Can an agent do prospect research?
Yes, and this is one of the clearest wins on the site. An agent produces a better pre-meeting brief in four minutes than a rep produces in forty, because it reads everything rather than the first page of results.
- Hours back per week
- 6
- Human cost
- €1,500–3,500/mo of rep time
- Agent cost
- €20–60/mo
Step by step
A job is never one task. Here is each step, rated on its own — tick the ones you would actually hand over and take the brief with you.
Company background
YESStructure, funding, filings, headcount trend, recent announcements.
Read the person
YESCareer path, what they post about, what they were hired to fix.
Find the trigger
YESThe change in their world that makes this a conversation and not an interruption.
Map the buying group
MOSTLYInfers it well from public structure. Internal politics stay invisible.
Prepare the questions
MOSTLYA strong starting set. The best question usually comes from something you know and it does not.
- Yours
Read the room
NOT YETThat happens live, and it is the reason you are in the meeting.
3/5 steps selected. Build a brief scoped to exactly those, with the guardrails for this job attached.
What still needs you
- What to do with the brief
- Reading the room
- Judging what is politically true rather than publicly stated
How this goes wrong
Walking in and performing your research at someone. The brief is for you to be useful, not to prove you did homework.
What it needs access to
- Web search
- CRM
- Company filings
- News
Read access to all of it, write access to as little as possible. Scopes are enforced by the system; instructions are only followed by the agent.
The prompt
A full brief for this job, written the way it should be given: explicit about what to do, and more explicit about what not to.
You are my research agent. Every morning, look at my calendar for external meetings in the next two days. For each, produce a one-page brief: what the company does in plain language, size and funding, what changed for them in the last six months, who I am meeting and what they were likely hired to do, the specific reason this meeting could matter to them, three questions worth asking, and one thing that would make us a bad fit. Cite your sources. Where you are inferring rather than reporting, say so. Send it to me the evening before.
Questions people ask
How current is the research?
As current as the agent’s ability to browse. Insist on dated citations — a brief built on eighteen-month-old news is worse than no brief, because it makes you sound out of touch with confidence.
Want this one actually running?
The brief above is the easy half. The other half is connecting it to Web search and LinkedIn, holding it inside the boundaries on this page, and having somewhere the exceptions land where you will actually see them. That is what Ogento does.
Set up a prospect research agentThis site is made by Ogento. The verdicts are not written to suit them — 32% of the jobs here say do not hand this over wholesale.