Building a B2B Prospecting Platform for Better Company Research

B2B prospecting often involves jumping between different sources just to understand whether a company is worth reaching out to.

You might start with a company website, search for additional business information, evaluate whether the company fits your target market, organize what you've found, and then use that research when preparing outreach.

I have been working on Prospetra, a browser-based B2B prospecting and company research platform designed around making this workflow more organized.

The problem with prospect research

Finding a company is usually only the beginning.

Before starting outreach, useful questions might include:

• What does this company actually do?
• Is it relevant to the target market?
• What information is available about the business?
• Is it worth adding to the prospecting pipeline?
• What context could make outreach more relevant?

When this research is spread across multiple tabs and tools, prospecting can quickly become repetitive.

Bringing research into one workflow

The idea behind Prospetra is to bring more of the prospect research process into a single web-based workflow.

Instead of treating prospecting as simply collecting a list of companies, the focus is on helping users understand the businesses they are researching.

This makes company information more useful when deciding which prospects deserve attention.

Research before outreach

One lesson from building the platform is that more prospects don't necessarily mean better prospecting.

A large list of companies isn't particularly useful if there is little context about them.

A more useful workflow looks something like:

Discover a potential company
        ↓
Research the business
        ↓
Evaluate its relevance
        ↓
Organize the prospect
        ↓
Prepare informed outreach

The research and qualification stages are important because they provide context for what happens next.

Designing for B2B workflows

Prospecting software also has an interesting UX challenge.

There can be a lot of information available about a company, but displaying everything at once can make the interface harder to use.

The application needs to help users move from discovering a company to understanding it without turning every prospect into an overwhelming collection of data.

That means deciding which information should be immediately visible and which details should be available when deeper research is needed.

Keeping prospecting actionable

Another challenge is making sure research leads somewhere.

Collecting information is useful, but eventually users need to decide what to do with a prospect.

The workflow therefore needs to connect research with organization and outreach rather than treating company information as an isolated dataset.

Building Prospetra

Prospetra is still something I am actively developing and improving.

Building it has been an interesting exercise in combining company research, prospect organization, and B2B outreach workflows into a single product while keeping the experience straightforward.

You can explore Prospetra and see the current platform.

I'd particularly appreciate feedback from developers, founders, and people involved in B2B sales:

What part of prospect research takes the most time in your current workflow?