we noticed something during a deal review a few months ago. asked one of our reps how her call went. she said it went fine but she'd spent the entire morning prepping for it. not building a custom deck, not practicing the pitch, just manually looking up the company on linkedin, checking crunchbase for funding stage, trying to figure out who the actual decision maker was.
asked another rep about a different call. same story.
every single lead that came in, someone on our team was spending 20-30 minutes manually reconstructing who that company is before they'd pick up the phone. makes sense individually, you want context before a call, nobody wants to sound clueless. but across every lead, every day, it was eating 5+ hours per week per rep in pure research time.
the information wasn't hard to find. it was just slow, repetitive, and had to be done fresh every time because nobody remembers what they looked up for the last lead.
so we built a Research Agent into Surface that runs automatically the moment a lead enters the system. it pulls company background, funding stage, employee count, tech stack, recent news, and structures it all directly in the lead record before a rep ever opens it. by the time they see the lead, the research is already done.
the result: reps walk into calls already knowing the basics. the 5+ hours a week they were spending on manual research shifted to actual selling time. and the quality of first calls went up because reps weren't scrambling to read a linkedin page 2 minutes before the meeting.
for anyone running a sales team: how are your reps handling pre-call research right now? fully manual, partially automated, or have you found something that works?
