Run this before a first meeting or an ABM push. It produces a one-page brief where every claim is tagged as evidence-backed or inference, so the AE knows what they can say out loud.
The play
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Resolve the company to a stable identifier first. Match on the company's own URL slug rather than its display name. Name search returns near-matches and you will research the wrong entity, which is worse than researching nothing.
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Pull firmographics. Size, industry, headquarters, founding year, description, specialities. This is the skeleton the rest hangs on.
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Read composition, not just headcount. How the employee base splits by function and seniority says more than a total. A company that is 60% engineering sells differently than one that is 60% sales.
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Extract positioning pillars. Cluster the company's own description, tagline, and specialities into three to six themes: product areas, target buyer, stated differentiators. Name each pillar and cite the exact source phrase. These are the words the buyer already uses about themselves.
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Build a SWOT where every line is tagged. Mark each point
evidence(traceable to something retrieved) orinference(your read). An untagged SWOT is opinion wearing a suit, and an AE who repeats an inference as fact in a meeting loses the room. -
Ask before you spend on people. Confirm two things with the requester: which titles matter, and how many employee records to pull. Skipping this is how a routine brief turns into a surprise bill.
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Read hiring as a live signal. Recent joiners, by function, are the most current evidence you have of where budget is moving. A team that added four engineers and no marketers last quarter is telling you something.
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Deliver both shapes. Structured data for the next automation step, and a short human brief for the AE. They have different readers and different lifespans.
What good looks like
- The best briefs quote the company's own language back. Buyers relax when you describe them the way they describe themselves.
- The mediocre version is a reformatted About page: no composition, no signal, no tagging, and nothing an AE could not have read themselves in two minutes.
- Absence is a finding. "No leadership changes in twelve months" is real intelligence. Say it rather than padding the section.
- You know it is good when the AE walks in able to say which claims are sourced and which are your read, and never has to guess.
Rules
- MUST tag every SWOT point as evidence or inference.
- MUST confirm target titles and record counts before pulling people data.
- MUST state plainly when a data source returned nothing, in the brief itself.
- NEVER invent a headcount growth trend, an exec, or a job opening to fill a section.
- NEVER research a company you matched by display name alone without confirming the identifier.