Prospect research brief Claude skill

Use this for one person you are about to contact or meet. It produces a brief a rep can read in 60 seconds and a first line that proves the message was written for them.

Inputs

• Name, company and title, plus a profile link if available.
• Your offer and the persona this person maps to.
• Any CRM history with this person or their company.

The play

1. Confirm the person

Check they still work at the company and in the role. Roughly one in five B2B contacts changes jobs each year; a brief about the wrong job is wasted.

2. Gather in this order

1. Their own words: posts, comments, articles, podcast or event appearances from the last 6 months.
2. Career path: previous companies and roles, tenure in this role. A person 60 days into a role behaves differently from one 4 years in.
3. Company context: one or two triggers from the account level that land on their desk.
4. Shared ground: same former employer, same community, same school, a mutual customer. Use only if real and relevant.

3. Rank the hooks

Score each hook on two questions: is it specific to this person, and does it connect to the problem you solve? Keep only hooks that pass both. Read references/hook-ranking.md for the ranking grid and examples of strong and weak hooks.

4. Write the openers

One for email, one for LinkedIn. One or two sentences each, built from the strongest hook, ending in a natural bridge to the problem, not to your product.

Output format

Person: <name> - <title> at <company> - <tenure in role>
Confirmed current: yes/no (source)
Measured on: <likely metrics for the role>
What they talk about: <2-3 themes with links>
Hooks (ranked):
  1. <hook> - <source> - <why it connects>
  2. ...
Email opener: <1-2 sentences>
LinkedIn opener: <1-2 sentences, more conversational>
Avoid: <topics or claims to stay away from>

What good looks like

• The opener could not be sent to anyone else. Swap the name and it breaks.
• It references their thinking, not their resume. "Loved your post" is weak; "your point that SDR ramp is a data problem, not a training problem" is strong.
• When nothing specific exists, the brief says so and falls back to a role-and-trigger opener instead of inventing intimacy.
• The common mistake is personalising on trivia (alma mater, hometown, a sports team) that has nothing to do with the reason for the message.

Rules

• MUST confirm the person’s current role before writing.
• MUST attach a source to every hook.
• NEVER use personal life details: family, health, location history, photos.
• NEVER claim to have read or watched something you did not.
• NEVER mention tracking data such as profile views or website visits in the opener.

Example prompts

• "Research Priya Shah, VP Revenue at Lumen. Write an email and a LinkedIn opener."
• "I meet Tom Becker tomorrow. Give me a 60-second brief."
• "Find a real hook for each of these 15 prospects, or tell me when there isn’t one."

The grid

Hook strength, strongest first

1. Their stated opinion on the problem you solve. A post, a talk, a quote in an article.
2. A change in their remit. New role, new team, new region, new target.
3. A project they are visibly running. Hiring for it, posting about it, speaking about it.
4. A company trigger that lands on their desk. Funding with growth targets for a VP Sales.
5. A peer comparison. A similar company solved this; name it only if the claim is approved.
6. Role-level insight. What people in their role usually wrestle with at their company’s stage.

Strong and weak versions

When there is nothing

About a third of prospects have no public activity. Do not fake it. Use the role-and-trigger fallback:

"Most heads of operations at multi-site groups your size tell us payroll closes take two to three days. Is that true at Northwind too?"

It is honest, it is relevant and it invites a correction, which is still a reply.