Research
Research is the function that keeps the department’s picture of your market current. It refines the ideal customer profile, shortlists the accounts that match it, maps the buyer roles inside them and watches competitors and their pricing on a fixed cadence. It starts with your existing customers and ends with account briefs that strategy, outbound, content and sales enablement work from.
01
What the function does
Research starts with what you already know. In setup it reads your closed deals, your current customers and the notes your sales team keeps, and writes the first version of the ideal customer profile: the company size, industry, situation and buying roles that describe the customers you win and keep. That profile is not fixed. Each month it is checked against what closed and what stalled, and revised where the evidence says it should be.
From the profile, research builds the account shortlist. Each week it finds companies that match the criteria, records why each one matches, and orders them by fit and by signs of timing, such as a new hire in the buying role or a change the company has announced. For each account on the list it maps the people who own the problem, influence the decision and sign, so outbound knows who to write to and your sales team knows who else is in the room.
Alongside accounts, research watches the market. Competitor positioning, pricing pages, releases and hiring are checked on a schedule, and the changes that matter are written up in a monthly brief. Questions your buyers ask, in search and on sales calls, are collected for the content function. Everything research produces is written for use by another function, not for its own sake.
02
What is automated
These are defined marketing processes: each has a fixed input, a fixed output and a rule for what happens next. They run on a schedule and never wait for someone to remember them.
01
Profile scoring
Every account in your CRM and every candidate account is scored against the ideal customer profile on a fixed set of criteria. Accounts below the threshold are logged with the reason and left off the shortlist.
02
Account discovery
Companies that match the profile are found each week from public sources, deduplicated against your CRM and added to the candidate list with the evidence for each match attached.
03
Buyer-role mapping
For each shortlisted account, the people in the buying roles set in the profile are identified by title and function and recorded on the account with a role label. Gaps are flagged for a person to fill.
04
Competitor and pricing watch
Competitor websites, pricing pages and public announcements are checked on a schedule. A change is recorded against the competitor with the date and the previous version, and queued for the monthly brief.
05
Timing signals
Hiring in the buying roles, funding, leadership changes and announced projects are collected for shortlisted accounts and attached to the account record, so the shortlist can be ordered by timing as well as fit.
06
Question collection
Questions your buyers ask in search, on sales calls and in replies are gathered into one list, grouped by topic and passed to the content function with the source noted against each one.
03
What is supervised by the Aryeh Algorithms team
Judgment stays with people. Our team owns this function for your account, and these are the points where a person reads, decides or pauses the work.
01
Profile revisions
The ideal customer profile changes only when a person on our team has reviewed the evidence and your team has agreed. Automation proposes the revision with its reasoning; it does not apply it.
02
Shortlist review
Every weekly shortlist is read by a person before it goes to outbound. Accounts that match on paper but not in practice are removed, and the criteria are adjusted so the same mistake is not repeated.
03
Competitor readings
A change on a competitor’s site is recorded automatically. What it means for your positioning and pricing is written by a person, after checking that the change is real and not a test page.
04
Buyer-role judgement
When a title does not say who owns the decision, a person looks at the account and decides, using what your sales team knows about how that kind of company buys and who has signed before.
05
Source quality
Sources are checked before they feed the profile or the shortlist. Anything stale, inconsistent or unverifiable is set aside and marked as such, rather than passed along as fact.
Research is where the department decides who is worth your team’s time, so I read every profile revision myself and I see the shortlist before outbound works it. The automation keeps the picture current every week; a person still decides what the picture means.
04
What you receive
Each artifact appears in your portal as it is produced, under the task or approval it belongs to. The weekly summary also arrives by email.
| Artifact | Cadence |
|---|---|
| Ideal customer profileThe criteria, buying roles and disqualifiers your department works from, with the evidence behind each change. | Reviewed monthly, revised when the evidence supports it |
| Account shortlistMatching accounts ordered by fit and timing, with the reason each one qualifies and your exclusions applied. | Weekly |
| Account briefsOne page per shortlisted account: what the company does, who is in the buying group and what changed recently. | Weekly, with the shortlist |
| Competitor and pricing briefChanges in competitor positioning, pricing and releases since the last brief, and what they mean for your offer. | Monthly |
| Buyer questions listQuestions buyers ask in search, on calls and in replies, grouped by topic for the content function. | Weekly |
| Research section of the weekly summaryWhat was added to the shortlist, what was removed and why, and what the profile review found. | Weekly |
05
How it integrates with your team and stack
Research reads from the CRM you already use. Closed deals, lost deals and the notes your sales team keeps are the starting evidence for the profile, and every account it shortlists is checked against the CRM before it is added. It writes back in place, so account records carry the fit score, the buying roles and the brief, and nothing lives in a separate spreadsheet your team has to go and find.
Your sales team is both the reader and the source. Briefs reach them attached to the account they are about. What they learn on calls, who actually decided, what the objection was, why a deal was lost, comes back to research and changes the next profile review. Strategy, outbound and content draw from the same records, so one account brief serves every function that touches the account.
What it connects to
- Your CRM
- Deals, accounts and contacts are read as evidence and written back with fit scores, buying roles and briefs. Your CRM stays the system of record.
- Public sources
- Company websites, job postings, filings and announcements are read on a schedule for account discovery, timing signals and the competitor watch.
- Call notes and recordings
- Notes and recordings your team already keeps are read, with your permission, for buying roles, objections and the questions buyers ask.
- Team messaging
- Shortlist changes and notable competitor moves can be posted to the channel your sales team already reads.
07
Questions about research
By doing the research before the call. Automation finds the accounts that match your profile, maps who is in the buying group, collects what has changed at the company recently and writes it into the CRM record your team already opens. A person checks the shortlist and the briefs before they are used. Your team spends its week on conversations rather than on looking things up.
From your own history first. In setup we read closed and lost deals, current customers and your sales team’s notes, and write the first profile with your team. After that it is reviewed monthly against what closed and what stalled. Automation proposes revisions with the evidence attached; a person on our team and someone on yours agree to them before anything changes.
The account shortlist and buyer-role maps are refreshed weekly, timing signals are collected as they appear, and the competitor and pricing watch runs on a schedule with a monthly brief. Every shortlist and brief is read by a person before it reaches outbound or your sales team. Sources that cannot be verified are set aside, and anything your team corrects on a call is written back.
Talk through what research should cover for your market
Tell us who you sell to today and where your best customers came from. We will come back with how the research function would be set up for you, what it watches on its own and what a person reviews.