# Research — AI Marketing Department

Canonical page: https://aryehalgorithms.com/ai-marketing-department/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.

## What it 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.

## Automated

- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.

## Supervised by a person

- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.

## A note from the CEO

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.

## What you receive

- Ideal customer profile (Reviewed monthly, revised when the evidence supports it): The criteria, buying roles and disqualifiers your department works from, with the evidence behind each change.
- Account shortlist (Weekly): Matching accounts ordered by fit and timing, with the reason each one qualifies and your exclusions applied.
- Account briefs (Weekly, with the shortlist): One page per shortlisted account: what the company does, who is in the buying group and what changed recently.
- Competitor and pricing brief (Monthly): Changes in competitor positioning, pricing and releases since the last brief, and what they mean for your offer.
- Buyer questions list (Weekly): Questions buyers ask in search, on calls and in replies, grouped by topic for the content function.
- Research section of the weekly summary (Weekly): What was added to the shortlist, what was removed and why, and what the profile review found.

## Questions

### How can AI support a sales team?

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.

### Where does the ideal customer profile come from?

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.

### How current is the research, and who checks it?

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.

## Related

- [Strategy](https://aryehalgorithms.com/ai-marketing-department/strategy): Sets direction from the profile, the shortlist and the competitor brief.
- [Outbound](https://aryehalgorithms.com/ai-marketing-department/outbound): Works the account shortlist and writes to the buyer roles research mapped.
- [Sales Enablement](https://aryehalgorithms.com/ai-marketing-department/sales-enablement): Takes the account briefs into the conversations your team has.

Route: /ai-marketing-department/research