The ultimate guide to account research in 2025
In today's hyper-competitive B2B landscape, generic outreach has become noise.
The key to successful prospecting is proper research. Studies show that 82% of top-performing salespeople research prospects "all of the time" before reaching out, compared to just 49% of average performers.
Why this massive gap? Effective account research transforms cold outreach into relevant, personalized engagement that actually gets responses.
Your buyers are overwhelmed by spam but still want to hear from you when:
- They're actively looking for solutions to their problems
- You demonstrate genuine understanding of their business challenges
- You can provide relevant insights they haven't considered
Effective account research answers these critical questions:
- Timing: When is the ideal moment to reach out?
- Contacts: Who are the stakeholders most likely to respond?
- Message: What will resonate and establish credibility?
Mathematically speaking, it looks something like this.
"But I don't have time for deep research!". For a long time, this was true. You had to choose between volume and quality. In 2025, Modern tools and AI can automate much of the research work. What used to take hours can now be accomplished in minutes, giving you the insights without the time investment.
In this guide, you'll learn the concrete, actionable techniques used by top performers to research accounts efficiently and effectively.
What you need to research
A mistake that many sellers make is to start prospecting without a clear plan of what needs to be researched.
We often do what most people talk about when it comes to researching a company: check a company on LinkedIn Sales Navigator, go on their website, read some blog posts, do some Google Search.
The best sellers have learned how to be strategic on what to research. This allows them to save time and get better results.
Find the Right Signals for Timing
Timing isn't just important—it's everything. According to Gartner research, prospects who receive relevant outreach during key buying triggers are 3x more likely to engage compared to generic timing. The difference between "just another sales email" and "exactly what I needed to hear" often comes down to WHEN you hit send.
How do we know when it is the right time to engage a prospect?
Don’t fall for the “intent” scam.
Lots of marketers will answer the question of timing with “intent!”. ABM platforms and third-party “intent” data providers have done an amazing job marketing themselves as the solution to finding the right time to engage.
Their "proprietary signals” (read “blackbox”) believe that a company is ready to buy when an anonymous someone somewhere is seen reading about a topic somehow related to your space. It does not make a difference if this is an intern reading a news article loosely related to your area. It will flag that company as “surging”. This “intent” is the weakest signal of all. Studies have shown that reply rates on “accounts with surging intent” are no better than picking random accounts to prospect.
Start with the strongest signals: first-party engagement
This seems pretty obvious, but you'll be surprised to see how many sellers don't have access to first-party engagement like website visits, webinar attendance, and content views. Or they have access and they don’t act on it.
Think about it. If your brand is somewhat decent, the first thing your prospects will do if they are in-market is to go and check your company out, and this means visiting your website, watching demo videos, and looking at your content.
Make sure that you’re able to know when someone is in one of your target accounts:
- Visited your Demo Request page
- Visited your Pricing page
- Viewed a self-serve product demo
- Signed up for a product trial
- Registered and/or attended a relevant webinar
- Commented on your company’s LinkedIn posts
What do you do when an account does not show any engagement with your company?
You look for other clues that indicate they need your solution right now..
Beyond engagement: Identify the “Why NOW” for your target accounts
One of the main reasons prospecting has gotten harder is that everyone uses the same triggers to prospect.
For example, almost every seller now gets alerted when a company has raised money. That company receives a thousand emails and phone calls from sellers trying to tell them how they can help. It might actually be one of the worst times for a seller to reach out!
[meme of 1000 people going after someone when their company raised money]
Instead of focusing on generic signals, think specifically about the triggers that lead prospects to need a solution like yours, NOW.
How do you identify those triggers? In a more mature organization, your marketing team and sales team would probably have those documented. If not, you'll find it very valuable to use ChatGPT or Claude to answer that question for you.
Here is a prompt you can use:
```
Generate a table of common buying triggers for a buyer at a company to buy a product like {your product name}.
For each trigger, include:
- A short label for the trigger
- A 1-2 sentence description of the scenario
- Common signals or events that would indicate this trigger is active (e.g., hiring, press releases, tech stack changes)
- A sentence on why MongoDB (or a similar product) is a good fit in that situation.
Format the output as a clean table with the following columns: Trigger, Description, Common Signals / Events, Why MongoDB (or similar). Do not number the triggers.
```
Here is what you get if you use this prompt for MongoDB, a no-SQL database.
Then, pick 3-5 signals you find most relevant and that you can access now.
In this example with Mongo DB, you could pick:
- Companies who are hiring product managers or who have posted about their product roadmap -> “new product launch” trigger
- Companies with plans of international expansion in the news -> multi-region expansion trigger
- Companies with a significant increase in traffic -> scaling challenge trigger
We’ll look in the Step 2 section at how to automatically capture and act on those signals.
Find the right Signals to pick the right Contacts.
Now that you’ve defined what to research to determine the ideal timing to engage an account, it’s time to look at what to research to identify the right contacts in the account.
Research shows that B2B buying decisions typically involve 6-10 stakeholders across multiple functions.
Top enterprise sales teams use a multi-threaded approach, targeting multiple stakeholders simultaneously. They identify and engage 5-8 contacts across different departments and levels.
This approach creates multiple entry points and reduces the risk of your efforts stalling if one contact goes cold.
Consider these two strategic approaches:
- Bottom-Up: Start with end-users and mid-level managers to gather insights and build internal support before approaching executives
- Top-Down: Begin with executives to secure high-level buy-in, then work with their teams on implementation details
The best approach depends on your solution, sales cycle, and the organization's culture:
- Complex, expensive solutions -> a top-down approach often works best.
- User-centric tools with lower price points -> bottom-up can be more effective.
Here is a practical example. For a sales enablement platform selling to enterprise accounts:
- Poor Targeting: Only contacting the VP of Sales
- Good Targeting: Engaging the VP of Sales, Sales Operations Manager, and Sales Enablement Director
- Excellent Targeting: Connect with the VP of Sales, Sales Operations Manager, Sales Enablement Director, a few sales managers, and selected high-performing sales reps who could champion your solution
By systematically identifying and prioritizing the right contacts, you develop a comprehensive approach that addresses the needs and concerns of all stakeholders involved in the purchasing decision.
What do you need to research when deciding which contacts to go after?
Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator or your favorite contact database to get an accurate list of contacts at the company, with their job title and their location.
Then, make sure to find for each relevant contact if they has shown signs of engagement: it is much easier to start a conversation with someone who has been in touch already, or someone who has been checking your website, or attended your webinars.
We’ll see in Step 2 how we can automate this.
Find the right Signals to personalize your outreach
Last but not least, it’s time to think about what we’re going to say to our prospects.
Determine what signal or information to look for, and start with the end in mind. Concretely, think about the messages you’d like to send (i.e., what you want to say), and then go backward and think about what information you need to have to know if the message is relevant.
Put it all together
With the exercise above, you’ve been able to determine what’s most important to research for your prospecting.
Create a little summary like the one below to summarize what you need to research.
You’re ready to move to Step 2: automating the research!
Automating your account research
In 2025, a lot of the manual research can be automated using software and AI. You can use an off-the-shelf solution like MadKudu for it, or you can build your own.
To automate your account research, you need the following features:
1. Collecting buying signals, i.e., go fetch information about your accounts from multiple sources
2. Prioritize which accounts to work on based on the strengths of the buying signals
3. Generate an account brief so you get a bird's-eye view of what matters on an account
4. Source and recommend contacts so you knock at the right doors of an account
5. Suggest email, LinkedIn, and call script messages so you can time reviewing or polishing your messages instead of starting from scratch or using generic sequences.
If you’d like to learn more about how this works and how this would look for you, just reach out 👇.