Every Email Starts With
Real Research. Not Guesses.
Most cold email tools write from a contact record: name, job title, company. That's not enough to write a relevant email. SendState's Research Agent reads the prospect's website and LinkedIn before generating a word, so every first email reflects something true about who they are right now.
Sources scraped per prospect
Personalized openers generated
Research runs once, reused automatically
The problem with merge fields
Merge fields feel like personalization. They aren't. "Hi {{first_name}}, I noticed {{company_name}} is in the {{industry}} space" is still a template, just one with variables. Prospects can tell.
Genuine personalization means knowing something real about the person's current situation. What their company actually does. What problems they're visibly dealing with. Whether there are signals right now (a new hire, a funding round, a job listing) that make the outreach timely rather than generic.
Without research
"Hi Sarah, I noticed Acme Corp is in the SaaS space..."
- · Generic angle, no context
- · Sounds like everyone else
- · 1.1% average reply rate
With Research Agent
"I saw you're hiring two AEs while the sales motion is still founder-led, that's a specific timing problem..."
- · Angle built from live signals
- · Reads like the sender did their homework
- · 6.2% average reply rate
How it works
Three phases. One brief. Before send.
Live data collection
The Research Agent fetches and reads the prospect's company website, LinkedIn profile, and X/Twitter if provided. It handles different page structures automatically and extracts meaningful text, not raw HTML noise.
Company website · LinkedIn · X / Twitter
Signal extraction
AI analyzes the scraped content to build a structured brief: what the company does, who they sell to, their current stage, visible pain points, opportunities, and buying signals (hiring activity, expansion indicators, "pipeline now" language).
Pain points · Buying intent · Fit signals · Tone & style · Tech stack
Brief + openers ready
The orchestrator assembles everything into a single research result: company summary, ICP, signals, recommended tone, confidence score, and three personalized opening lines grounded in what was actually found. The email writer uses this brief as its starting point.
Company brief · 3 openers · Confidence score · Sources logged
What the writer actually receives
Every email generation call includes a fully structured brief, not a name and job title.
This brief is what the email writer uses, not {{company_name}}.
What research-backed emails actually do to reply rates
How other tools handle research
Most tools skip it entirely. A few have it as an add-on. SendState runs it by default on every prospect before any email is written.
Clay is a powerful research tool for teams who want to build custom enrichment pipelines. SendState is for teams who want research to happen automatically as part of sending: no pipeline to maintain.
Common questions
Yes. When you import prospects and launch a campaign, the Research Agent runs on each contact before generating emails. You don't trigger it manually, it's part of the send pipeline. If research for a prospect already exists and meets the quality threshold, it's reused at no extra cost.
The Research Agent fetches the prospect's company website, LinkedIn profile (if a LinkedIn URL is provided), and X/Twitter profile (if provided). It handles different page structures automatically and extracts meaningful company and signal data from each source.
The Research Agent returns a confidence score alongside the brief. If the score is low, for example, because a website has minimal content or a LinkedIn profile is sparse, the email writer falls back to safer, less signal-dependent angles rather than fabricating context. You can see the confidence score and sources in the prospect's research record.
Not exactly. Clay is a powerful standalone enrichment and research platform built for teams who want to build custom data pipelines with many sources. SendState's Research Agent is built for teams who want prospect research to happen automatically as part of the send workflow: no separate tool, no pipeline to maintain, no extra cost per enrichment row. If you're already using Clay, you can import Clay-enriched lists into SendState.
Apollo enriches contacts from its database: firmographic data, contact info, and some intent signals. SendState's Research Agent scrapes live data from each prospect's actual website and LinkedIn at the time of the campaign, which means it picks up things Apollo's database doesn't have: recent job listings, current messaging, expansion signals, and tone cues from how the company actually talks about itself right now.
See what your prospects are actually signaling.
Every contact you import gets a full research brief before a single email is written. No setup. No extra tools. No manual research.
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