Prospect Research

Prospect research is the unglamorous work that makes every later step of sales easier. Before you ever contact a business, you should know: what they currently do for marketing (do they run ads already? what does their website look like?), how established they appear to be (reviews, years in business, number of locations), and at least one specific, genuine observation about them you can reference in your outreach.

A simple research pass takes ten minutes per prospect: check their Google Business Profile for review count and recent activity, check whether they're running Meta ads (the Meta Ad Library is free and shows any active ads a Facebook/Instagram page is running), and look at their website for obvious gaps — slow load times, outdated design, no clear call to action, no mobile optimization.

This research does two things. First, it lets you qualify prospects before you waste outreach effort on a bad fit — a business running zero marketing and barely any reviews may not have the revenue to support your retainer yet. Second, and more importantly, it's what makes your outreach sound like it came from a person who looked at their actual business, not a copy-pasted script — which is the single biggest driver of response rates.