How to research an account before a sales call in 15 minutes

Most first calls go one of two ways. Either you open with "tell me about your business" and spend twenty minutes learning what their website already said, or you open with something specific and the conversation starts where it matters.

The difference is about fifteen minutes of the right reading. Here's a routine that works, whether you do it by hand or with a tool.

1. Start with what the company says about itself (3 minutes)

Read the home page and the about page. You're after one sentence: what they sell, to whom. Write it down in their words, not yours.

Then skim the products or solutions page. Note anything that touches what you sell.

Keep the link. If you repeat a fact on the call, you want to know where it came from.

2. Check whether they're hiring (3 minutes)

The careers page is the most honest page on most company websites. It shows where money is going next.

Look for roles related to what you sell. A company hiring three customer support engineers has a support problem it's paying to solve. A company hiring its first head of revenue operations is about to change its sales stack.

Note the role and the date you saw it. Job pages rarely show dates, so "listed on their careers page on October 31" is the honest way to put it.

3. Look for what changed in the last six months (5 minutes)

Search recent news and the company's press page for five kinds of change:

• Funding or investment: new money usually brings growth targets.
• Expansion: new markets, offices, acquisitions or partnerships bring new teams and systems.
• Product launches: something new to get adopted.
• Leadership changes: new leaders often review priorities and vendors in their first months.
• Tools on their site: what their website loads tells you something about their stack.

For each one, keep the date the article gives. A funding round from three years ago isn't a signal; one from last month is.

Ignore what you can't source. If a detail only appears on a data broker's profile with no date, leave it out. Getting a fact wrong on a first call costs more than not knowing it.

4. Turn signals into priorities, carefully (2 minutes)

A signal is a fact. A priority is your guess about what it means. Keep them separate in your notes:

• Fact: "Opened a 40-door terminal in Indianapolis (press release, October 14)."
• Guess: "Probably planning new routes and short on dispatch capacity."

Labelling the guess as a guess keeps you curious on the call instead of presumptuous.

5. Write three opening questions (2 minutes)

Good opening questions are grounded in something you found and leave room for them to correct you:

1. "I saw you opened the Indianapolis terminal. How are you planning routes for it, and what has to go right in the first quarter?"
2. "How does your team handle this today, and what would you change if you could?"
3. "Who else would be involved in deciding on something like this?"

Doing it for a whole list

Fifteen minutes is fine for one meeting. For a list of fifty target accounts it's two working days, which is why most lists never get researched.

That's the job Scouta does: give it a company's domain and it reads the company's website, careers page, press page and recent news, keeps only the signals it can show word for word in a dated source, scores fit against your ideal customer and writes the brief with three questions. You can try it on one company without an account.

Whatever you use, the rule is the same: every fact you bring to a call should have a source and a date.