# Account Research Brief

> Use this skill before a first meeting, an ABM push, or a territory review, when you need a defensible account brief instead of a copied About page. Produces firmographics, positioning pillars, an evidence-tagged SWOT, a named exec list, and live hiring signals, with every claim marked as sourced or inferred.

- Skill: `swan-gtm/account-research-brief` (Agent Skill)
- Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add swan-gtm/account-research-brief`
- Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/swan-gtm/account-research-brief/raw
- Safety review: pending
- Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex
- Category: Marketing & Growth
- Author: swan-gtm (https://skillmd.com/u/swan-gtm)
- Updated: 2026-09-17
- Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/swan-gtm/account-research-brief

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Run this before a first meeting or an ABM push. It produces a one-page brief where every claim is tagged as evidence-backed or inference, so the AE knows what they can say out loud.

## The play

1. **Resolve the company to a stable identifier first.** Match on the company's own URL slug rather than its display name. Name search returns near-matches and you will research the wrong entity, which is worse than researching nothing.

2. **Pull firmographics.** Size, industry, headquarters, founding year, description, specialities. This is the skeleton the rest hangs on.

3. **Read composition, not just headcount.** How the employee base splits by function and seniority says more than a total. A company that is 60% engineering sells differently than one that is 60% sales.

4. **Extract positioning pillars.** Cluster the company's own description, tagline, and specialities into three to six themes: product areas, target buyer, stated differentiators. Name each pillar and cite the exact source phrase. These are the words the buyer already uses about themselves.

5. **Build a SWOT where every line is tagged.** Mark each point `evidence` (traceable to something retrieved) or `inference` (your read). An untagged SWOT is opinion wearing a suit, and an AE who repeats an inference as fact in a meeting loses the room.

6. **Ask before you spend on people.** Confirm two things with the requester: which titles matter, and how many employee records to pull. Skipping this is how a routine brief turns into a surprise bill.

7. **Read hiring as a live signal.** Recent joiners, by function, are the most current evidence you have of where budget is moving. A team that added four engineers and no marketers last quarter is telling you something.

8. **Deliver both shapes.** Structured data for the next automation step, and a short human brief for the AE. They have different readers and different lifespans.

## What good looks like

- The best briefs quote the company's own language back. Buyers relax when you describe them the way they describe themselves.
- The mediocre version is a reformatted About page: no composition, no signal, no tagging, and nothing an AE could not have read themselves in two minutes.
- Absence is a finding. "No leadership changes in twelve months" is real intelligence. Say it rather than padding the section.
- You know it is good when the AE walks in able to say which claims are sourced and which are your read, and never has to guess.

## Rules

- MUST tag every SWOT point as evidence or inference.
- MUST confirm target titles and record counts before pulling people data.
- MUST state plainly when a data source returned nothing, in the brief itself.
- NEVER invent a headcount growth trend, an exec, or a job opening to fill a section.
- NEVER research a company you matched by display name alone without confirming the identifier.