Prospect research: what to check before you message someone

Prospect research is the few minutes between finding a name and writing to them. Skip it and you send messages to people who left the company, companies that were never a fit, and reasons that turned out to be wrong. Overdo it and you spend an hour per person. Five minutes is usually right.

Here's the checklist, in the order that saves the most time: each step can rule a prospect out before you spend time on the next.

The five-minute checklist

1. Read the company's own website

Not a database summary, the actual homepage. In one minute you can tell what they sell, who they sell to, roughly how big they are and whether they fit your ideal customer profile. Databases often get industries and sizes wrong; a company's own words rarely do.

When Audyense started reading each company's homepage before showing a prospect, it rejected 2 of the first 4 companies in one test run: they matched on paper and didn't fit once you read what they actually do.

2. Find a reason to write now

Look for something dated: a job posting for the role your product supports, a new leader, a funding round, a launch, or a post where they describe the problem. Buying signals in B2B sales has 20 to look for. Check it's real: open the posting on the company's own job board, check the date on the announcement.

3. Check the person owns the problem

• At a company under 50 people, a founder or the head of the team is usually right.
• At a larger one, the person who'd manage the new hire, or who owns the budget for the team.
• Avoid people who'd only forward you on. "Product Manager" is rarely the buyer of a sales tool, even at a perfect company.

4. Check they're still there

This is the step most often skipped, and the one that wastes the most messages. Contact data ages fast: in one dataset we tested, only about 30% of records had been updated in the last year. Open their LinkedIn profile: is the current role at this company? Does their headline name a different employer? If so, they've moved on.

5. Find one detail to make it theirs

A recent post, a talk, a line on their company's blog, a product they launched. One detail is enough; two starts to feel like surveillance. If you can't find one, the reason from step 2 is enough.

What not to research

• Personal details: family, holidays, hobbies. It's unsettling and adds nothing.
• Their full career history. You only need the current role.
• Every person at the company. Pick one.

Doing it at scale

Five minutes for 10 people a day is fine. For 50 it's most of a morning. Audyense runs these checks before a prospect is shown: it reads each company's homepage and judges the fit against your profile, finds and dates the buying signal, picks people by the titles in your ICP, and leaves out anyone whose own headline names another employer. Every prospect then shows where each fact came from, so your five minutes become one.