Take the worksheet into your own workflow
Use this worksheet when a company looks relevant but the reasons are scattered across tabs or someone's memory. It is designed to preserve the reasoning behind an account, not to create a bulk contact database.
Download the account-research worksheet (.md) ↓
Free plain-text Markdown. No signup, personal-data upload or email gate. It is a blank working tool, not a completed customer record.
Prefer a spreadsheet?
Download the blank spreadsheet template (.csv) ↓
The same working fields and guidance, arranged as Section, Field, Your entry and Notes. Import the UTF-8 CSV into your spreadsheet tool, enter your information in the blank column and keep the notes beside it. Duplicate relevant rows when you need more than one observation.
This is a record to adapt, not an automated scoring model, validated benchmark or forecast. It contains no formulas, real prospect records or client results. The Markdown version remains available above if you prefer a document.
No signup or upload. Nothing is sent to this website. Keep personal or confidential information in your approved systems; check sharing permissions if you use an online spreadsheet.
Start with criteria and exclusions
Before researching a company, write down why that kind of business belongs in your audience. Useful criteria connect to the offer: business model, operating situation, market served or a relevant process. Avoid collecting fields simply because they are easy to find.
Add disqualifying conditions and account exclusions. A company can look attractive while already being an active sales opportunity or outside the market your business can serve. The worksheet asks for the decision and the evidence, so that a later reviewer can challenge it.
Keep a small evidence ledger
For each important observation, record the source URL, the date you checked it and a short description of what it actually says. Prefer a source that directly supports the statement rather than repeating an unsourced summary.
Useful source categories may include the business's own service pages, public announcements, relevant job descriptions and published company material. These sources can be incomplete or out of date. Note uncertainty instead of treating every public statement as current operational truth.
A practical record has four columns in your working document: observation, source, review date and confidence or caveat. This is a documentation habit, not a numerical accuracy guarantee.
A public-source exercise: evidence to decision
Public-source training exercise, not client work. Prepared with AI assistance and checked against the linked first-party pages on . No outreach was performed for this exercise, and no affiliation or endorsement is claimed.
For this exercise only, suppose the account criterion is a business that makes project-management software with tools for shared project work. This is a hypothetical research criterion, not The Lead Agency's confirmed target market or evidence that this business needs our services.
- Entity and product
- Basecamp's own site describes a project-management product; its About page identifies 37signals as the business that makes it. This separates the product name from the maker, without assuming a particular legal contracting entity. Basecamp product page; Basecamp's company explanation.
- Source-supported observation
- The features page describes task assignment and due dates, project message boards, and controls over what clients can see in a project. These are first-party product descriptions, not independently tested capabilities or evidence of customer outcomes. Basecamp's feature descriptions.
- Criterion check
- The published product description supports the narrow software-category criterion above. It does not establish a need for an outsourced campaign, a current budget, a buying role or permission to contact anyone.
- Unknowns and next decision
- Current acquisition priorities, supplier selection, campaign ownership and interest in an external service are unknown. Decision: clarify commercial fit before treating this as a prospect; do not mark it qualified or ready for outreach.
- A bounded question, not a diagnosis
- In an appropriate, agreed conversation, ask whether an external research or outreach scope is relevant at all. Do not claim that the company's pipeline, internal reporting or project coordination is broken: these sources say nothing that establishes that.
Recheck the cited pages when using this exercise later; first-party statements can change. The worksheet's useful output is the evidence-to-decision chain, including what it cannot establish, not a supposedly complete lead record.
A fictional equipment-distributor example
Illustrative example, not client work. The company, source descriptions and offer below are invented for training; no such source was fetched and no account was contacted.
- Hypothetical offer and criterion
- A hypothetical maintenance-planning provider wants to understand equipment distributors that run an in-house repair operation. Selling equipment alone is not sufficient fit.
- Fictional observation
- The imagined account has a product catalogue and a page describing repair support. The scenario does not specify whether employees or an external contractor perform that support.
- Decision and reason
- Clarify. The repair-support statement is relevant, but it does not establish the essential in-house-service criterion. Do not progress the account simply because a catalogue looks impressive.
- Role hypothesis and next question
- A service-operations role might understand responsibility for repair work. Who performs the repairs, and who would evaluate a planning change? No named person, purchasing authority, pain point or budget is assumed.
- Exclusion rule
- If repairs are entirely outsourced and the agreed criterion requires an in-house team, exclude this account from that scope. Do not invent internal operations to keep it on a list.
- What not to claim
- “Your service team is missing maintenance deadlines.” Nothing in this fictional observation establishes that claim.
Map roles without inventing authority
Different people may use a solution, evaluate it, sponsor it or approve spending. Write down why a role could matter and which part of the decision is unknown. Avoid treating a job title as a complete map of the buying process.
The worksheet intentionally does not ask you to scrape personal contact details. Any contact selection, channel and permission checks belong in the actual campaign scope. Public availability of information does not remove your responsibility to use it appropriately.
Decide whether to progress, clarify or exclude
At the end of research, choose an operational decision and give a reason. “Progress to message review” means the account meets the agreed research criteria. It does not establish buying intent, consent to every channel or a qualified sales opportunity.
“Clarify” keeps essential unknowns visible. “Exclude” prevents a weak fit from being carried forward just to fill a list. Revisit a record when material information changes rather than changing dates to make an old observation appear fresh.
If you need help defining the scope, read our account-research service. Then connect the record to the campaign-readiness plan and, after a real conversation, the qualification handover.