How to do deep account and market research with AI.

I use this when I need to actually understand something before I act - a target account, a competitor, a market, a pricing question - with sources I can trust, not a confident guess. It fans out across the web, fetches and checks the sources, and gives me a cited answer. I reach for it before a big call or a pitch, when sizing a segment, or any time I am about to make a decision on a hunch and want it grounded first.

How I use this, and what for

I use this when I need to actually understand something before I act - a target account, a competitor, a market, a pricing question - with sources I can trust, not a confident guess. It fans out across the web, fetches and checks the sources, and gives me a cited answer. I reach for it before a big call or a pitch, when sizing a segment, or any time I am about to make a decision on a hunch and want it grounded first.

What the AI actually does

You give it a question. The AI breaks it into many searches, fetches and reads the pages, cross-checks the claims against each other, and writes a synthesised report with the sources attached. The manual version is opening fifteen tabs, reading three of them, and hoping. This is the difference between skimming and having something genuinely look into the question.

For an account specifically, public research only gets you half the picture. Common Room pulls signals from across your touchpoints - product usage, website activity, public LinkedIn engagement, news, hiring, job listings - and resolves them into one profile per person and account, sorted into first, second and third-party signals. Layer that on the web research and you see not just what is public, but who is already in your orbit. A general engine like Perplexity covers the open-web side if you do not have the harness to hand.

The tools and APIs you need

• Common Room
• Perplexity
• Claude

The right prompts

Account research before a pitch

```
/deep-research
Research [Company] before my pitch: what they do, how they sell, recent
funding or hiring, who runs sales, and any signal they are scaling the
sales team. Cite sources. Then add what Common Room knows about them.
```

Market / segment question

```
/deep-research
Which UK B2B SaaS segments (50-200 employees) are hiring SDRs and AEs
fastest right now, and what does that say about where meritt should focus?
Give me a cited report, and ask me to narrow it if the question is too broad.
```

How to do it

Sharpen the question first

"Should we move upmarket" is too broad; "which 50-200 person UK SaaS segments are hiring SDRs fastest right now" is researchable. If it is underspecified, the skill will ask 2-3 narrowing questions - answer them.

Run `deep-research`

with the refined question.

Let it fan out

- many searches, sources fetched, claims cross-checked, not one summary of one page.

Read the cited report

Follow the sources on anything you will repeat to a prospect or put in a deck.

For an account, add [Common Room](https://www.commonroom.io/)

- layer first-party signal on top of the public research so you see who is warm, not just what is public.

See the difference

Let AI carry the heavy lifting; you keep the judgement and the final say.

How you'll know it's working

• A cited report, not a confident-sounding guess - you can check every claim that matters.
• Many sources read and cross-checked, not one page summarised.
• For accounts, public research and your own warm signal in one picture.
• You walk into the decision grounded, not guessing.

Questions people ask