Lead Research Workflow
Wake up to 25 qualified prospects a day. Every one enriched, scored, and ready to outreach.
Founders either buy $300/month Apollo seats and still spend 2 hours a day clicking through LinkedIn, or they hire a VA who sends 'hey' messages that burn the list. Lead research is the most universally hated solo founder task: low-skill enough to feel beneath you, hard enough that shortcuts produce garbage leads that waste your outreach time.
The AI Sales Rep and AI Head of Growth run a daily lead research heartbeat. They scan LinkedIn, Apollo, Clay-style sources, and your existing CRM for prospects matching your ICP, enrich each with firmographic + tech stack + hiring signals, score against your fit criteria, dedupe against past outreach, and drop a ranked list in your chat by 9am.
How it runs
- 1Define ICP once
AI Head of Growth interviews you in chat: company size, industry, role, stack, recent funding, hiring signals. Writes a structured ICP definition to workspace memory. You refine it once; it persists.
- 2Scan sources nightly
At 2am the AI Sales Rep queries Apollo, LinkedIn Sales Nav (via Composio/Clay), Crunchbase, BuiltWith, and your own CRM for new accounts matching ICP. Typical pull: 200-500 candidates.
- 3Enrich each profile
For each candidate, pull firmographics (size, revenue, funding), tech stack (BuiltWith), hiring signals (job posts), recent news (Google News), and key contacts with verified emails (Hunter/Apollo).
- 4Score and rank
AI Sales Rep scores each on fit (ICP match), intent (hiring signals, recent funding, tech migration), and reachability (verified email, mutual connection). Top 25 get promoted to today's list.
- 5Dedupe and filter
Check against HubSpot for past outreach (90-day cooldown), Gmail for past conversations, and your ban list. Only truly new, high-fit prospects make the morning list.
- 6Deliver the ranked list
9am briefing delivers 25 prospects with name, company, role, fit score, top 3 reasons for the score, and a suggested hook for outreach. You approve the list; it flows into the sales outreach workflow.
Who runs it
What you get
- ✓25+ qualified prospects in your inbox every morning
- ✓Lead research time cut from 2 hours/day to 5 minutes
- ✓Higher response rates — every prospect is a true ICP match
- ✓Apollo + Clay + Hunter cost replaced with one workflow
- ✓Pipeline never runs dry — the heartbeat doesn't forget
- ✓Rejected leads get remembered — no duplicate outreach
Frequently asked questions
Isn't this what Clay already does?
Clay is a phenomenal data tool — if you want to spend a weekend building tables, writing enrichment logic, and maintaining it as sources change. That's a job. Tycoon's AI Sales Rep treats lead research as a goal ('find me 25 ICP-fit prospects daily') not a workflow you build. It picks the right sources, handles API quirks, updates scoring when you give feedback, and writes a new enrichment recipe if a source goes down. Many Tycoon users keep their Clay account and use it for ad-hoc one-offs, but their daily pipeline runs through Tycoon.
How do you get LinkedIn data without getting banned?
Through authorized surfaces only — Sales Navigator API (via LinkedIn's sanctioned integration), Apollo's LinkedIn exports, and your own warm network via your connected account. We don't scrape logged-out LinkedIn. This matters: bans are permanent on LinkedIn and you lose your most valuable asset if you get caught with bulk scraping. The AI Sales Rep is explicitly constrained to sanctioned sources and will tell you so when you ask it to do something riskier.
What if my ICP changes mid-quarter?
You tell the AI Head of Growth in chat: 'we're moving upmarket, new ICP is 100-500 employee Series B+ SaaS companies with a Claude Code integration.' It updates the workspace memory, reruns the scoring on today's candidates, and next morning's list reflects the new criteria. Apollo/Clay require you to rebuild the filter manually — and every filter is a new artifact to maintain. Here it's a conversation.
How much does the AI Sales Rep cost to run this daily?
Typical cost for daily research + enrichment on 25 prospects is $2-5/day in API calls ($60-150/month). Plus whatever your source subscriptions cost (Apollo $149/mo, Sales Nav $99/mo). Compare to: an offshore VA at $800-1500/month who produces worse data, or an inhouse SDR at $5-8K/month. The enrichment quality matches or beats what a trained human produces because the AI checks 12 sources per prospect; a human checks 2.
How do I prevent the AI Sales Rep from burning through my prospect list too fast?
Set daily and weekly prospect quotas in the AI Sales Rep config. Default ceiling: 50-100 new prospects/day, 300-500/week for early-stage companies. Higher caps make sense only when your list is large enough to sustain the volume without repeat contact. The AI also rotates across segments so no single segment depletes — it pulls from your ICP pool proportionally rather than sequentially.
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