Quality initial research of a target enterprise account may take up to 15 hours of deep-dive analysis.
This may seem a lot, but only until you realize the devastating cost of pursuing a dead-in-the-water deal with a huge cross-functional decision-making unit.
So here's an overview of the preliminary account summary (PAS) framework that I developed over the years:
Layer 1. Helicopter view
All the standard stuff from your data provider of choice -- financials, growth rate, recent M&As, etc.
Layer 2. Key initiatives at the company level
Main topics of the investor calls (besides financials) and executive keynotes, projects that the company focuses media and PR focus on, big hires at the C-Level, and POVs of the main execs.
Layer 3. Zoom in on the initiatives and events inside the account that are related to your topic. Traces of competitors and complementary vendors, technical keynotes and webinars, anything that will help you better understand the infrastructure you'll be dealing with.
Layer 4. Rough (very rough) outline of the account map with light research on possible decision-makers. You don't need to go deep on every exec at this point, just feel the waters and make your assumptions on the main information flows.
Layer 5. In-depth profiles of the potential champions, who may be selling your product internally. Possible KPIs, POVs on the industry trends, projects that they highlight in social media, education, career path (SUPER IMPORTANT), hobbies, and personal context.
This dataset allows you to
1) Relatively quickly disqualify the accounts that are an obvious misfit
2) Gather enough insight to generate messages that will resonate with potential champions and engage them at a 70+% conversion rate (because you can't live off a 5% cadence conversion when selling to an enterprise).
A preliminary account summary (PAS) is the solid foundation from which you can move on to orchestrating your megadeal.