The day-before hack, opening with confirmation and the quiet qualification.

If you treat the sales meeting as the starting line, you’re wasting valuable time. Getting a prospect to agree to a meeting is hard, but let’s be honest, half the time you’re not even sure they’re a real buyer yet.

To make fast, reliable founder sales, you need to break the ice before the first sales meeting. And that’s something SA sales pro Heinrich Swanepoel knows a lot about.

He’s spent years building partner networks and sales teams across 24 African countries — first at Sage, then as Head of Business Development for Africa at Deel Local Payroll (powered by PaySpace), and now as Chief Commercial Officer at Matrix Software. 

Here’s Heinrich's ultimate pre-meeting phone call workflow that builds rapport, qualifies prospects and shortens the path to yes or no.

Don’t email or WhatsApp, call them up to say you’re just confirming the meeting. Then use those two to five minutes to get a natural read on their tone, hear what’s going on in their world and pick up whether they’re actually excited/prepared for your meeting.

The magic is: You do all of this before you’ve walked into the room.

As Heinrich puts it: “We used to, before driving out, just pick up the phone and say, hey, I’m driving, I just want to confirm that you’re actually going to be there when I get there. But these days, with meetings online, we jump on back-to-back meetings and nobody actually phones.”

That gap is your opportunity.

Not the morning of, that’s too late, and they’re already in their day. Not two days before, that’s too far out, nothing to confirm yet. Aim for between 9 and 11 on the day prior; that’s the sweet spot. Put a recurring 15-minute block in your calendar called “pre-meeting calls” and batch them.

“Hi Thandi, it’s Rene — just phoning quickly to confirm we’re still good for 10 am tomorrow?” That’s it. You’re not selling. You’re being professional. Nine times out of ten, they’ll say yes and then keep talking.

This is the whole point. People who wouldn’t give you two sentences in a formal meeting will casually mention that they’re prepping for a board review, that their head of finance just resigned, that they’ve been looking at three vendors, including yours. 

Let them talk. Ask one light question if the door opens: “How’s your week been?” is usually enough.

Heinrich’s take: “That intro can actually have so many points that you can clarify, confirm, and check — and that for me becomes the chitchat.” You’re not manufacturing small talk in the real meeting. You’ve already had it.

You’re listening for three things: 

You’re not asking these directly, just picking them up as context. If the call is flat and they sound like they’re doing you a favour, that’s data. As Heinrich notes, “It also helps with your time as well. If you realise this is going to be a crap call, say: listen, let’s only make it half an hour.” 

You might shorten tomorrow’s meeting from an hour to 30 minutes and save yourself the difference.

“Great, looking forward to chatting tomorrow. Enjoy the rest of your day.” 

No agenda-sending, no document-attaching, no “just wanted to share one more thing.” You’ve done the job. Just say see ya and hang up.

First, almost nobody does it here. The bar for pre-meeting effort in South Africa is a LinkedIn connection request, which everyone ignores. A phone call lands differently; it signals that you take the meeting seriously, which quietly signals that your time is worth taking seriously too.

Second, South African businesses still run heavily on relational trust. We buy from people we like, and likability is hard to manufacture in a 45-minute first meeting with a stranger. A low-stakes phone call the day before does some of that work in advance. By the time you actually meet, there’s a thread of prior contact to pick up on, and the first ten minutes, which usually get wasted on forced rapport, are already banked.

Heinrich makes a related point about going one level deeper when the meeting is in person: “I prefer still going on site, because the reception lady can probably tell you more about the customer and the people you’re meeting than anybody will ever tell you.” 

The principle is the same. Sales intelligence lives in the margins around the meeting, not inside it. Most founders miss it because they only show up for the meeting itself.

You walk into tomorrow’s meeting knowing more than the other person expects you to know. You’ve already built a small piece of rapport. You’ve qualified softly without them feeling qualified. And if the signals were bad, you’ve saved yourself half a meeting you weren’t going to close anyway.

It costs you two minutes. It’s the cheapest piece of sales infrastructure you have.

This workflow is one tactic from a much longer session. In Heinrich’s full Founder Collab masterclass on Founder-Led Sales: How to Close Without Feeling Pushy, he walks through his complete system for: 

You can get access to Heinrich’s full playbook, plus 40+ other masterclasses from South African operators, founders and experts when you join The Founder Collab.

This news first appeared in our 22 April ‘26 edition on Champions Link sports sponsorship.

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