Prepare pre-call research briefs with GPT-5 and Firecrawl

Say Goodbye to Manual Prospect Research! Walk into every discovery call fully prepared: company background, recent news, and tailored questions ready, with zero minutes spent prepping. This AI-powered workflow watches your Google Calendar for upcoming discovery calls, sends an AI out to research your prospects across the web, and drops a neat briefing into Slack and Google Drive. Research that ate 45 minutes per call now runs itself. Last updated: September 2026. Why You'll Love This Workflow Get your time back: Prep time drops from 45 minutes to zero. Save money: No pricey sales intelligence tools, no virtual assistants hired just to google companies. Zero duplicates: It remembers which calls it already prepped for, so no repeat alerts. Built to scale: 1 call or 20 tomorrow, prep quality stays the same. Who Is This For? Sales Reps (AEs & SDRs): Nail high-stakes discovery calls with automated background checks and news updates. Founders & Consultants: Spot pain points and company growth signals before you even say hello. Agency Ops Teams: Standardize team prep and organize all client data neatly into Google Drive folders. How The Magic Happens 1. The Kickoff: Every day at 4:00 PM, the automation wakes up to prep for tomorrow's meetings. 2. Finding the Meetings: It grabs all your upcoming events from Google Calendar. 3. Filtering: It specifically looks for keywords (like "discovery" or "call") and ignores any meetings it has already researched for you. 4. The AI Researcher: An AI agent uses Firecrawl to scour the web, read the company’s website, and dig up recent news, leadership changes, and funding info. 5. Filing It Away: The workflow creates a dedicated client folder in Google Drive (or finds the existing one) and saves a structured research doc. 6. The Ping: You get a handy summary in your ops Slack channel with the brief and a direct link to the Drive folder. What You Need to Get Started n8n instance (The engine that runs the automation) Google Calendar (To find your meetings) OpenAI API (The brain doing the research) Firecrawl API (For reading websites) Google Drive (For saving the docs) Slack (For sending you alerts) Easy Setup Steps 1. Import the JSON file to your n8n instance. 2. Connect your accounts: Log into your Google, OpenAI, Firecrawl, and Slack accounts so the workflow has permission to do its job. 3. Tell it where to put things: In the Search Client Folder node, pick your main "CLIENTS" Drive folder. In the Notify Ops Channel node, pick the Slack channel you want the alerts to go to. 4. Tweak the keywords: If you call your meetings something specific (like "Intro" or "Demo"), update the keywords in the Extract Call Details node. 5. Give it a test run: Trigger the workflow manually to make sure it catches a test event and generates a brief! Make It Your Own The Basics: Change the trigger words to match how you name your meetings. Adjust the timer! If you'd rather have the briefs run at 6:00 AM instead of 4:00 PM, just change the schedule node. Take It to the Next Level: LinkedIn Sync: Add a tool like Proxycurl to pull the prospect's actual LinkedIn profile. CRM Integration: Have it drop the notes directly into Salesforce or HubSpot instead of just Google Drive. Email Delivery: Set it up to email the brief to you 15 minutes before the meeting starts. Quick Troubleshooting Not finding any events? Make sure your calendar invites actually have the trigger words in the title. Research coming up blank? If the prospect used a personal @gmail.com email to book, the AI won't be able to scan a company website. Getting duplicates? If you restart or move your n8n instance, it might "forget" what it already researched. --- Quick Answers When does it prep? Daily at 4:00 PM for tomorrow's meetings. Change the schedule node for 6:00 AM briefs instead. How does it find my calls? It scans Google Calendar for keywords like "discovery" or "call" and skips already-researched meetings. Where does the brief land? A structured doc in