Research a prospect before the first call

Everyone agrees you should research a prospect before the first call. Almost nobody does it consistently, because it costs twenty minutes and the call is in four.

This is the most reliably valuable thing an AI employee does in a sales context, and it needs nothing connected.

Ask for the brief

Open Chat, pick an employee, and ask. The important part is telling it what you are going to use the brief for, because "research this company" produces an encyclopedia entry and you need something you can read in the lift.

Research Acme Corp (acme.com). I have a first call with their Head of
Operations on Thursday.

Write me a one-page brief with:
  What they do, in two sentences, in plain language.
  How they make money, and who their customers are.
  Anything that changed in the last six months: funding, launches,
    leadership, layoffs, acquisitions.
  Two things I could open with that show I did the reading.
  Two risks or objections I should expect from an operations lead.

Cite a source for anything specific. If you cannot find something,
say so rather than inferring it. I would rather have a short brief
than a confident one.

"I would rather have a short brief than a confident one" is doing real work. Without it, research prompts tend to fill gaps with plausible industry generalities, and you find out in the meeting. An explicit licence to return less is what makes the gaps visible.

Check the two things you will actually say

Read the opener suggestions first, and check their sources.

These are the only two lines from the brief that will leave your mouth, and they are exactly the lines that will embarrass you if the funding round was three years ago or the launch was a competitor's. Everything else in the brief is context, and context being slightly stale is survivable.

File it against the record

Ask it to save the brief and attach it to the account.

Save that brief to Documents, and create the organization in the CRM if
we do not have it. Link the document to the organization record, and log
an activity noting that I have a first call on Thursday.

The CRM is part of Tenfold, so this needs nothing connected. This is the step that turns a one-off piece of research into something the next person to touch the account can find.

Then stop doing it one at a time

Once the shape of the brief is right, it becomes a standing job: every new organization in the CRM gets one automatically, before anyone asks.

Every weekday at 7am, check the CRM for organizations created in the
last 24 hours with no linked brief. For each one, research it and write
the brief using our standard format, then link it to the record.

If there are none, say so and stop.

What good looks like

You walk into the call knowing what they do and one specific true thing about their year, and it took you ninety seconds of reading.

The failure mode to watch for is the brief that is fluent and sourceless. If you find yourself unable to check a claim quickly, tighten the citation instruction rather than trusting it.

Also covers

Writing outreach that references something real. The brief above is what makes this possible, and the order matters: research first, then write. Asking for personalised outreach without the research produces the flattery that every inbox has learned to delete.

Using the brief you just wrote, draft a first outreach email to their Head
of Operations.

Open with the specific thing you found, not with a compliment about their
company. Say why it makes me think we are relevant, in one sentence. Ask
for a short call.

Under 120 words. No "I hope this finds you well", no "I was impressed by".

Use only facts from the brief. If the brief did not turn up anything
specific enough to open with, say so and do not write the email. A generic
one is worse than none.

That refusal is the whole discipline. Some companies genuinely have nothing public worth referencing, and the honest response is to reach them another way rather than to open with something that could have been sent to anyone.