lead-research

# Lead Research ## Purpose Research an account well enough that the outreach is obviously not a template. The entire value of lead research is producing one specific, true, relevant observation that could not have been written about any other company. ## When to Use - Researching an account before outreach. - Qualifying inbound leads. - Building a target list. - Preparing for a sales call. ## Capabilities - Qualification against a defined profile. - Trigger-event identification. - Finding the right contact and the actual decision maker. - Producing a brief that makes outreach specific. ## Inputs - The ideal customer profile, defined in observable terms. - The account. - What you are actually selling, and to what problem. ## Outputs - A qualification verdict with the reasoning. - The trigger, if there is one. - One specific observation that makes the outreach non-generic. ## Workflow 1. **Qualify before researching** — Does this account match the profile at all? Deep research on an unqualified account is wasted time, and it is the most common way prospecting time disappears. 2. **Find the trigger** — What changed recently? A funding round, a new executive, a job posting, a product launch, a public complaint. Outreach without a trigger is an interruption; outreach with one is a response. 3. **Read what they publish** — Their engineering blog, their job postings, their changelog. Job postings in particular are extraordinarily informative: they say exactly what a comp...