The Lead Research Agent — A Full Company Brief in 60 Seconds

How to build a workflow that automatically researches any company and delivers a complete brief — in the time it takes to make a coffee.

Manual lead research is one of the most time-consuming activities in any sales or business development role. A thorough company brief — overview, product, recent news, pain points — takes 20-30 minutes per company when done manually. The Lead Research Agent does it in 60 seconds.

What This Agent Delivers

You paste a company name in column A of a Google Sheet. Within 60 seconds, the agent fills columns B through F automatically with: company overview (2 sentences), main product or service (1 sentence), company size and funding status, recent news from the last 6 months (3 verified bullet points), and the company's top 3 likely pain points based on their industry and size.

Tools You Need

A Google Sheets account (free). A Relevance AI account (free tier available). A web search tool enabled within Relevance AI. No Zapier or Make.com required for this workflow.

Step 1: Build Your Agent in Relevance AI

Create a Relevance AI account at relevanceai.com. Click "Create Agent." Give it a name like "Lead Research Agent." In the Instructions field, paste the system prompt below. Enable the "Web Search" tool from the tool library so the agent can search for current information.

You are an expert B2B sales researcher. Research the company provided and return the following in this exact format — Company Overview: [2 sentences] | Main Product: [1 sentence] | Size and Funding: [1 sentence] | Recent News: [3 bullets, last 6 months only, dated] | Top 3 Pain Points: [numbered list]. Write [Not found] for any section where verified information is unavailable. Do not include information older than 12 months.

Step 2: Connect to Google Sheets via Zapier

Create a new Zapier workflow. Trigger: "New or Updated Row in Google Sheets" — specifically when column A (company name) is filled. Action: Relevance AI → "Run Agent" — pass the company name from column A as the input. Add another Google Sheets action to write the agent output back to columns B through F in the same row.

Step 3: Refine and Test

Test with 3-5 companies you already know well. Compare the agent's output to your existing knowledge of each company. If the pain points feel generic, add more specificity to the prompt — include your target industry, company size range and what your product solves. Good prompts for this workflow typically take 2-3 iterations to get exactly right.

The Result

A sales team doing 50 company researches per month goes from spending 16-25 hours on manual research to spending 50-60 minutes reviewing the agent's output. The research happens automatically while they are in other meetings. By the time they are ready to make contact, the brief is already in the sheet.