What to write down after a call, and what to leave out

Three lines, not a write-up

A full account of the conversation feels thorough and works against you. It takes ten minutes, so you put it off until the end of the day, and then you skip it. And when you do write it, nobody reads it back — including you, because four months later you're looking for one fact and have to wade through a page to find it.

What you do write fits in three lines:

• What they want. Not the product, the problem. "Loses quotes somewhere between his emails" is usable; "interested in a CRM" isn't.
• What you said or sent. Which figure, which condition, which promise. This is the part that stops an argument a month from now.
• What's in the way. A business partner on holiday, a budget that doesn't free up until April, a contract running to May. This is the most underrated of the three and often the most useful.

And then the part most people skip

A note with no next step is an archive. Pleasant to read back through, but it never does anything on its own.

Add a task with a date, even if that date is "in two months". That one field is the difference between a system that reminds you and a folder you have to remember to go and look in. There's more on setting that rhythm in the piece on following up.

What's better left out

A notes field feels private and isn't. Your colleague reads it, a new starter reads it a year from now, and the customer themselves has the right to ask what information you hold about them — a subject access request, and you have one month to answer it.

So the practical test before you hit save: would you say this out loud if they were reading over your shoulder? If not, it doesn't belong in there.

In practice that rules out judgements about people ("difficult bloke"), notes about health or personal circumstances — that's special category data, with much stricter rules — and speculation about what a competitor is up to. What is and isn't allowed is set out in the piece on customer data and UK GDPR.

When to do it

Straight after the call, before you open anything else. Not because that's tidy, but because the barrier is lowest then: it's still in your head and you don't have to reconstruct anything.

If you can't because you're on the road, dictate it into your phone and type it up that evening. That's worse than doing it there and then, and much better than not doing it.

A worked example

This is what it looks like when it works. Not pretty, but usable:

*Wants rid of the shared spreadsheet, loses quotes between his emails. Quoted £240 a year for the whole firm, two weeks to try it. Waiting on his business partner to agree, who's away until the 18th.*

Three sentences, forty seconds of work. Ring him in six weeks and you open with "did your partner give it the nod?" instead of "now, where were we?" — and he can hear that difference.