Lead generation and prospect research
A researched, scored and ready-to-contact prospect list every morning, each lead with its evidence and a drafted first message for a rep to approve.
Prospect research takes reps away from selling, and what replaces it is usually a generic list. Lead generation is the fourth most in-demand Sales & Marketing skill in Upwork’s In-Demand Skills 2026 report.
Reps barely sell
Sales reps spend 70% of their time on non-selling tasks, according to a Salesforce survey of 5,500 sales professionals. Prospect research and list building are a big part of it.
Salesforce, 2024Businesses pay freelancers to do it
Lead list building runs $150–$500 per project for 100–500 contacts, and ongoing pipeline work $800–$3,000 a month.
UpworkLists go stale and generic
Bought lists are not researched, and generic outreach gets ignored. Personalising each message by hand does not scale.
What the agent does
- 01
Knows your ideal customer
A knowledge base holds your ideal customer profile, best-fit and bad-fit examples, your offer and your case studies.
- 02
Finds candidates
A tool pulls companies matching your filters (industry, size, location, technology) from your data provider, or takes a list you upload.
- 03
Researches each one
Every night a research agent runs on every company in parallel. It reads their website and recent news through search tools and notes hiring, funding, new locations or product launches.
- 04
Scores the fit, with reasons
Each company gets a score and the evidence behind it, such as “opened 2 new clinics in Texas in August; your case study is a clinic group”, with links to the pages it read.
- 05
Drafts the first message
For good fits, an opener agent writes a short personalised opener using that evidence and your case studies.
Checked before anyone sees an answer
The guardrail
No invented facts in openers, and no claims you cannot back up. An opener may only use evidence the research agent found, with the link attached, and an output guardrail blocks a claim that has no source.
Where a person steps in
The day’s list lands in Human Review. Reps approve, edit or reject each lead, and only approved leads go to the CRM or outreach tool. Nobody is contacted before a rep approves.
What is recorded
Every lead carries its reasons and source links, and Monitoring shows the cost per researched lead and every source used.
The steps, in order
Only the research and data tools need a developer. Outreach should follow your email and privacy rules (for example CAN-SPAM and GDPR); the approval step keeps a person accountable for every first contact.
| Step | What you do in Studio | Typical time |
|---|---|---|
| 1Describe your ideal customer | Create a knowledge base with your ideal customer profile, 5 best customers, 5 bad fits, your offer and your case studies. | 1 hour |
| 2Create the agents | Create the research agent, with scoring and evidence fields, and the opener agent. | 30 min |
| 3Connect research tools | Add search and website-reading tools, plus your data provider, with the keys in Secrets. | 2–3 hours for a developer |
| 4Test on 20 companies | Run known good and bad fits, and save them as a test suite so scores stay consistent. | 1 hour |
| 5Build the nightly workflow | Schedule, find candidates, Agent (for each), Branch on score, Human review, CRM. | 1–2 hours |
| 6Run for a week | Reps approve every lead; adjust the profile from their edits. | 1 week |
A worked example
A team of 3 reps who each want 100 researched prospects a month. The inputs are assumptions about a typical business; replace them with your own numbers.
| Line | Assumption | Per year |
|---|---|---|
| Rep research time today | 15 minutes per prospect × 300 a month, which is 75 hours a month at $46.89 an hour, the US private-industry average cost per hour worked (Bureau of Labor Statistics, June 2026) | ≈ $42,200 |
| Review time with Studio | Reps spend 2 minutes reviewing each prospect, which is 10 hours a month | ≈ $5,600 |
| Rep time freed | 65 hours a month back to selling | ≈ $36,600 |
| A freelancer, for comparison | Ongoing pipeline work at $800–$3,000 a month | $9,600–$36,000 |
| Total value | ≈ $36,600 | |
| Krazimo Studio cost | ≈ $1,500–$2,000 a year, plus your data provider: the Starter plan at $99 a month (about 600–900 runs a month) plus model and search usage, estimated at $0.05–$0.20 per researched company | |
About 65 hours a month back to selling, and every prospect arrives with evidence a rep can use in the first sentence.
See it working
on your own information.
Tell us about your business and we will walk through this use case with you in Studio.