How to Conduct Account Research

Did you know that salespeople spend almost 20% of their time researching accounts and contacts?

While necessary, this can be an extremely tedious and time-consuming task. Sales reps must dig through various systems and sources to piece together the full picture of an account before an important sales call or meeting.

But what if AI could take on much of this grunt work automatically?

Before AI, researching accounts was an entirely manual process.

Salespeople would have to search across their CRM, marketing automation platform, LinkedIn, news sources, and more to understand an account’s key contacts, pain points, and history. This fragmented process could take hours for a single account, leaving less time for selling.

Now, AI is transforming account research by automatically aggregating all the relevant information sales reps need to know in one place. Read on to learn how AI is saving sales teams countless hours while enabling more informed selling.

The Grueling Task of Account Research Before AI

Prospecting used to be an arduous process for sales teams.

A critical but often skipped part was doing thorough account research to develop a strong understanding of each target account. This research was necessary to craft tailored messaging and pitches.

But it required sales reps to dedicate hours of work to build a single, comprehensive account plan.

For public companies, reps had to dig through earnings calls, SEC filings, and annual reports.

They needed to analyze these dense documents to identify challenges the company faced and areas where they were betting on growth.

For private companies, the task was even more difficult without publicly available information. Reps would have to scour the web for relevant intel, like recent interviews given by the CEO or press releases about new funding.

All this manual research was massively time-consuming for sales reps. But now, AI is stepping in to automate the process and provide instant access to account insights.

How AI Has Streamlined Account Research

With AI, account research that used to take hours can now be completed in seconds.

AI solutions leverage vast datasets and natural language processing to quickly surface relevant information on target accounts.

For public companies, AI tools can instantly analyze earnings calls, filings, and reports to identify key facts. They can determine growth drivers, new initiatives, and pain points.

For example, an AI assistant could rapidly read a company's latest earnings call transcript and highlight that decreasing margins on a certain product line were called out as an issue to address.

For private companies, AI can synthesize information from various sources to generate an account overview.

Web scraping techniques allow AI to pull data from company websites, news articles, press releases, and other public sources. The AI can then summarize key details like company size, leadership team, funding status, product offerings, and more.

In essence, AI eliminates the manual heavy lifting previously required for account research.

Reps no longer have to spend hours digging through dense documents and piecing together research. With AI, they get a comprehensive account overview delivered in seconds.

This allows them to spend time crafting customized pitches instead of on manual data collection.

What to Do Next...

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