Pitch prep in an afternoon with a sourced research brief

What goes in

The strategist starts the workflow from Chat or a short form with three things: the prospect’s domain, the market, and the pitch question in one sentence. For the skincare brand, that question was "why is paid social not growing new customers?". The question matters because the brief is written to answer it, not to list everything the tools return.

They also add three to five competitors. Picking competitors is a judgement call, so the workflow does not guess them. Semrush suggests organic and paid competitors in its results, and those appear in the brief as a separate list the strategist can accept or ignore.

Five kinds of source, gathered in parallel

A Parallel block runs the collectors at the same time, and each writes rows to a sources table in Tables: the claim, the source URL, the tool and the date pulled.

• Traffic. The Similarweb block returns estimated visits, pages per visit, visit duration and bounce rate for the brand and each competitor. These are modelled estimates, and the table says so.
• Search. The Semrush block returns organic and paid keywords, competitors and top pages. A rival bidding on the brand’s own name is a common and useful finding.
• The brand’s site. Firecrawl maps the site and scrapes the pages that matter: home, range, pricing, about and any launch page. An Agent block summarises the range and the claims the brand makes about itself.
• Social and coverage. Exa searches for the brand’s social profiles, press coverage and reviews, and returns their contents. The workflow reads only public pages.
• The ad library. Public ad library pages, such as the Meta Ad Library, are read with Firecrawl. Where results only appear after filters are set, a Browser Use task opens the page in a cloud browser and reads it. Browser Use is billed per task, so keep it to the ad library.

The research rules sit in the workflow’s notes and in the brief writer’s instructions: public pages only, respect each site’s terms and robots rules, never sign in, never get past a paywall or a bot check. If a site says no automated access, it comes off the list and someone looks by hand.

A brief with a source on every line

Once the rows are in, an Agent block writes the brief. Its instructions come from a brief template in the Knowledge Base: the sections your agency always wants, how long each should be, and one hard rule. Every claim cites the row it came from. A claim with no row does not go in.

The draft is saved as a document in Files, next to a link to the sources table. The brief ends with open questions the data cannot answer, because those are usually where the pitch idea lives. In the example, every ad in the library uses the same discount-led static format. The data shows the pattern; only a person can say whether it is a strategy or a habit.

The afternoon belongs to the strategist

The workflow takes minutes. The strategist’s afternoon goes on three things:

1. Check the load-bearing facts. Anything that will appear on a slide gets opened at its source. The sources table makes this a click rather than a search.
2. Cut. A good brief is shorter than the draft. Remove findings that do not bear on the pitch question.
3. Write the angle. The brief says what is true; the strategist says what it means for the client and what the agency would do about it.

If a follow-up question comes up, such as which competitor runs the most video ads, the strategist can ask in Chat, which reads the same table and can call the same integrations to check a new page.

Keeping the research honest

Third-party traffic and keyword numbers are estimates, and a pitch that leans on one too hard can embarrass the agency in the room. The brief writer is told to label them as estimates and to avoid precise figures in headlines. Every figure in this post’s example is illustrative.

Logs record every run block by block, so if a client asks where a number came from, the answer is the run, the block and the URL. The workflow runs from a deployed version, so a change to the template or the sources is reviewed before the next pitch uses it.

After the pitch

If the agency wins, the same sources table becomes the baseline for the first quarter. The competitor list can move into a weekly competitor brief, and the client’s own accounts feed reporting dashboards. If the agency loses, the brief stays in Files for the next time that category comes up.