OSINT for sales teams: a field guide
Open-source intelligence started in security and journalism. Applied to accounts, it is the most under-used advantage in B2B sales.
Open-source intelligence is the discipline of building a reliable picture from public information. Security teams use it to profile threats; journalists use it to check claims. Sales teams mostly do not use it at all, which is a shame, because the account you are about to call has told the internet almost everything you need to know.
What is public
- Hiring: job postings reveal priorities, tooling, budgets and the pain the new hire is meant to fix.
- Filings and results: for listed companies, what the CEO promised investors and what the CFO is worried about.
- Technology: detectable stacks, migrations, integrations and the vendors they have publicly thanked or blamed.
- People: who joined, who left, who got promoted, what they said on stage or in a podcast.
- Commitments: regulatory deadlines, sustainability targets, product launches announced with dates.
Turning it into a brief
A useful OSINT brief is two pages: the account's stated priorities, the evidence, the buying group, the likely objection, and the one angle that connects your offer to a commitment they have already made. It takes an analyst three to four hours. It takes an agent, properly configured, about four minutes, and then a human ten minutes to check.
The rule
Never reference anything the prospect would be surprised you know. The brief is for relevance, not for showing off. If the angle is right, you never need to say where it came from.
Why most intent programmes produce the same accounts as everyone else's, and how to tune one to your own history so it stops.
Most LinkedIn programmes fail because they start with what the executive wants to say. The ones that work start with what the prospect has already said.