Automated Prospect Research Solution for Digital Agency

Industry: B2B Services Client: Mid-sized digital agency Solution: Automated Prospect Research, AI Analysis, and Personalized Reports (built in n8n)

A growing digital agency was struggling with one of the most time-consuming parts of outbound sales: researching prospects at scale.

Their SDRs spent 10–12 minutes per lead digging through LinkedIn profiles, company pages, reviews, and social posts—only to create short, inconsistent summaries.

This research bottleneck slowed the sales pipeline, limited daily outreach volume, and produced low-quality personalization.

The agency approached us to automate the entire process without sacrificing accuracy or personalization quality.

The agency wanted a system that could collect prospect data from LinkedIn, company websites, and TrustPilot, analyze the data and generate key insights including personal background, company summary, pain points, opportunities, and suggested solutions, create a branded HTML research report, automatically email the report to the SDR, and update Google Sheets as the single source of truth.

All without manual effort.

We designed an end-to-end automated research pipeline using n8n, OpenAI, Perplexity, and Google Sheets. The workflow consisted of three stages:

The workflow automatically collects LinkedIn posts, experiences, education, company background via Perplexity, citations, TrustPilot reviews, and online mentions. Data is cleaned, structured, and prepared for the AI analysis layer.

This replaced 100% of the SDRs’ manual research.

Using multiple OpenAI message models, the automation generates a person and company profile summary, key similarities between SDR and prospect, and critical pain points with tailored solutions.

Each AI step is modular, meaning the system can easily be expanded or fine-tuned. This improved personalization quality and ensured every outreach message referenced real insights.

Finally, the workflow generates a beautiful HTML report using a custom template, sends the report automatically via Gmail, and updates Google Sheets with contact research status, timestamp, and summary fields.

The SDR receives the report instantly and uses it to write a highly personalized email.

Research time per lead: Previously 10–12 minutes, now less than 45 seconds

Daily capacity: Previously 20–25 leads per day, now 150+ leads per day

Personalization quality: Previously inconsistent, now consistent, high-quality, and insight-rich

Positive reply rate: Previously 2.9%, now 4.1% (a 41% increase)

SDR satisfaction: Previously described as “time-consuming,” now called a “game-changer”

Multi-source data collection: The system pulls from LinkedIn, company websites, Perplexity research, and TrustPilot reviews.

Multi-model AI analysis: Generates profiles, identifies similarities, extracts pain points, and suggests solutions.

Automated HTML report: Creates beautiful, branded, client-facing documentation.

Zero manual work: Everything runs with a single trigger or button.

Outbound fails when personalization is generic. But personalization fails when research is slow.

This automation solves both. SDRs start their day with high-quality insights, AI highlights pain points and buying triggers, and the team stays inside one workflow—no tabs, no scraping, no copy-paste.

The result is more replies, more meetings, and no burnout.

This case study proves that AI-assisted research can drastically improve outbound productivity without hiring more SDRs.

The best part? The system is fully modular. Tomorrow, we can extend it to auto-generate the outreach email, push directly to CRM, trigger follow-ups, score leads, or qualify prospects using additional data sources.

If you’d like to build a similar automation for your agency or business, we can replicate or customize this for your exact workflow.