Use this for lead intelligence, prospect research, investor/customer/partner/press list building, lead qualification, warm-intro path research, and personalized outreach drafts.
User wants to find specific leads: investors, customers, partners, or press contacts
"Who should I reach out to for X?" or "Find me 20 potential enterprise customers"
Building an outreach list for a launch, fundraise, or partnership campaign
Qualifying an existing list of companies or contacts
Researching a specific person or company before a meeting
Finding warm introduction paths to a target contact
How this differs from nearby skills
vs sales-strategy: sales-strategy defines the ICP, pipeline stages, and overall go-to-market motion. lead-intelligence executes actual discovery and qualification against a defined ICP — it answers "who specifically?" not "what kind of person?"
vs marketing-growth: marketing-growth plans channels and campaigns. lead-intelligence finds specific named individuals and companies to contact.
market-analysis maps the competitive landscape. lead-intelligence finds actionable contacts within that landscape.
Skills relacionados
vs market-analysis:
vs deep-research: deep-research conducts broad topic research. lead-intelligence is focused, structured prospecting with scoring and outreach drafts.
MCP requirements
Exa (required): Primary tool for finding matching people and companies via semantic and structured search. This skill has significantly reduced capability without Exa.
Playwright (optional): Social profile research, company page scraping for signals. Graceful degradation: skip social signals layer if Playwright unavailable.
Graceful degradation without Exa: provide a search strategy and query templates the user can run manually.
Workflow
1. Define the ideal contact profile
Before searching, produce a precise profile:
Role signals: Job titles, seniority (VP+, founder, head of), department
Company signals: Industry, company size (ARR or headcount), stage (seed/Series A/enterprise), geography
Behavioral signals: Recent funding, hiring in relevant areas, posted about the problem, attended relevant events
Exclusions: Competitor employees, conflicted investors, regions not served
Output this as a one-paragraph ICP statement before proceeding.
2. Search via Exa
Construct targeted Exa searches:
Person searches: "[role] at [industry] companies", "[title] who [behavior signal]"
Company searches: "[industry] companies using [technology]", "[industry] Series A [geography]"
News/signal searches: "[company] recently hired [role]", "[person] posted about [problem]"
Run multiple searches with varied query angles to avoid single-source bias.
3. Score each lead
Apply signal weights to rank results:
Signal
Weight
Role match (title, seniority, department)
30%
Industry / vertical match
25%
Recency of activity / signal
20%
Influence / reach (followers, company size)
15%
Geography / location fit
10%
Score each lead 0-100. Tier: A (80-100), B (60-79), C (40-59). Default to Tier A leads for outreach.
4. Find warm paths
For each Tier A lead:
Mutual LinkedIn connections (manual check or Playwright)
Shared communities, Slack groups, alumni networks, investors in common
Prior interactions (commented on same post, attended same event)
Portfolio company connections if targeting investors
Document any warm path found — warm outreach converts 3-5x better than cold.
5. Draft personalized outreach per channel
For each Tier A lead, produce a draft message:
Channel
Format
Email
Subject line + 3-sentence body (problem relevance, social proof, CTA)