How to research a company before a sales call

Build a sourced company brief with Vaaya: resolve the business, inspect its own pages, add relevant events and preserve the gaps.

A useful company brief helps you ask better questions on a call. It should explain what the company sells, who it serves and what has changed recently, with enough evidence to check each claim.

You can build that brief with Vaaya from a company domain and a few questions. The workflow below ends with a research document. Contact discovery and outreach can follow once you know which people and problems matter.

Before you start

Connect your agent using the Vaaya installation guide. Have the company's domain, the meeting purpose and a maximum research spend ready. If the name is ambiguous, include a location or known product.

Use this prompt, replacing the brackets:

Research [company domain] for a call about [our product or question].
Use Vaaya consult to select current sources and quote the calls first.
Work within [budget]. Answer: what they sell, who buys it, relevant teams,
and changes since [date]. Start with the company's own pages.
Keep a source URL and date for each material claim. Mark estimates and
unknowns. Return a one-page brief plus an evidence table. Do not contact anyone.

1. Resolve the company before adding facts

Ask the agent to check that the website belongs to the intended business. Match the company name, product and location. A parent group and its subsidiary may share a brand while operating different products.

Vaaya exposes akta/company-search with a required query. Use the domain or company name, then inspect the matches before choosing a company reference. The selected domain or Akta UUID can feed the enrichment action. These actions appear in the current catalog.

Record the resolved domain at the top of the brief. If two matches remain plausible, keep the research unresolved rather than merging their facts.

2. Read the pages that answer your questions

Start with the homepage, product page and an appropriate customer or about page. vaaya/onescrape accepts a required urls array, with up to five URLs per call. Ask the agent to read the actual returned content before summarizing it.

Keep claims tied to the page that makes them. A company saying that its product serves banks supports a statement about its positioning. It does not establish the number of bank customers or their contract values.

If a needed field is still missing, use akta/company-enrich. Its required fields are company and sections. This is a request template, not a recorded run:

{
  "company": "[resolved domain]",
  "sections": ["firmographic", "product_offering"]
}

Ask consult for the quote with your selected sections before execution. Add management_profile or funding_detail only when those questions belong in the brief. A returned financial estimate should retain its estimate label.

3. Add events with dates and sources

Search for relevant announcements and reporting inside the date window. The catalog includes brave/news, which requires q, and akta/news, which can scope news by company, industry or query. For Akta, start_date uses YYYY-MM-DD; set an explicit limit as well.

Read the underlying article for events that will influence the call. Keep the publication date and the event date separate. An old acquisition can appear in an article published yesterday. Deduplicate syndicated announcements before describing several articles as several events.

When sources disagree on headcount or funding, retain both values with their dates and definitions. Do not average incompatible measures into a new fact.

4. Produce a brief someone can audit

Use the following illustrative schema. It defines fields to collect, not results from a company run.

Field	What belongs here
Claim	A factual sentence relevant to the meeting
Evidence	Source URL and a short paraphrase
Timing	Publication date, event date and retrieval date
Status	Confirmed, company-reported, estimated or unknown
Follow-up	A question the evidence makes worth asking

Put three useful meeting questions below the table. Each should follow from a finding or an explicit gap. Avoid personalized openers built from unrelated trivia.

When the research stalls

An empty response may mean missing coverage, a bad company match or an unavailable source. Inspect the error and selected identity before spending on another provider. If a page cannot be read, list it as unread; a search snippet cannot replace its contents.

Keep the actual call receipts with your working notes using Vaaya's response fields. Finish when the brief answers the meeting questions, even if optional company fields remain blank. The next person opening the document should be able to follow a claim back to its source.

Questions

What do I need to research a company?

Start with its website domain, the purpose of the research, a date window and a spending ceiling. A domain helps avoid confusing businesses with the same name.

Should I buy every company-enrichment section?

Request the sections needed for your questions. Akta company enrichment accepts selected sections, so a funding question does not require every available company field.

What should the final brief contain?

Include a short business description, relevant people and events, source URLs, dates, contradictions and unanswered questions. Distinguish company claims from independent evidence.