What you'll be able to do after this guide: set up note and task conventions that keep research auditable, stop your task list filling with duplicates, and let one agent hand work to the next through the CRM.
Agents find a lot. If every finding goes into one long note, nobody can scan it and the next agent can't find what it needs. Ask agents to write one note per topic, titled so you can see what it holds at a glance.
A researched company at Fernhill typically has notes like these:
| Note title | What's in it |
|---|---|
| Sourcing: Segment A | Why the company was picked, the score and why, each signal tagged Tier 1, 2 or 3, sources, the drafted message |
| Revenue: source and entity check | The registered legal name, company number, filed figures and where they came from |
| Decision-maker shortlist | The primary contact, backups, and why the primary was chosen |
| Value proposition evidence | What the agent saw on the prospect's own website and profiles, and which angle it matched |
| Routing: Email (date) | The hand-off note. See below |
Two rules make notes useful:
Search before you write. Before creating a sourcing note, check whether one already exists on the record, so reruns don't duplicate it.
Tag the confidence of every claim. A reader should know which facts are confirmed and which are inferences.
When the sourcing agent finishes, it doesn't create a task. It writes a routing note and sets the company to Review. The routing note is the hand-off: it carries everything the next agent needs.
A routing note contains:
Which channel goes first (for example, "Routing: Email" or "Routing: Social").
The contact's name and profile URL.
Which agent and segment produced it.
The full drafted subject line and message.
A pointer to the sourcing note.
The routing note carries the draft; it isn't the clock. When a later agent needs to know how long a prospect has waited, it uses a date field on the record (the research date, or the date a connection request was sent), because fields can be filtered and notes can't be searched by title. See The Email Task Agent.
Because the draft is written at sourcing time, the later agents don't need to research again. Creating an email task becomes cheap: copy the draft from the routing note.
Once one agent searches for notes by their title, the title becomes part of your schema. If you rename an agent and its note titles change, the agent that searches for the old title will stop finding them, silently.
Keep a short list of note title prefixes and which agents read them. Never "tidy" a prefix without updating every reader. Where you can, prefer a CRM field over matching on note titles. Attio's note search filters by record, author and date, so design queries around record fields first and read notes only for records that already qualify.
Tasks are where a person's attention goes, so protect the task list. Our rule is simple: only one agent creates outreach tasks. Sourcing agents write routing notes; the email task agent (stage 6) turns them into tasks.
We arrived at this after a painful week. Every sourcing agent was creating its own email task for every prospect. The task list filled with work that might not be needed, because many of those prospects were about to be reached on another channel first. When we counted, most stalled prospects already had an open task. One task-creating agent means one daily cap, one duplicate check and one set of priorities for the whole list.
Title format: a verb plus the person and company, for example "Contact Dana Morgan at Brightside Ltd". Use a different wording for a different motion, such as "Partnership intro: Lee Carter at Northgate Consulting", so the list reads clearly.
One task per company, for the primary contact only. Several emails to one company's team on the same day reads as spam.
Assigned to a named person and linked to both the company and the person.
Due date that means something. We use 48 hours: soon enough to act on, long enough not to be ignored.
First line says why the task exists, for example "Connection request sent 9 days ago and not accepted. Falling back to email."
The body contains the draft, ready to copy.
Respect the length limit. Attio limits task text length; we hit it at around 2,000 characters. Trim the research summary, never the draft.
The last line is a reminder: "Once sent or skipped, update the prospect status on this record." Sending is a person's job, so updating the status after sending is too.
Housekeeping tasks don't count as coverage. A task like "Classify segment: Brightside Ltd" is for you to tidy data. It must not stop an outreach task being created.
Write your note title list, including the routing note format.
Decide which single agent will create outreach tasks.
Decide your task title format and due-date rule.
Next: move on to Define Your Targets, starting with Split Your Market into Segments.
