How to prep for a sales call using a prospect's Linkedin and X activity

Why the days before the call are worth watching

Most call prep is a snapshot. You read the profile once, maybe the company's last press release, and that's it. The trouble is that a profile tells you who someone is, while their recent activity tells you what's on their mind this week.

The gap between booking and the meeting is usually a week or two. That's a lot of time for a prospect to comment on a competitor's launch, like a post about a problem you solve, or share something about a reorg. Any one of those changes how you'd open the conversation.

Comments tend to be the most useful. A post is polished and written for an audience. A comment on someone else's thread is quicker and more candid, and it's where people say things like "we tried that and it didn't stick."

So how do you catch it? The free way is already built into both sites. Linkedin shows a person's recent activity. Open their profile, scroll to the Activity section, and click Show all. You'll see tabs for posts, comments, and reactions (some profiles show fewer, depending on what the person shares). On X, open the account and check the Posts and Replies tabs. Likes on X have been private since 2024, so you won't see those anywhere.

For one meeting a week, I'd do this the morning of the call and stop there. Fifteen minutes across two or three people is plenty.

It breaks down when you have eight meetings a week with three attendees each. Nobody opens 24 activity tabs every morning. And checking only on the day of the call means you see the last few items, with no sense of what came up in between.

Watching attendees automatically

The automated version flips the order. Instead of you going to the profile, the activity comes to you as it happens, from the day the meeting is booked until the day it's over.

In MultiFollow, each person you watch is a tracker. You add a Linkedin profile or an X account, and we check it for new posts, comments, and likes on Linkedin, and posts and replies on X. We start from the moment you add the tracker, so the manual check above is still the way to see what they did before that. You don't follow anyone from your own account, so the prospect doesn't see anything.

1. Add the attendees when the meeting is booked

The simplest version is manual: when a demo lands on your calendar, paste each attendee's Linkedin URL into the dashboard. If they're active on X, add that too.

If you'd rather not do it by hand, the REST API can create trackers for you (it's on Business and above). A common setup is a Zapier or n8n flow that fires when a meeting is booked in Calendly or your CRM and calls the API with the attendee's Linkedin URL. The catch is that a booking gives you a name and an email, not a profile URL. Adding a "Linkedin profile" question to your booking form is the easiest fix. Otherwise you'll need an enrichment step in Clay or similar before the API call.

2. Send the alerts to the rep who owns the call

Each tracker can have its own Slack webhook, which overrides the account-level one. So you can send every alert about Tuesday's attendees to the rep's own channel, instead of mixing them into a team-wide feed. Email works on every plan if Slack isn't an option (Slack and API webhooks start on Business).

A comment alert in Slack looks something like this:

New Linkedin comment from Maria Chen (Head of Revenue Operations, Example Freight)
On a post by Tom Reyes: "Multi-touch sounds great until you try to explain
it to the CFO. We went back to first-touch plus a sanity check..."
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

(The people and company above are example data.)

That one comment gives you a better opening question than anything on her profile.

3. Narrow it with keywords if they're very active

Some people post and comment ten times a day. If that's too much, add keywords to the tracker (up to 10, comma-separated), and we'll only send activity that mentions one of them. Your category, a competitor's name, and a pain point you solve are a good start. For a deeper look, see our guide on filtering watchlist alerts with keywords.

4. Pause or remove the tracker after the call

This step is easy to forget, and it's what makes the habit affordable. Once the meeting is done, either pause the tracker (you can resume it later without setting it up again) or delete it to free the slot for next week's calls. If the deal moves forward, keep it running. At that point the person is part of an account you're working, so the tracker has earned its slot.

How many people can you cover?

Because trackers come and go with your calendar, you only need enough slots for the meetings on your calendar at any one time.

As a rough guide, a rep with five meetings in the next two weeks and two attendees each needs ten Linkedin slots, which puts them on Business. A founder with one or two calls a week and a single attendee on each can get by on Essential with email alerts.

A Linkedin company page counts toward the same Linkedin limit, so if you also want to watch the prospect's company page, budget one extra slot.

What to do with what you find

Quoting someone's post back to them word for word would feel strange. What you want is a better first question. "I saw you commented on Tom's post about attribution. Is that something you're working through right now?" is a lot easier to answer than "So, what are your priorities this quarter?"

Use it lightly. One reference in the first five minutes is enough, and keep it to what they said in a professional setting. Their personal life stays out of it. If you want more on how to bring it up, we wrote about reaching out after a prospect posts on Linkedin, and most of it applies to the first minutes of a call too.

One thing this won't help with is job changes. If an attendee switches companies quietly between booking and the meeting, we won't flag it. Your CRM enrichment is the better place for that.