How to use ChatGPT to research a prospect before a sales call
Ask free-form and you get a paragraph to mine for facts. Ask for a fixed structure and you get facts, contacts, and a first move.
Updated 7 August 2026
The problem with asking an AI to "just research this company"
A free-form prompt like "research Acme Corp for me" gets you a well-written paragraph — and a well-written paragraph is exactly the wrong shape for what you actually need before a call. You need a name, a role, an email if one's public, and a specific detail worth opening with. Prose buries all four in sentences you have to re-read to extract them.
What changes if you ask for a fixed structure instead
Tell the model the sections you want back, in the order you want them, and it will follow that structure just as reliably as it answers a free-form question — the difference is what you get out the other end. A fixed structure turns "research this company" from a chat transcript into something closer to a form: skimmable, and reusable the same way every time.
The five things worth asking for, every time
Whatever wording you use, ask for these five sections specifically:
- Company facts — industry, website, location, how you'd describe the source of the lead
- People — name, role, and any publicly available contact details, as a table, not a paragraph
- Observations — pain points, current tools, anything that reads as a real opening line
- Suggested next actions — with an actual date attached, not just "follow up"
- A short outreach draft — under 150 words, written now while the research is fresh
Verify before you send anything
AI research is a starting point, not a source of truth. Models will sometimes produce a plausible-looking email or phone number rather than admit it doesn't know one — tell it explicitly to leave a field blank rather than guess, and verify anything you're about to act on before it leaves your inbox.
The ready-made version
If you'd rather not write this prompt from scratch, there's a free copy-paste version — the Dossier v1 prompt — that already asks for exactly these five sections in a fixed format. Paste it into any AI, drop in a company name, and the output is structured enough to act on directly, or import into Anguardia as a company, contacts, and dated follow-ups automatically.
Frequently asked questions
- Does this work with Claude, Gemini, or another AI, not just ChatGPT?
- Yes — the technique is model-agnostic. Any capable AI will follow a fixed-structure request; none of this depends on ChatGPT specifically.
- Can I trust the contact info an AI gives me?
- Only after verifying it. Tell the model explicitly not to invent details, and treat anything it returns as a lead to confirm, not a fact to act on directly.
- How is this different from just asking research questions in chat?
- A chat answer is prose optimized for reading once. A fixed-structure request produces the same information shaped so a human — or a system like Anguardia — can act on it without re-reading a paragraph to find the two facts that matter.