Recipes / Pre-meeting brief from Salesforce + web

Pre-meeting brief from Salesforce + web

Salesforce + Perplexity

IntermediateAEsCustomer successSales leaders

Who it's for

AEs on Salesforce who want a one-page brief before every external meeting. It's the same workflow as the HubSpot pre-meeting brief, using Salesforce's hosted MCP servers.

What you get

One-page brief before an expansion call. Sample output: every company and person in it is fictional.

Meeting: Wed 11:30, Fernhill Software (fictional) with Dana Okafor, Head of RevOps

Opportunity: 'Fernhill expansion: 40 seats', $36,000, stage Proposal/Price Quote, close date Nov 14
Next step on record: "Send revised quote" (set 9 days ago)
Last activities: demo (Oct 2), pricing email (Oct 6), two calls with no notes
Open tasks: Revised quote (due yesterday)

News (last 30 days, with sources):
- Fernhill announced a partnership with a payroll provider [1]
- Hiring 6 sales roles [2]

Three questions to ask:
1. Does the partnership change the rollout timeline for the 40 seats?
2. Who besides Dana signs the expansion?
3. Is the revised quote still the blocker?

Risks: overdue quote; two calls with no notes logged.
Log this as a task on the opportunity? (yes/no)

Time and cost

Estimate About 3–5 minutes per meeting, once an admin has set up Salesforce.

Assumptions: One meeting: a handful of Salesforce reads and one or two Perplexity searches.

Exact credit costs depend on your plan with each vendor. Check the tool pages before a large run.

MCP servers

Every server is confirmed in: ClaudeCursor

Set up in a chat app

Every server in this recipe is confirmed for Claude. Connect each one, then paste the prompts below into one conversation.

Developer setup

Auth setup and mcp.json for Claude Code and Cursor
  • Salesforce: Sign in with OAuth in your client (run /mcp in Claude Code). Do it once interactively, and the client stores and refreshes the token.
  • Perplexity: Sign in with OAuth, or pass an API key as a Bearer token for headless use.

Put this in .mcp.json (Claude Code, project root) or ~/.cursor/mcp.json (Cursor). Swap the example keys for your own, and don't commit real ones. Remove the // comment lines if your client requires strict JSON.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "salesforce": {
      "url": "https://api.salesforce.com/platform/mcp/v1/platform/sobject-all"
    },
    "perplexity": {
      "url": "https://api.perplexity.ai/mcp"
      // headless alternative: "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_PERPLEXITY_API_KEY" }
    }
  }
}

Step-by-step prompts

  1. Find the account for my next meeting in Salesforce (I'll name the company if you can't tell). Pull its open opportunity: stage, amount, close date, next step, the last 5 activities and open tasks. Read only.
  2. Use Perplexity to get news about the company from the last 30 days, plus anything relevant to our product category. Cite sources with dates.
  3. Write a one-page brief: who they are, where the opportunity stands, what changed since the last touch, three questions to ask, and risks.
  4. Optionally log the brief as a task on the opportunity, after I approve it.

Run it on a schedule (optional)

Where this goes wrong

Gotchas

Download

Get the prompts, guardrails and expected output as one Markdown file. Paste it into a Claude Project or ChatGPT project's instructions, or save it as CLAUDE.md for Claude Code.

Download pre-meeting-brief-salesforce.md

Vendor sites: Perplexity. If we join an affiliate program, these links will be labeled as affiliate links.