Account research before a sales call: a one-page brief template

The call starts in four minutes. You have the company's homepage open in one tab and the LinkedIn profile of the person you're meeting in another. You're skimming the "About" page and hoping they don't ask why you reached out to them specifically. Then they open with "So, what do you know about us?"

Most founders and first sales hires research accounts this way: last-minute, one tab at a time, and differently every time. The fix is a fixed format and a batch habit. One page per account, the same seven boxes, done for the whole week's calls in one sitting.

The one-page account brief

Copy this. The order matters: the first three boxes are facts, the last four are your thinking.

Box	What to write	Where it comes from	Max length
1. What they sell	One sentence, in their words, then in yours	Homepage, pricing page	2 lines
2. Who buys it	Their customer, and the size of company they sell to	Case studies, customer logos, job posts	2 lines
3. What changed lately	Funding, launches, hires, leadership moves in the last 6 months	News, their blog, LinkedIn company page	3 bullets
4. Who's on the call	Name, role, how long in the role, what they posted about	LinkedIn, their own posts	1 line each
5. Why now	Your best guess at why this is worth their time this quarter	Boxes 1-4	2 lines
6. Likely objection	The one thing most likely to stall the deal	Their stack, size, stage	1 line
7. First question	An open question that only makes sense for this company	All of the above	1 line

If a box is empty after ten minutes, write "unknown" and move on. An honest "unknown" is more useful on a call than a guess you'll repeat as fact.

The sources, in order

Check them in this order and stop when the brief is full:

1. Their homepage and pricing page (boxes 1 and 2)
2. Their blog or changelog, newest first (box 3)
3. Job posts (box 2 and box 6: a company hiring three data engineers has a data problem)
4. News search for the company name plus "raises", "launches", "acquires" (box 3)
5. The LinkedIn profiles of the people on the invite (box 4)
6. Anything the person posted in the last month (box 7 often comes from here)

Skip review sites and long reports unless the deal is large. They take time and rarely change your first question.

How to research 20 accounts in a morning

One brief at a time takes 20-30 minutes, because every account starts from a blank page. In a batch, each account takes about ten, because you stop switching tasks.

Set up the sheet first. One row per account, one column per box, plus three more: fit score, source links, and "done".

Work column by column, not row by row. Do box 1 for all 20, then box 2 for all 20. Your eye gets fast at reading homepages when you read twenty in a row.

Score fit before you go deep. After boxes 1-3, give each account a fit score from 1 to 3. Only the 3s get boxes 4-7 in full. The 1s get a line saying why they're a 1.

Stop at good enough. A brief exists to give you one better question and spare you one embarrassing one. It doesn't need to be a report.

We did a version of this for our own outbound. Our marketer bot built a target list of 339 companies from four sources (two people's networks, recently funded startups, and AI-first startups in India), and scored every row for fit. 182 came out high fit. Scoring first is what made it usable: nobody writes 339 briefs, but you can read the top ten.

account-research-batch.xlsx

Account	1. Sells	2. Buyers	3. Changed lately	Fit	4-7	Sources	Done
Northwind Freight	Route planning for trucking fleets	Fleets of 50-500 trucks	Series A, driver app, hiring support	3	Filled	4 links	Yes
Acme Payroll	Payroll for agencies	Agencies, 10-50 people	New pricing page	2	1-line reason	2 links	Yes
Example Labs	Lab inventory software	University labs	Hiring 3 data engineers	3	Filled	5 links	Yes
Contoso Health	Clinic scheduling	Small clinics	unknown	1	Too small for now	1 link	Yes
Globex Retail	Store analytics	Mid-size chains	New CEO in July	3	In progress	3 links	No
Initech Cloud	Backup for SMBs	IT teams of 1-5	Launched API	2	1-line reason	2 links	No

An example: one brief, start to finish

The company and people here are made up.

The ask: "Brief me on Northwind Freight before my 3 PM. Use the seven-box format. Mark anything you're unsure of."

What came back:

1. Sells route-planning software for regional trucking fleets.
2. Buyers are fleets of 50-500 trucks, judging by the case studies.
3. Changed lately: raised a Series A in August; launched a driver app in September; hiring two support leads.
4. On the call: Head of Operations, in the role 8 months, recently posted about support tickets doubling after the app launch.
5. Why now: support load is growing faster than headcount.
6. Likely objection: "We just hired for this."
7. First question: "What happened to support volume after the driver app went out?"

It also flagged one item: "Series A amount appears in one article only. Unverified."

What the rep changed. Dropped the funding amount from their notes entirely, since it was unverified and they didn't need it. Rewrote the first question to sound less like they'd read the person's posts: "How's the driver app rollout going on the support side?"

What got approved. The brief went into the deal notes as it was. After the call, the rep asked for a follow-up email drafted from the call notes. It went out only after they approved it.

How to set it up in Caret

We run our own research and outbound prep on a marketer bot that works in its own web browser, on its own computer. Here's the setup for a sales version.

1. Sign up at app.caretbot.com. Team starts with a 7-day trial.
2. Create a sales bot. Paste the seven-box template into its job, with the source order and the rule "write unknown, don't guess".
3. Add it to your sales thread. It's bridged to Slack both ways if your team works there.
4. Give it a schedule, for example every weekday at 8:00, to brief you on that day's calls.
5. For batches, ask it to build the research sheet as an Excel file and attach it in the thread.
6. Approve or deny each follow-up email. Before it sends anything, it asks, and an admin answers with one click.
7. Its memory lasts between conversations, so ask what a prospect said last time before a second call.

Example asks:

• "brief me on the company I'm meeting at 3, seven-box format, mark anything you couldn't verify"
• "here are 20 companies from the event. build a sheet with boxes 1-3 and a fit score 1-3, then fill boxes 4-7 only for the 3s"
• "draft a follow-up for today's call from my notes above, short and plain"

FAQ

How long should account research before a sales call take? About ten minutes per account when you work in a batch with a fixed template, and 20-30 minutes if you research one account at a time from scratch. Large deals deserve more; most first calls don't.

What should be in a pre-call account brief? What the company sells, who buys it, what changed in the last six months, who is on the call, why the timing might be right, the likely objection, and one open question specific to them. One page, with a source link for each fact.

Can AI do account research for sales calls? It can do the reading and the first draft of the brief well, especially in batches. Ask it to mark anything it couldn't verify, check the facts you plan to say out loud, and keep the follow-up emails on an approval step.

For the rest of the sales week, see what Caret does for sales. Put a bot on it: start your 7-day trial or download the Mac app.