Account Research Brief

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

1. 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.

2. Pull firmographics. Size, industry, headquarters, founding year, description, specialities. This is the skeleton the rest hangs on.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. Build a SWOT where every line is tagged. Mark each point evidence (traceable to something retrieved) or inference (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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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.