Research Campaigns
Audience: Operators configuring AI-assisted prospect discovery.
Goal: Explain how research campaigns, briefs, modes, scoring, and jobs work in Client Growth Hub.
Related: Prospects, CRM, and Pipeline, Features
What a research campaign is
A research campaign is the planning object for AI-assisted prospect discovery. It captures:
- Who you sell to (ICP, industry, geography, language)
- What you offer
- Which channels you may engage after approval
- Guardrails (budget, prospect limit, confidence thresholds, exclusions)
- Optional scoring priority overrides
Interview answers are the source of truth. For B2B, launch always goes through a versioned structured research brief — a read-only interpretation of those answers.
Businesses / Contacts toggle
On Research (and Prospects), choose:
- Businesses — B2B company discovery (structured brief + Deep Research pipeline)
- Contacts — B2C social listening (person prospects)
The selection is remembered in the browser. Both workflows can run in the same workspace; the toggle only filters which campaigns and prospects you see.
Guided interview
Open Research, confirm the workflow toggle, and start a campaign interview:
| Mode | What you answer | Defaults |
|---|---|---|
| Quick interview | Essentials: name, offer, buyers/sectors, geography, prospect limit, scoring priority | Budget, channels, thresholds, evidence, automation, and approval settings use conservative defaults |
| Full interview | Complete policy, including channels, thresholds, exclusions, automation permissions, and scoring | Full operator control |
| Demo fill | Paste a short “we sell X, find Y” brief; the system drafts the interview for edit | For demos — not production policy capture |
For Contacts, the interview also captures discovery mode (Social intent vs Account consumers), listen keywords, and optional Reddit communities.
Some questions can use an optional AI assessor that suggests a normalized value. Accepted normalized answers are stored instead of raw prose when available.
On save, the app creates or updates a draft research campaign with targeting fields, product_mode, and research_guardrails policy metadata.
B2B launch flow
Interview → Save campaign → Launch → Generate brief → Review (read-only)
→ Choose research mode → Approve brief & launch → Worker pipeline
→ Prospects (all qualified; recommended = top N)
→ Accept business → Contact Resolution → Approve / import to CRM
- Click Launch research.
- Review the generated Research brief (summaries, include/exclude lists, hard exclusions, research questions, short search queries, buyer roles).
- If the interpretation is wrong, edit the interview and regenerate a new brief version (do not edit the brief in place).
- Choose a research mode.
- Approve brief & launch.
- Monitor job status on the campaign detail page (requested / discovered / qualified / recommended / available, or why it stopped below target) and in Agent Runs.
- On Prospects, review the recommended set (or all qualified), Accept & find contacts, then Approve & import when persona-matching contacts are ready.
Launch requires a brief that still matches the current interview. If the interview changed after approval, regenerate before launching again.
Research modes (B2B)
| Mode | Best for | Qualification style |
|---|---|---|
standard (default) | Production default | Faster qualification first; escalate to Deep Research when industry, geography, operating-business status, or confidence is still ambiguous |
search | Fast / lower-cost smoke path | Sync qualification only (no Deep Research escalation) |
deep | Higher-effort per-company qualification | Async Deep Research with higher reasoning effort |
demo_deep | Live demos | Brief-driven shortlist (capped) then Deep Research |
Modes change discovery and qualification strategy. Cost estimates on the plan are planning hints, not hard spend gates. Exact provider models are configured per deployment. Clear hard negatives (not an operating business, explicit ICP mismatch) are not escalated — the faster pass stands.
Worker pipeline (B2B)
When a job has an approved structured brief and execution plan:
- Discovery — find organization candidates from strategy-driven web search. Early rounds stay precise; later rounds add industry synonyms, activity signals (hiring, careers, growth), and gap-fill for uncovered sectors or geographies — without increasing the search budget. Other source types (registries, datasets, CRM lookalikes) are reserved for later work and are not operator-configurable today.
- Identity resolution — confirm an operating company name and website/domain; reject directories, listicles, and social shells used as the company site. Identity failures stop before deep qualification credits are spent.
- Qualification — research each resolved organization against the approved brief. In
standardmode this is a faster pass first, with Deep Research only when facts are still ambiguous. - Guardrails — apply hard exclusions and required ICP includes (operating business, geography, industry) as pass/fail; soft geography/industry/signal scoring on survivors.
- Finalize — persist all qualified rows as prospect candidates with qualification facts. The campaign prospect limit marks
recommendedon the top N. Research stays contact-light (no named-person spend yet).
The campaign job summary reports requested / discovered / qualified / recommended / available-for-review counts, plus why a run stopped if it finished below target.
Failed or cancelled jobs can be rerun. Active campaigns can Run again; re-runs skip companies already found for that campaign (by website domain, or company name when no website is available). Use Clone as draft to start a fresh editable policy from a finished or active campaign.
Contact Resolution (after Accept)
B2B company research does not find named people during qualification. On Prospects:
- Review the Recommended set (or toggle All qualified).
- Accept & find contacts (single or bulk) for businesses you want to pursue.
- A background Contact Resolution job looks for persona-matching people (buyer roles from the interview) and stops when quality is sufficient.
- When contacts are ready, choose a primary contact and Approve & import.
Prefer Accept → Contact Resolution over ad-hoc enrichment panels for the primary contact path. “Verified” on contacts means provenance and quality tiers — not SMTP or carrier verification. Prefer rejecting on weak fit or evidence, not only on a missing mobile number.
Guardrails operators commonly set
| Control | Effect |
|---|---|
| Prospect limit | Target / recommendation count N — research may persist more qualified prospects than N |
| Budget | Soft planning constraint with an estimated cost-per-prospect model |
| Minimum confidence | Drops prospects below the threshold |
| Geography / industry | Required ICP includes fail on explicit mismatch; otherwise soft-rank |
| Hard exclusions | Structured rejects even if a company otherwise looks relevant |
| Client / organization type includes | Keep only matching organization types when configured |
| Channels | Allowed engagement channels after approval |
| Buyer roles / contact requirements | Drive Contact Resolution persona match and stop-when-sufficient |
| Scoring priority | Optional campaign overrides for fit / intent / urgency blend |
Not every interview field is hard-enforced by the worker. The research campaign guide in the product distinguishes enforced vs policy text. When in doubt, verify behavior on a small test campaign before a large run.
Signal catalog and scoring
Settings → Signal catalog defines which buying signals matter for this installation, how research should detect them, and how they affect scores.
This is deployment-wide: one catalog for the server install. Campaign ICP and guardrails control who to find; the catalog controls what counts as a buying signal and how strongly it ranks.
For each signal type (for example hiring, growth, marketing, technology, or a custom key):
| Field | Role |
|---|---|
| Definition / evidence examples | Guide detection — what public proof counts |
| Weight | Contribution to buying-intent score |
| Urgency | Contribution to “act now” score |
| Pass to research | Include or exclude the type from detection |
Priority score blends three parts (defaults; editable under Settings → Research priority blend, must sum to 100%):
| Part | Default share | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Fit / base | 45% | ICP match, evidence, contacts, confidence |
| Buying intent | 35% | Signal weights × confidence |
| Urgency | 20% | Signal urgency × confidence |
After changing the catalog, new research jobs use the new definitions immediately. Already-saved prospects keep previous scores until re-researched. At least one signal must remain enabled for research.
Contacts research (B2C)
With Contacts selected on Research:
- Discovery uses social network research for public intent (and related discussion) instead of company-first Deep Research.
- Choose Social intent (people posting public buying intent) or Account consumers (find businesses, then affiliated people).
- Matched authors become person prospects (profile / permalink URL can satisfy the channel guardrail).
- Active social-intent campaigns keep listening on an interval (org default often 1 hour) and only create new prospects / drafts for unseen posts.
- Draft replies land in Social inbox for edit → Approve & publish or Reject.
Full operator steps: B2C Social Listening. Cadence settings: Admin, Settings, and Integrations.
Getting started tutorial
Trial workspaces can run a Getting started wizard for either Businesses or Contacts without live Deep Research or live social listen. Fixture jobs are tagged so they do not count against research entitlements. See Operator User Guide.
Agent Runs
Open Agent Runs to inspect AI/provider activity for research and related calls:
- Status and timestamps
- Related campaign or prospect context
- Citations when available
- Cost signals when available
- Failure reason for failed rows (click a failed run for details)
The list refreshes automatically while the page is open. Use it to explain AI work during demos and to debug failed qualifications.
Changelog
| Date | Change |
|---|---|
| 2026-08-13 | Pre-approval engagement is in controlled managed-campaign validation and is not generally available. Public copy no longer presents it as a shipping campaign policy. |
| 2026-08-12 | Campaign policy Allow pre-approval engagement (default off). Existing campaigns stay off unless an operator enables it. |
| 2026-08-12 | Perplexity optimization: Sonar-default qualify + DR escalate; People Search Contact Resolution; discovery strategy diversity |
| 2026-08-12 | Qualification policy + full qualified pool (recommend N); Accept → Contact Resolution waterfall; job result summary counts; B2C strategy seams |
| 2026-07-28 | Documented Businesses/Contacts toggle, social research for Contacts, Social inbox, Getting started tutorial; removed obsolete Settings product-mode switch. |
| 2026-07-21 | Initial public research campaigns guide (interview, brief, modes, pipeline, signals). |