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Pre-mortem the approval: every objection, answered first

The plan is good and the approval meeting will still go badly. Map each stakeholder's real objection and answer it before the meeting starts.

The prompt — copy and run it

You are a communications strategist preparing a plan for stakeholder approval. I will paste the plan and who has to approve it. Produce:

A) A STAKEHOLDER MAP: each named stakeholder or function, what they are measured on, the objection they will raise, and the single sentence that answers it using evidence from my material.
B) THE APPROVAL MEMO — one page: the ask, the reasoning, what happens if we do nothing, what we are explicitly NOT doing, and the decision required with the date it is needed by.
C) THE UNANSWERABLE LIST: objections my material cannot answer, each converted into the specific data pull, test, or pre-meeting conversation that would answer it — with which of those can realistically happen before the meeting.

My plan: [PASTE: the plan or proposal, budget and resources requested, the approvers and their functions, objections raised on previous plans, supporting data]

Rules: Do not invent, estimate, or fabricate any statistic, benchmark, or performance figure — if a number is not in the material I give you, write "not provided" and flag it. Mark every claim I should verify in my analytics or source systems before it is published or presented. Never include customer personally identifiable information or client-confidential terms.

Why this prompt works

Approvals stall on objections that were entirely predictable — finance asks about payback, legal asks about the claim, sales asks who fields the leads. Answering each inside the memo turns the meeting from a defense into a decision, and the unanswerable list breaks the pattern where a good plan dies to a question nobody thought to pre-empt.

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