Prospect Research: What to Look Up, Where to Find It and What to Skip

Person: What This Buyer Owns and Cares About

Person research is about their job, not their life. You want to know what they're responsible for, how long they've been in the role and what they talk about publicly.

• Title and tenure. New in the role often means open to change. Five years in means they built what's there now.
• About section and headline. How they describe their own job, in their words.
• Recent work posts. Priorities, opinions and problems they've named publicly.
• Previous companies. Whether they've used a tool like yours before.

Stop at the professional line. Family, hobbies and personal accounts are off limits. The guide to cold email personalization shows which personal details help and which backfire.

Timing: Signals That Make Now Different

Timing is the most valuable answer and the one most reps skip. A good fit with no trigger can wait; a good fit with a fresh trigger deserves a message this week.

• Hiring for a role your product supports. The strongest everyday signal.
• New leadership. A new VP often reviews tools and processes in the first months.
• Funding, expansion or a launch. New goals create new problems.
• Tooling changes. A new CRM or platform creates gaps around it.
• Stated priorities. An interview, keynote or earnings call where leadership names a goal for the year.

Date every signal. News older than about six months rarely reads as timely. The full guide to buying signals ranks them by strength and pairs each with an outreach play.

The Best Prospect Research Sources

A handful of sources covers almost every question. Paid tools speed things up, but the free ones below are where the context lives.

Set alerts for your top accounts. Google Alerts on the company name and Sales Navigator account alerts surface new signals without a weekly manual search.

Use paid databases for contacts and firmographics. Tools like ZoomInfo, Apollo and Sales Navigator are good at who works there and how big the company is. For what's changing and why it matters, go to the source.

What to Skip in Prospect Research

Knowing what to ignore is what keeps research to minutes instead of an hour. Skip anything that won't change what you say or who you say it to.

• Personal life. Family, health, home, personal social accounts. It's unhelpful and it can feel invasive.
• Mission statements. "We put customers first" fits every company. It gives you nothing to say.
• Stale news. Last year's funding round or a launch from two years ago.
• Vanity numbers. Follower counts, awards and "fastest growing" badges rarely tie to a problem.
• Facts you can't verify. If you can't find the source again, don't put it in an email.
• Duplicate digging. If a teammate already researched the account, start from their notes in the CRM instead of from scratch.
• Depth the deal doesn't justify. Small deals get a two-minute pass. Save the hour for strategic accounts and use account research for those.

Turning Prospect Research Into Outreach

Research only pays off when it becomes a sentence the prospect cares about. Compress your notes into one line per question, then write the opener from the timing and company answers.

Fit:     [why they match your ICP]
Company: [what they sell / what's changing]
Person:  [what they own, in their words]
Timing:  [dated signal + source]

Opener:  [Timing fact]. [What that usually means for someone in their role].

Example: "Halden has three pricing analyst roles open (careers page, September), which for an ops leader usually means spot quotes are waiting on people." For a fill-in version, use the sales research template, and for the step-by-step routine see how to research a prospect.

Doing it for every account. Research per prospect is the first thing reps cut when the list gets long. Edithly's prospect research reads each prospect's website and public signals while it writes the email, call script or one-pager, and shows the facts it used with sources so you can check them in seconds.