathered data — nothing is fabricated.
It does the same research you would do by hand — the difference is that it can do it for five meetings before lunch. Email content is analyzed in real time and never stored, and your dossiers are private to you.