The Claude Code Skill I Built for Client Research

Client research used to take me an hour per prospect. I built a Claude Code skill that does the first-pass research and now it takes ten minutes. The skill pulls public signals, structures them, and hands me a brief I can walk into a call with. Here is what is in it and why it became the most-used skill in my kit.

The Inputs

• Company name and domain
• Linkedin profile of the main contact
• Industry or niche

Three fields. That is all the skill needs to produce a full brief. Anything more would be over-scoping the tool.

What the Skill Returns

• Company summary from the homepage and about page
• Tech stack detected from the site (script tags, headers)
• Recent blog posts or news
• Contact background in three bullets
• Two hypothesis angles for the opening conversation
• A list of three questions I should ask on the call

The questions part is the highest-value output. Walking into a call with three specific questions makes me look prepared and surfaces insights faster than generic discovery.

The Skill File Shape

# ~/.claude/skills/client-research/SKILL.md
name: client-research
description: First-pass brief for a prospect
inputs:
  - company_domain
  - contact_linkedin

The actual body is a long prompt plus a small Python helper that fetches the site and extracts text. The prompt is where the intelligence lives. The helper is just a fetcher.

Why This Is Safe

Everything the skill pulls is public. It is faster reading, not surveillance. I would not ship this over non-public data without explicit consent. The line between research and creep is thinner than people think and I want to stay well clear of it.

The Business Impact

Fifty minutes saved per prospect call. Five prospect calls a week. Four hours back every week for actual client work. The skill paid for itself in the first afternoon. The marginal cost per run is fractions of a cent.

What I Would Add Next

A second pass that pulls recent Twitter or LinkedIn posts from the contact to flag topical hooks. I am cautious about adding it because the privacy calculus gets murkier. The public-only rule is a good floor to hold.

The Lesson About Skills

The best Claude Code skills automate a repeated research task, not a creative task. Creative tasks need human steering. Research is mostly about gathering the right inputs in the right order, which is exactly what skills do well.