The second eBook of the AI, Automation and Tools category. It takes the assistant you set up in the opening eBook and points it at the part of your business that's hardest to keep moving consistently: finding the next customer. Practical workflows, no spam, no shortcuts that will damage your reputation.
Members ebook·7 chapters· 40 minute read
Chapter 3
Prospect Research and List Building
How to use AI to research prospects properly before you reach out, and build a small, high-quality list of people worth talking to.
Most small business outreach fails at the research stage, before the first message is even written. The owner sits down with a vague idea of who they're going to contact, opens an email window and writes something generic because they don't know enough about the recipient to write anything specific. The recipient reads two lines, recognises the template and deletes it. The owner concludes that outreach doesn't work for their business.
Outreach does work for most small businesses. What doesn't work is outreach without research. The assistant changes the time cost of research from prohibitive to easy - five to ten minutes per prospect for the kind of careful read that used to take half an hour. That single change is enough to turn outreach from a frustration into a working channel for a lot of small businesses.
This chapter shows you how to do that research, how to build the small list it feeds and how to keep the whole thing manageable for one person.
The full chapter walks through researching individual prospects, building a focused list of twenty to forty good targets, the public sources worth using and the line you don't cross when researching people online.
What good prospect research looks like
Good prospect research isn't a dossier. It's a half-page brief that tells you four things. What this business or person actually does. What's likely to be on their mind right now - growth, hiring, a recent change, a public initiative. Why they might plausibly care about what you offer. One specific, true thing you can refer to in your first message that proves you read about them.
That's it. Half a page. Five to ten minutes per prospect. Done with the assistant, you can do five proper briefs in under an hour, which is enough outreach work for a busy week in most small businesses.
How to use the assistant for the research
Open the assistant. Give it the name of the business and the name of the person you're aiming at. Ask: 'Find what you can about this business and this person from public sources. Summarise into half a page covering what they do, what's been on their mind recently based on news or their website, and one specific, true thing I could refer to in a first message. Don't make anything up. If you don't know, say so.'
What you get back is a starting point. Cross-check the specific facts on the business's own website. Don't trust the assistant on names, dates or numbers without checking. The point is that the assistant has read more pages in two minutes than you would have time for in twenty, and pulled out the bits worth your attention.
What a half-page prospect brief should contain
What the business or person does, in one paragraph
What's likely to be on their mind right now, in one paragraph
Why they might plausibly care about what you offer, in two or three lines
One specific, true thing you can refer to in your first message
Building a focused list
Most small businesses don't need a list of two thousand prospects. They need a list of twenty to forty. The right shape of list is small, specific and high quality. People or businesses where you can plausibly explain, in one sentence, why you're a good fit for them. People or businesses where you'd be happy to do the work if it landed.
Build the list by hand. The assistant can help you brainstorm categories - 'What kinds of business in my area might benefit from a regular plumbing maintenance contract?' - and you fill in the actual names from your local knowledge, your existing customers' referrals, public listings and a careful look around the places your customer profile said your prospects look. Twenty good names is a quarter's work. That's plenty.
Public sources worth using
For business prospects, the obvious sources are the company's own website, their Google Business Profile, their LinkedIn page if they have one, any news articles about them and any awards or accreditation listings. For individual professionals, their public profile on LinkedIn, any published writing or interviews, their company bio. For local businesses, your own observation - what they do, who they serve, how busy they look on a Wednesday afternoon.
Don't bother with paid data services for a small business at this stage. They're built for high-volume sales teams and the data they sell often isn't accurate enough to justify the cost. The free public sources, plus careful reading, are enough.
The line you don't cross
There's a line worth holding firmly. Public information about a business or a professional role is fair to read and refer to. Personal information about someone's home address, family, health, religion or politics is not, even if you can find it online. The test is simple. If you can imagine the prospect being uncomfortable that you knew this, don't reference it. The point of research is to be useful, not to demonstrate that you've been thorough.
Same goes for using AI to scrape contact details at scale. Don't. The reputational and legal risk isn't worth the volume of additional contacts. A small list of people you've researched properly is worth far more than a long list of people you haven't.
Keeping the list alive
The list isn't static. People move. Businesses change. Prospects you reach out to either become customers, become not-yet customers or become not-a-fit. Mark each one. Once a quarter, take an hour, prune the list, add new names, refresh the briefs on people you haven't talked to in six months. The assistant makes the refresh fast. The discipline of doing it is yours.
What to do this week
Pick five names from your existing customers' referrals or your own knowledge - businesses or people you'd like to be talking to in three months. Spend an hour with the assistant building a half-page brief on each. By the end of the week, you'll have five real prospects you understand well enough to write a first message to. Chapter four will show you how to write that message.
Recurring principle for this chapter: start with the customer. For more on the wider lead generation context, look back at Sales and Leads. For the next step on writing the first message, look ahead to chapter four.
The rest of this chapter walks through the practical steps, the templates and the checklists you need to put it into action. It includes worked examples, copy frameworks and the small decisions that make the difference between a plan that sits in a drive and one that gets used.
Inside you'll find a step-by-step playbook, a downloadable template, a checklist you can run this week and a short list of common mistakes to avoid before you start.
The full action plan, broken into weekly steps.
Ready-to-use scripts, templates and checklists.
Worked examples for different sized businesses.
Common mistakes and how to avoid them.
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