Company Research Tools for B2B Sales Teams
By Kooperativa Engineering
Research before outreach takes a large share of a seller's week. Salesforce's seventh State of Sales report, based on a survey of 4,050 sales professionals, found that reps spend almost one full day of the workweek on prospecting. Salesforce's release on the report says AI agents are expected to cut research time by 34%. Tools that promise to shorten that time are easy to find. Comparing them is harder, because they do different jobs.
Four questions research has to answer
Most lists of company research tools put products from different categories side by side. It helps to start from the questions a seller needs answered before a first call.
| Question | What you need | Typical source | How fast it goes stale |
|---|---|---|---|
| What is this company? | Size, industry, headquarters, offices | Company site, filings and registers, data providers | Months |
| Who is there? | The people who own the problem and the budget | Professional profile data | Months, as roles change |
| What changed? | New joins, leadership moves, hiring activity | Change signals and monitors | Weeks |
| What is the context? | News, strategy, filings, earlier conversations | News, filings, your CRM | Days to weeks |
No single tool answers all four well. A platform that covers every row is usually strong on one of them, and you find out which one by testing it on accounts you know.
Four kinds of tools
Free official sources. For US public companies, SEC EDGAR holds the annual report on Form 10-K, which gives the company's own description of its business, its risks and the number of persons it employs. National company registers cover private companies, with a scope that varies by country: a legal entity, an address and often its officers. They are authoritative and free. They are also slow to read and say little about the people inside.
Sales intelligence platforms. These bundle company data, people, alerts and often contact details in a user interface inside the CRM, often priced per seat. They suit teams that want one tool a seller opens without help from engineering, and that need contact details. Research stays manual, and how much you can automate depends on the plan.
Data APIs. These return structured company and people data to a script, a CRM workflow or an agent. They suit teams that research many accounts and want the result in a field or a score. Someone has to build the integration, and there is no interface to hand a seller.
AI assistants and agents. They are fast at pulling public sources together into a brief. Without a source they invent plausible details, so the useful ones cite where each fact came from, and the best results come from connecting them to structured data over a protocol such as MCP, covered in our article on building an AI research agent.
A research routine you can script
A routine that runs the same steps for every account is easier to check than one that depends on who does the research. Six steps cover the four questions, and the first five are API calls.
- Look up the company by profile URL, username or ID and note fetched_at.
- Read the size and shape with headcount by seniority.
- List the senior people with decision makers.
- Check movement with hiring signals for the last 30 days.
- Find former employees, who know the organization and may now work at a customer of yours.
- Add the context the API does not hold: the latest 10-K or news, and your own CRM notes.
KEY="Authorization: Bearer ik_live_..."
BASE="https://kooperativa.io/api/v1"
curl "$BASE/company?username=hubspot" -H "$KEY"
curl "$BASE/company/headcount-by-seniority?company_id=68529" -H "$KEY"
curl "$BASE/company/decision-makers?company_id=68529&per_page=25" -H "$KEY"
curl "$BASE/company/hiring-signals?company_id=68529&days=30" -H "$KEY"
curl "$BASE/company/past-employees?company_id=68529&per_page=25" -H "$KEY"
# Step six, the context, comes from filings, news and your CRMCheck the research before you use it
Research that nobody checks creates a different problem from research that is missing. Four checks catch most errors.
- Confirm the company. Name search is fuzzy, so match the website or the headquarters before you trust an ID.
- Read the date. Every record carries fetched_at, and a brief should show it next to the facts it supports.
- Question numbers that look off. A headcount ten times what you expected is a reason to look at the source, not to repeat it.
- For a public company, compare the size with the 10-K. Counts differ by definition and date, and the filing is the reference for a total.
What to choose
The right choice depends on who does the research and what happens with the result.
| Situation | Fit |
|---|---|
| A few accounts a week, read by a person | Free sources plus a platform trial |
| Many accounts, result goes into CRM fields or scoring | A data API |
| You need emails or phone numbers | A contact data provider. Our API holds none |
| A brief for every meeting, generated on demand | An agent connected to an API |
Where our API is the wrong source
Our records hold no revenue, funding rounds, technology stack, news or contact details. They cover who works at a company, what the company looks like and what changed. For strategy and financial context you still need filings, news or another provider.
Frequently asked questions
What are company research tools?
Company research tools help a seller or marketer learn about an account before outreach. They fall into free official sources, sales intelligence platforms, data APIs and AI assistants, and each answers a different part of the research.
What free tools can I use to research a company?
SEC EDGAR for the annual reports of US public companies, national company registers for legal entities and officers, and the company's own website. All three are free, and none of them covers the people inside the company in any depth.
How do I research a company before a sales call?
Cover four questions: what the company is, who is there, what changed recently and what the context is. Check the company's size and structure, list its senior people, look for recent joins and leadership moves, then read the latest filing or news.
Can AI research a company for me?
It can assemble a brief quickly, and it needs sources to be trusted. Connecting an AI assistant to structured company and people data lets it report each fact with the date it was fetched, so you can check it.
Get started
Try Kooperativa
One API key. Person and company enrichment, structured search, and monitors under one flat license.