Does anyone have advice on how to automate your search process?

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September 17, 2020

by a searcher from Stanford University - Graduate School of Business in New York, NY, USA

A few of the panels with experienced searchers have mentioned automating your search process. Does anyone have examples of how they have done this? Or have specifics on what this means?

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Reply by a searcher
from The University of Michigan in Hyderabad, Telangana, India
There are many steps in the upfront part of the search process that can be partly automated. Though I can't present a success yet, here is what we've been doing:
1. We have a specific industry segment in mind. So we first identified the SIC, NAIC, etc. codes that match those segments
2. We then leveraged databases such as D&B to identify what companies match those codes...this list ran into 20,000+ companies
3. We then wrote some scripts to auto-extract websites of these companies and crawled specific descriptive pages of the companies' sites and created a search interface on top to allow our analyst to quickly search through the pages based on keywords (and complex search strings) to extract matches
4. We then screened the matches to extract a couple of 1,000 companies that match our need and extracted their contact names/e-mail addresses
5. Now we are in the process of creating an automated mailing/mail-tracking solution (we already have one in-house that we use for a different purpose) where we will be e-mailing all these prospects our interest
6. Next step would be to track email activity, our website visits, etc. to pick and choose who to call, etc.

Beyond these steps, I don't expect automation to help much. Hope this helps
commentor profile
Reply by a searcher
from Stanford University in Charlottesville, VA, USA
Ben, for what it is worth, I think it depends on what part of the search you want to automate. Certainly I can't speak with tons of experience as I just started, but there are parts of the search you may want to be intimately involved with, especially if doing a hyper industry focused search, whereas tasks like list building of potential leads, screening CIMs, website development, filling out industry scorecards, drafting emails, etc. can often be built into a process that is automatic digitally or via a well trained intern(s). That being said, talking to business owners, deciding yes/no on an industry, etc. needs to come from you. My advice would be to run through your processes a few times and quickly, assuming you are familiar with outsourcing tasks, freelancers, and digital tools (calend.ly, zoominfo, outreach.io, etc.), you will find what tasks you can automate to better leverage your time.
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