burger
menu arrow
Features

Every tool you need for AI sales outreach

Independent AI sales assistant

An extra pair of hands for your sales growth

Our best AI emails

Clients' favorite emails generated by AiSDR

End-to-end AI Sales Outreach

All your bases covered within one solution

AI for HubSpot sales

Make the best of your CRM data

AiSDR Website Illustrations | Starts and lightning icon 1
Speak with our AI

Let AiSDR try and convince you to book a meeting with us

Explore Q2 2024 outreach benchmarks Grab my copy
menu arrow
menu arrow
<Back to blog

30 Tactics to Research Sales Prospects and Companies

30 Tactics to Research Sales Prospects and Companies
Jan 14, 2025
By:
Joshua Schiefelbein

Find out where to look for prospect data and tactics to use

18m 11s reading time

Companies often waste marketing resources on broad email campaigns or rely on only a handful of sources when prospecting for leads. However, good lead research is easy if you know where to look and what to look for.

Why is prospect research critical?

Prospect research (or lead research) is the systematic search and evaluation of potential buyers for your products or services. It requires you to gather precise data about your prospective customers and clients, such as their industry, company structure, purchasing behavior, regulatory landscape, and pain points.

The payoff of investing so much time and effort into lead research is that it enables you to execute more personalized sales campaigns instead of overly broad ads and mass emails.

How to use the results of sales prospect research

If you have a reliable research methodology, it will help you collect relevant data while ignoring extra noise. 

Once you’ve collected data about your leads and prospects, here are some of the ways you put your research data to good use.

Develop an ideal customer profile (ICP)

Use your research to identify the characteristics of the most valuable customer for your services or products. Include all relevant details, especially key factors like your ideal customer’s location, industry, company size, budget, and technical stack.

Then, apply these insights to develop a best-fit rating that tells which companies match your image of an ideal customer. Next, use the ratings to score and prioritize leads, so you can focus on high-potential opportunities.

Understand key pain points

Use the research to customize your outreach. It should reflect each prospect’s unique industry conditions, recent changes within the company, known challenges, and precise needs.

Focus on the core issues your prospects face — not obvious surface issues but problems you infer from their public statements, social media pages, and even employee feedback.

Account for specific factors

Companies and individual leads require a different approach. Your prospect research may include organizational data and personal details. 

Use organizational data in a factual, objective way. However, personal information about people should be treated with tact.

For example, if you use AI tools to personalize outreach, consider what data the tools might use. We’ve heard about pitches that failed because the software accidentally mentioned a prospect’s family tragedy in a business email.

Evaluate buying potential

A company’s financial statements, announcements, and hiring activity can reveal a lot about its readiness to buy and a prospect’s conversion potential.

Apply this information to decide who’s ready for immediate outreach and who might need more time or nurturing.

Free guide
7 Time-Saving GPT Prompts for Your Sales Work
52% of sales pros use AI for their daily work. Join the majority and work more efficiently with these AI prompts.
GET MY GUIDE

Consider long-term relationships

Your research can reveal which prospects have the potential for lasting partnerships. If appropriate, point out the benefits of extended partnership in your initial message.

The same applies to converted clients. Use your data to keep them engaged by offering relevant insights or exclusive deals, thus reinforcing loyalty.

Update databases regularly

Approach research as a continuous process. After all, your lead data changes over time, whether it’s getting married (and changing the last name) or switching companies.

It’s essential to update your database with the most current information about prospects and their market standing. And always maintain current contact information.

Schedule routine data updates, use data enrichment to fill in missing fields (like email addresses and current job titles), and use data scrubbing to remove duplicates or stale leads.

Apply proper frameworks

When you know how to structure your messaging around a framework, as in knowing how you will write an email, your research will be more focused.

 Here are some of the most common frameworks for lead research and outreach:

  • Attention, Interest, Desire, Action (AIDA) Focus your research on factors that will help you create a compelling message based on the AIDA model: grab attention, build interest, spark desire, and prompt action.
  • Customer, Organization, Media, Product (COMP) – The COMP framework analyzes the prospect’s core aspects, including its target audience, product strengths, recognition, and supply chain.
  • Show Me You Know Me – Demonstrate deep familiarity with your leads’ challenges, especially within the context of their market or industry. 
  • Jobs to be Done (JTBD) – JTBD focuses on the underlying “jobs” your prospect wants to accomplish.
  • Personal, Accomplishments, Past Focus research on your lead’s interests, career milestones, and track record. 
  • Justin Michael Method (JMM) – JMM messages follow a hyper-short format of 1-3 sentences with no filler to capture a lead’s attention with a compelling “trigger.”

You can use these frameworks (and many more) for setting up and running sales campaigns in AiSDR.

Analyze data from multiple channels

Minimize blind spots and discrepancies in your customer profiles. This requires you to gather, cross-reference, and study data from multiple channels.

Luckily, there’s an abundance of online tools for lead research.

Tools and tactics for researching leads

Using multiple research tools and tactics helps you uncover different pieces of information about your target customers. Every tool collects different data that may reveal unique insights about each prospect. 

This gives you a more complete picture of who they are, making it easier for you to reach out to them. 

Here are some of the locations where you can search for and find information about target prospects. 

Search engines (Google, Bing, etc.)

Search for companies or individuals by using key industry terms. It’s best to search across all search engines, not just Google and Bing.

Along with background information, you might find references to individuals’ achievements or authored content. For example, you might discover that your prospect played a role in successful product launches or operational restructuring strategies.

You can use this information to highlight how your solution complements their strengths or simply to show interest in their talent when starting a conversation.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the go-to place to check out a person’s professional background. Other options exist, but LinkedIn is the leading professional social media network.

This lets you verify a prospect’s background, find articles they wrote or shared, and get insight into what interests them. You can even search and filter their activity to see specific posts or articles they interact with.

This will help you craft a personalized message. If you see that your prospect belongs to the same LinkedIn groups as you or your other clients, that might be worth referencing.

Social media

Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter (X) reveal informal clues about character, brand affinity, and interests.

Business leaders, tech leads, and middle managers frequently discuss their problems or favorite tools publicly.

You might find hints about personal values or communication style, which can be used to craft an engagement approach.

To save yourself a bit of time, look into which platforms are commonly used by your target prospects. If you’re a B2C company, you’ll probably spend more time on TikTok or Instagram. And if you’re targeting a B2B or professional audience, this probably means focusing on LinkedIn.

Public communities (Quora, Reddit, etc.)

Your prospects and their companies might participate in open online discussions and Q&A sessions on platforms like Reddit and Quora. Many people appear in Q&A threads discussing professional challenges or offering niche expertise. 

You can also create your own thread to tap into diverse perspectives, or you can host an AMA where you can engage with potential prospects who have a question. 

But before you can do this, you might need to invest some time into the platform by commenting in various threads. For example, many communities want to see users with a certain level of credibility, such as a minimum “karma” score on Reddit. 

And be careful about how you approach topics related to your business. The audience might turn hostile and label you a “shill”. Questions and other research will also need to fall within a community’s moderation guidelines, or your posts may quickly get blocked.

Lead’s website

A personal or business website offers insight into brand values, value propositions, and plans.

Individuals sometimes maintain a personal blog or portfolio spotlighting side projects, research interests, or published articles. To fine-tune your messaging, examine how prospects describe their professional journey, areas of expertise, or even hobbies.

News platforms

News can provide details about a prospect’s company or an entire sector. Use aggregator platforms like Google News, industry journals, and research agencies that specialize in sector analysis.

Individuals are sometimes featured in local business journals or research reports, especially if they’re industry experts or key stakeholders. Reference their participation in an interview, a masterclass, or a conference to personalize communication.

Survey tools

Ask your existing customers and leads for direct feedback about preferences and pain points. Try sending structured questionnaires via email, but not too frequently — you don’t want to appear spammy.

Alternatively, a discreet pop-up on a product page can ask about their needs and direct them to a sales page. Ensure the embedded form isn’t obstructive.

Website tracking pixel

Custom website tracking tools allow you to see which pages your website visitors (or your company’s) spend time on, how often they return, and whether they download certain resources. Visitor traffic patterns reveal where leads might be hesitating or losing interest.

For instance, if leads often bounce after reaching your Features page, you can improve that content or integrate a pop-up window inviting them to a demo. If a contact mainly checks your About Us section but never visits product pages, try adding more clarity about your brand identity, rating, or certifications.

Nudge your website visitors down the funnel at the right time
Check AiSDR’s Website Visitor Tracking feature in action
GET MY DEMO

Blogs

Blog posts often reveal details about a firm’s viewpoints, technical processes, and tone of voice. At the very least, they showcase topics the company cares about, which can resonate with your leads in a pitch.

Don’t limit yourself to the lead’s blog site. If you find an executive or senior engineer actively writing for high-profile publications, they likely influence purchasing decisions internally. Referencing their message can foster a more authentic connection.

Press releases

Official announcements highlight a company’s product lines, hiring, partnerships, and expansions.

To differentiate your approach from generic cold emails, refer to relevant press releases in your outreach.

Press releases often reveal core priorities and pain points. For example, news about opening a new distribution center means they might need software to handle more operations or store more data.

Trade shows and exhibitions

Online and in-person industry-specific events can be excellent for B2B lead research.

Peruse the companies that take part and study their presentations, learn about emerging trends and acute pain points, and get a glimpse of the unique value propositions they might not disclose publicly. Lastly, you can identify and contact decision-makers and representatives of potential leads at these conferences.

Of course, you might not have the time to prospect from all these sources. Luckily, some tools can speed up your research.

Tools and tactics for researching a prospect’s company

When you’re researching potential customers, you need to learn about both the people and the companies they work for. While many tools can help with both tasks (and opens up the chance of overlapping data), there are many additional tools specifically for digging deeper into businesses.

Here are several locations, tools, and tactics you can use for researching prospect companies.

B2B lead databases

Lead databases contain organization and contact-level data for prospects that you can search by industry, location, market reach, compliance requirements, and product type. Filtering by specific roles or firmographics helps you avoid blanketing a sector with generic pitches.

Advanced database platforms let you track intent signals that indicate a prospect’s readiness to buy. These could be topics they’re actively searching for or products they’re exploring.

Government sources

Publicly available government repositories, such as the US’s Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval (EDGAR) system, disclose filings, annual reports, and executive pay details for companies. You can use them to gauge a lead’s financial stability and expansion plans.

Government agencies also publish data on sector-specific guidelines and upcoming policy changes. For example, you might find out which companies need help with privacy-enhancing technologies based on upcoming changes in local data protection laws.

Search engines

Search for basic information like the company’s official web pages, the company’s size, its structure, and its market share. You may discover major events, such as rebranding or an acquisition, that indicate they’re ready for a new approach.

This will help you construct a baseline profile that you can augment with more research data. For instance, LinkedIn might tell you Company A has 11-50 employees, but a Google search reveals almost 100.

LinkedIn

Explore company size, leadership composition, and hiring activity. If they share frequent posts about sustainability, highlight eco-friendly aspects of your solution.

You might find something interesting, like possible gaps in hiring or hidden data. For example, a company claiming it operates in Cyprus might actually be located in another country whose regulatory landscape is incompatible with your product or service.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Sales Navigator offers advanced search and filtering options for LinkedIn. You can zero in on leads in specific industries, on companies of specific sizes and in specific geographic locations, and on key decision-makers.

Moreover, this tool can reveal changes within organizations. You can track changes in workforce size to know if a company has recently grown or experienced layoffs. Or, if an organization is ramping up hiring for specific roles (like Senior DevOps Manager), that might indicate what solutions they’re looking for.

Find customer champions that have just changed their job
Get the same leads you have on Sales Navigator in AiSDR
GET MY DEMO

Social platforms

Check official company social pages for announcements, partnerships, and marketing approaches. Look for “trigger events,” such as product launches, awards, or team expansions.

Additionally, look at interactions between the company and its customers. If you find that they frequently field complaints, it may be an opportunity to position your product as a customer experience solution.

Company’s website

Corporate sites usually feature About Us or Team sections that showcase the organizational structure, key players, and expanding departments. The Press or News pages usually contain announcements, such as new hires, expansions, and strategic initiatives.

Study the most frequent topics, as well as case studies. If they position themselves as a solution for healthcare, you might highlight your product’s isolated infrastructure and robust security.

Leadership structure

A glimpse into the hierarchy of an organization can ensure you’re targeting the right prospects.

Start with publicly available info, like leadership directories on the company’s website or LinkedIn’s “People” tab. When crafting a message, account for roles and prioritize specific department heads.

It’s also important to distinguish between top-level executives and middle managers.

C-level executives might control the budget, but they rely on managers to inform them, meaning you might want to start pitching to mid-level directors.

Financial statements

Annual filings, quarterly earnings reports, and investor presentations offer insight into a company’s fiscal health. Cash flow statements can reveal priorities, like modernizing technology, research and development, or marketing.

If you’re lucky, you’ll find earnings call transcripts on various financial platforms, which can reveal leadership’s goals. You can then use knowledge about their pressing objectives to justify your call to action (CTA).

Competing companies

Examine your lead’s competitors and take notes on their websites, social media presence, financial health, products, and even their latest feature roadmap. Often, highlighting the weaknesses of their competitors helps your prospect see clear value in your offering.

You can also see what they do and don’t consider to be priorities based on changes to their product roadmap over time.

If the company pays for a solution with higher fees, you can highlight the affordability of your solution. Other times, you can explain how your features can replace or improve on a competitor’s offerings.

Glassdoor

Platforms such as Glassdoor can tell you what anonymous employees say about a company.

You can learn about the work culture, leadership style, and job satisfaction level, and then, in your pitch, explain how your product can address issues you found.

Be mindful of quantity and subjectivity when you look at reviews. A small sample of negative (or positive) feedback might not be representative. If you have any doubts, you can try talking to their employees directly.

Review platforms (G2, Capterra, Trustpilot, etc.)

Review websites let you assess the quality of a company’s services or products from users’ perspectives. Ratings and feedback often reveal user concerns, which you can mention in your pitch.

Moreover, you can gauge a company’s current tech partners based on the reviews they leave. When you research sales prospects, identify their technical partners and the applications they use. Then, you can understand how your solution surpasses the lead’s existing tools.

100+ companies use AiSDR to power their sales approach
Check out the reasons why our customers chose AiSDR to scale their outreach
Discover how AiSDR delivers faster responses, stronger conversion, and more pipeline for clients.
CHECK OUR CLIENTS REVIEWS

Crunchbase

Crunchbase aggregates information about funding, investors, and estimated revenue. You can integrate these insights into your pitch to personalize any conversation to align with a company’s priorities.

For instance, early-stage companies and start-ups typically have less funding, but they may be open to innovative solutions for their tech stacks. And late-stage organizations might be exploring advanced scaling options.

Trademark and patent databases

Trademark and intellectual property registrations can help you identify leads that have innovative tech or are expanding into new product categories.

For example, if a healthcare startup filed a wearable device patent, you can pitch a testing or compliance solution. Similarly, you can propose marketing tools to an organization that recently trademarked a new brand.

News sites and reports

Look for details about funding rounds, executive hirings, geographic expansions, and mergers. Focus on articles discussing strategic decisions, like entering new markets or technology upgrades.

You might also study industry trends. Upcoming compliance changes, for example, might inform you about regulatory issues that your solution can address.

Public communities

Look for threads referencing a company’s products or services. Users might share valuable insights, complaints, or accolades.

Study posts to learn about their interests, pain points, and what outcomes they seek. Referencing their advice in your outreach can make your approach feel more authentic.

In addition, you can identify common pain points people face in the industry.

Watch for posts about competitor products or repeated complaints about recurring issues.

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a content analytics tool that can uncover trending topics, products, and influencers within a target market. You might discover that certain technologies, like generative AI or sustainable business practices, garner engagement in a specific niche and use it for your pitch.

This tool also helps measure lead conversion from particular campaigns or keywords. Over time, analyzing trending content can reveal patterns in your target ICP’s interests.

For instance, you may identify a spike in articles about data compliance among your prospects. You can use that information to create custom content or as a talking point in emails.

BuiltWith

BuiltWith reveals the technologies behind leads’ websites: content management systems, plugins, marketing automation software, and even security networks.

You can use this information to emphasize how your solution integrates with your client’s tech stack or e-commerce platform. If you see that they use a competitor’s solution, highlight the comparative advantages of your product in pitches.

BuiltWith also helps you spot common tech usage across prospects. A cluster of buyers may prefer the same workflow automation tool, which allows you to refine your messaging.

G2 Buyer Intent Data

G2’s lead research tool lets you track companies that browse your products or competitor solutions. You can customize your ICP, set up real-time alerts, and integrate these tools with CRMs and ad management software.

For example, you can get an instant notification if your target customer engages with your solution or a comparable service so you can reach the lead before your competitors. G2’s tool can also alert you about upselling opportunities or customers at risk of churn.

Virtual SDRs for prospect research

You can automate most prospect research with AI sales assistants, also known as virtual SDRs. These solutions crawl publicly available information on the Internet.

AI-powered SDRs offer multilayered data collection and processing at scale, integrating intent signals, buyer activity, and firmographic details to identify high-potential leads. In addition to lead research, specialized platforms can improve other top-of-the-funnel activities. 

For example, AiSDR can help you:

  • Track engagement metrics (email opens, clicks, downloads, website activity)
  • Score leads based on activity, organizational data, and intent signals
  • Autogenerate, personalize and distribute cold emails and follow-up messages (based on custom triggers)
  • Guide decisions about purchasing through the final decision-making stage and help onboard new clients

With AI platforms in the prospecting workflow, sales teams can save time and improve the precision and relevance of their outreach.

50+ outreach frameworks and 300+ data sources for value-driven relevant outreach
See how AiSDR does your lead research for you
GET MY DEMO

What are the advantages of prospect research?

Once it’s properly up and running, lead and prospect research brings several advantages.

Targeted outreach

Proper research helps you align your messaging with a potential buyer’s needs and challenges. For example, if a company recently merged with another enterprise, you might reach out with a discounted offer to migrate its business applications.

Efficient use of resources

Avoid wasting time and money on uninterested prospects and instead focus on potential buyers. 

If your software automates compliance reporting, focus your research and outreach on companies required to follow strict regulations. Similarly, your research can help avoid wasting time on prospects who might be interested in your services but lack the budget.

Better engagement 

By researching your lead’s current solution, you can demonstrate that your service will better meet their needs. This approach feels less like a generic product pitch and more like a genuine attempt to help.

Competitive edge

Often, the company that contacts a prospect first secures the customer. Proper research lets you uncover key information quickly, such as learning that a client plans to expand to a new location or recently raised capital. This timely knowledge can help you contact the client before your competitors.

Improved lead generation

Quality prospect research provides metrics and feedback that help you refine your outreach methods. 

For instance, if data shows that emails mentioning a recent trigger event boosted response rates by 30%, you can craft additional messages around similar events. Similarly, if LinkedIn generates the highest conversions for specific sectors, you might allocate more effort to LinkedIn.

Subscribe to our Newsletter
Get the latest product updates, company news, and special offers delivered right to your inbox.
helpful
Did you enjoy this blog?
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Why is prospect research critical? 2. How to use the results of sales prospect research 3. Tools and tactics for researching leads 4. Tools and tactics for researching a prospect’s company 5. Virtual SDRs for prospect research 6. What are the advantages of prospect research?
AiSDR | Website Illustrations | LinkedIn icon | 1AiSDR Website Illustrations | LI iconAiSDR | Website Illustrations | X icon | 1AiSDR Website Illustrations | X iconAiSDR | Website Illustrations | Insta icon | 1AiSDR Website Illustrations | IG icon 2AiSDR | Website Illustrations | Facebook icon | 1AiSDR Website Illustrations | FB icon
link
AiSDR Website Illustrations | Best AI Tools for Primary and Secondary Market Research | Preview
Get an AI SDR than you can finally trust. Book more, stress less.
GO LIVE IN 2 HOURS
You might also like:
Check out all blogs>
10 Best AI for Sales Prospecting to Get 8x More Results 
10 Best AI for Sales Prospecting to Get 8x More Results 
Joshua Schiefelbein
Joshua Schiefelbein •
Oct 11, 2024 •
19m 19s
Check out the top 10 AI for sales prospecting to get results
Read blog>
10 Best AI Tools for Prospecting in Winter 2025 (according to client reviews)
10 Best AI Tools for Prospecting in Winter 2025 (according to client reviews)
Joshua Schiefelbein
Joshua Schiefelbein •
Dec 30, 2024 •
8m 59s
Find out which are the best AI email assistants in Winter 2025 and what customers are saying about them
Read blog>
11 Best AI Tools for Sales Prospecting in 2025
11 Best AI Tools for Sales Prospecting in 2025
Joshua Schiefelbein
Joshua Schiefelbein •
Dec 3, 2024 •
17m 52s
Looking for a sales prospecting tool to help you reach next year's targets? Here are some options to take a closer look at
Read blog>
14 Best B2B Sales Channels to Drive Growth and Revenue in 2025
14 Best B2B Sales Channels to Drive Growth and Revenue in 2025
Joshua Schiefelbein
Joshua Schiefelbein •
Dec 10, 2024 •
16m 55s
Check out the 14 best B2B channels for sales growth
Read blog>
See how AiSDR will sell to you.
Share your info and get the first-hand experience
See how AiSDR will sell to you