Account Research & Intelligence

Create an account research template in a spreadsheet with sections: Company Overview (what they do, size, stage), Recent News (funding, launches, executive hires), Tech Stack (tools they use), Pain Indicators (signals they have your problem), Key Contacts (names, titles, LinkedIn URLs), Personalization Hooks (specific reference points for outreach).

Select 10 target accounts from your ICP; spend 15-20 minutes researching each using LinkedIn, company website, Crunchbase, news search, G2 reviews, job postings.

Set pass threshold: complete research for >=8 accounts, and personalized outreach to researched accounts yields >=30% reply rate vs <=15% for non-researched accounts within 1 week.

For each account, identify 2-3 personalization hooks: recent funding round ("Congrats on Series B"), new executive hire ("Saw you brought on new CRO"), product launch ("Noticed you launched X"), pain indicator from job posting ("Hiring for Y role suggests you're scaling Z").

Use research to craft personalized first lines in outreach emails: "Saw [Company] just raised $X to expand into [market]—as you scale, [pain point] becomes critical. We help companies like [similar company] solve this by [value prop]."

Log research data in Attio with custom fields for recent_news, tech_stack, pain_indicators, personalization_hooks; track which hooks generate replies.

In PostHog, create events for account_researched and personalized_outreach_sent with properties for research depth and hooks used.

After outreach, track reply rates by research quality (deep research vs surface-level vs no research); measure whether personalization improves engagement.

After 1 week, compare reply rates: do researched accounts respond >=2x more than non-researched? If yes, research delivers ROI.

If >=8 accounts researched and reply rate >=30%, account research is valuable; document research process and proceed to Baseline; otherwise refine research sources or personalization approach.