Turned manual prospect research into qualified, ready-to-pitch leads

The challenge

A private-equity-backed database company needed its sales team to grow pipeline efficiently, but reps were losing hours every day to work that happened before a conversation could even start.

Finding the right accounts. Researching each one’s technology stack to judge whether the product was a fit. Qualifying. Then writing outreach that didn’t read like a template. All by hand, account by account. The result was slow pipeline, generic outreach, and expensive sales time spent on research instead of selling.

For a PE-backed business under pressure to grow without simply adding headcount, that’s the most expensive kind of bottleneck: the team’s best people doing the work a system should.

What we did

We started where automation actually pays off

Before building anything, we reviewed the sales motion to find the steps eating the most time for the least human judgment: account research, technology-stack qualification, and first-touch drafting. Those were the targets. The parts of selling that genuinely need a person, the conversation and the relationship, we deliberately left alone.

We built the prospect spine with Clay

We used Clay to find and enrich target accounts, pulling firmographic and technology data into one place. Every prospect now arrived with the context a rep would otherwise have spent twenty minutes digging for, already attached.

We did the research and qualifying with Claude

Anthropic’s Claude models researched each account’s technology stack and buying signals, judged fit against the ideal-customer profile, and summarised in plain terms why an account was, or wasn’t, worth a rep’s time. This was the judgment-heavy research a rep used to do manually for every name on the list, now done consistently, at scale, for all of them.

We orchestrated it end to end with n8n

n8n tied the whole workflow together: trigger, enrich, research, qualify, score, and draft a tailored first message, then handed the rep a qualified, pre-researched prospect with outreach ready to review. One pipeline, running quietly in the background, turning a raw list into ready-to-pitch leads.

Reps stayed in control

Nothing went out on autopilot. The system did the research and the first draft; the rep reviewed, adjusted and sent. The quality and the brand voice stayed human, and only the grunt work was automated. No spray-and-pray, no generic blasts going out under the company’s name.

The outcome

• Reps receive qualified, pre-researched prospects with a tailored first message ready to send, instead of a name and a blank page.
• 15 hours of manual research and qualification removed from each rep’s week, on average.
• Outreach tailored to each account’s actual technology stack, not a template, leading to a 48% increase in call bookings.
• 73% more qualified pipeline from the same sales headcount.

Why it worked

Because we automated the research, not the relationship. Reps kept doing the part people are best at, while the system absorbed the part they aren’t: hours of repetitive digging, done the same way every time. For a private-equity-backed company, that’s the cleanest kind of growth, more pipeline from the team you already have.