How to Excel at AI Research in 3 Steps

Overview

Apollo’s AI research delivers actionable insights on people and companies, streamlining your prospecting and empowering you to craft deeply personalized messages. It saves you hours of manual digging, with just a few clicks to uncover the most important information.

When you create and tailor AI research to your goals, you can revolutionize your workflows and build meaningful, long-lasting business relationships with your ideal prospects.

Check out the following checklist to level up your skills with AI research.

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Step 1. Create a List and Run AI Research

To get started, create a list of prospects that you can use to test AI research.

  First, set your company preferences in the content center to configure key factors like your company name, customer pain points, and business or service value props. Apollo AI uses this information to make your research more relevant and to craft personalized messaging.

  Next, create a list of 100 people. Add search filters like job title, company size, or buying intent to hone in on your ideal prospects. Name your list "AI Research List." You'll use this list to level up your Apollo AI skills.

  Open your list, and click Run AI Research > Start with a template to run an AI research template built by Apollo.

  Select the confirm decision-maker research template. This template helps you find contacts who are empowered to manage budgets or make purchasing decisions, allowing you to narrow your list to highly qualified leads.

  Click Preview to review the research results. Previews allow you to trial and error research outputs, so you can fine-tune prompts. You can run 5 free previews on each AI research prompt.

  Next, click Save & run > Run on first 10 rows. Apollo runs the research on the first 10 contacts on your list. Review the results.

  Click the AI research column, and select Run on all empty rows. You just gained powerful insights on 100 contacts. Pretty cool, right?

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Step 2. Refine Your List and Create Custom AI Research

Now it’s time to refine your list and create a custom AI prompt. Custom AI research allows you to create your own AI prompts to discover unique insights.

  First, click the AI research column for Confirm decision-maker and select Apply filter.

  Select Yes to filter your list to those who are decision-makers.

  Select the remaining contacts, and add them to a new list called “Qualified.”

  Next, click Run AI research > Run custom AI prompt.

You can run custom AI research in assisted mode or prompt mode.

• Assisted: If you're new to AI prompts or need some guidance, assisted mode is best. Apollo generates a prompt for you based on your goals.
• Prompt: If you're a seasoned prompter and know about AI prompt best practices, prompt mode allows you to create a custom prompt from scratch.

  Select Prompt mode for this exercise. With custom AI prompts, you can choose between different AI models. Select Perplexity Sonar.

  Paste the following in the prompt input:

You are an expert news analyst. Your task is to find recent news about a specified company from the last 3 months, prioritizing the most recent and relevant information.
Find recent news about the Company: '{{account.name}}' with the website '{{account.website_url}}' from the last 3 months. Today's date is {{now_day}}-{{now_month}}-{{now_year}}.
**Search Scope:**
- **Company Website:**
   - Blog posts
   - Press releases
   - News or update pages
- **External Sources:**
   - Financial reports or earnings announcements
   - News articles from major publications
   - Podcasts focused on the company or their industry
   - Product releases or updates
   - New customers or partnerships announced
   - Mergers & acquisitions involving the company
   - Industry or market trends relevant to the company and its sector
Provide the output in the following numbered format:
1) A concise summary of the news.
Date: Date of the event or announcement mentioned in the news. (must be in format = YYYY-MM-DD)
A brief description of the news, highlighting key details.
2) A concise summary of the news.
Date: Date of the event or announcement mentioned in the news. (must be in format = YYYY-MM-DD)
A brief description of the news, highlighting key details.
...and so on.
If no recent and relevant information is found, respond ONLY and EXACTLY with "No news found online in the last 3 months." without any markdown formatting.
Important:
- Do not provide any introductory text, explanations, or conclusions.
- Only include results that are confirmed to be about the company mentioned, by cross-referencing with the given company's website url to avoid confusion with other companies with similar names.
- If unsure about the relevance or accuracy of the news, do not include it.
- Limit your response to a maximum of 5 news items.
- Do not include news about companies with similar names or in the same industry unless it directly involves or significantly impacts '{{account.name}}'.
- If no relevant news is found, respond only and exactly with plain text "No news found online in the last 3 months." without any additional explanation.

  Click Preview to preview the custom AI research results on a few contacts.

  Edit the AI research field and name it “Custom AI Research.”

  Click Save & run > Run on all empty rows.

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Step 3. Generate Personalized Messaging

Now that you’ve run a custom AI prompt to uncover important news on your prospects' companies, it’s time to put it all together with hyper-personalized messaging.

  Head back to your "Qualified" list and click Run AI research > Run a Custom AI Prompt. This time, choose the Anthropic Claude Haiku 3.5 model.

  For this step, paste the following in the prompt input — or get creative with your own prompt:

You are a marketing professional specializing in cold emailing. Write an email to {{contact.name}} from {{sender_first_name}} at {{offering}} offering {{value_proposition}}. 

Use the research from {{contact.AI Research}} to write a 2 paragraph email expressing interest in collaborating on ways to improve social media to boost recent major news. 

Introduce {{sender_first_name}} and {{offering}}, and outline the potential benefits of the collaboration. Propose a short Zoom and demo to discuss it further if they're interested.

Be polite, concise, and use natural language. Do not include a subject line.

End the email with "Sincerely,
{{sender_first_name}} {{sender_last_name}}"

  Name the AI research field “AI Research Email” and click Save and run and Generate > Run on all empty rows. You just generated hyper-personalized messaging for your contacts!

  Next, create a sequence.

  Add an email step.

  Click Insert AI variable > Existing AI variable. Click Recently created > then find and insert the "AI Research Email" into the email template.

  Click Save.

  Add the contacts from your “Qualified” list to the sequence. You just began outreach with hyper-personalized messaging!

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Next Steps

In this 3-step checklist, you learned how to use and write your own custom AI research prompts, apply them as a filter on searches and lists, and create a sequence for qualified leads with hyper-personalized messaging.

Ready to take your AI research to the next level? Here are some resources to keep the momentum going.

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