Contact research tiers

Contact research in Enki has two tiers: Standard and Deep. Picking the right one for the right person is the difference between burning your monthly quota on cold leads and having genuinely useful intelligence on the buyers who matter. This guide explains what each tier produces, when to upgrade, and how the tier choice plays out during onboarding.

The two tiers

When you trigger research on a contact, Enki shows a tier dialog with two options.

Standard research is the workhorse. A multi-source AI analysis takes about 60 to 90 seconds and produces a focused profile: career history, current role and scope, public statements and posts, signals about priorities, and where available, enrichment data from Apollo. It's the right choice for almost every contact you don't yet know well, and it consumes the Standard contacts quota line in your plan.

Deep research is the comprehensive option. It takes about fifteen to twenty minutes and produces a far richer brief: a full career arc, themes across published writing and interviews, a synthesized point of view on what this person cares about and how they make decisions, the buying signals tied to their role, and a longer source list. Deep research consumes the Contact Deep Research quota, which is more limited.

The rule of thumb the dialog itself surfaces: Standard is ideal for most contacts; reserve Deep for your highest-priority Tier 1 targets where comprehensive intelligence justifies the longer analysis time.

What you get per tier

Both tiers produce a research profile you can view on the contact detail page in both raw and formatted forms. The difference is depth, breadth of sources, and how much synthesis the model is allowed to do.

Standard research gives you enough context to write a good first message and to walk into a meeting without sounding unprepared. It will tell you what the person does, what they've said publicly, and how they fit into the buying picture at their account.

Deep research gives you enough context to plan a multi-touch sequence, brief an executive sponsor, or run a high-stakes meeting. It's slower because it does more: more sources, more synthesis, more time in the model.

The data populates the contact's profile and the influence-map view inside the account so you can see the person in context — not just as a row in a list.

When to upgrade a contact to Deep

Upgrade when at least one of these is true:

The person is the economic buyer or the most likely economic buyer.
They are your active or prospective champion, and you want a sharp read on what they care about.
The deal is large enough that the cost of a clumsy first meeting outweighs the quota cost of better prep.
Standard research returned thin output — usually because the person has a low public footprint — and you genuinely need more.

Don't upgrade as a default for senior titles. A VP at a sleepy account is not a better Deep candidate than a Director at the account you're closing this quarter. Title is a weak signal; deal context is a strong one.

Don't upgrade contacts you're sequencing cold. Standard is enough for cold outreach; if the response is positive, upgrade then.

What happens during onboarding

During onboarding, Enki does the contact research for you in batches across your territory. For your top-priority (Tier 1) accounts, the people identified as Key Decision Makers get Deep research automatically. For mid-tier (Tier 2) accounts, KDMs get Standard research, and a cohort of non-KDM contacts is enriched alongside them.

There's a deliberate cap on that mid-tier batch: at most forty non-KDM contacts per cohort, ranked by contact score. The cap exists for two reasons. First, it controls the cost of a single onboarding pass so your plan quota survives. Second, it forces the highest-signal contacts to the front of the line rather than spending budget on a long tail of unranked names.

If the cap leaves a contact you cared about un-researched, you can always trigger research on them by hand from the contact detail page. The tier dialog appears just like it does for any other contact.

When a Tier 2 contact deserves Deep research later

Mid-tier doesn't mean uninteresting. A Tier 2 contact often turns out to be the actual buyer once a deal is live. When that happens, manually upgrade them: open the contact, trigger research again, and pick Deep. The new run adds to what you already have, so you don't lose what Standard already captured.

A note for sales leaders

Deep contact research is a finite budget line. The team that gets the most value from it is the team that spends it on champions and economic buyers in active deals, not on broad pre-discovery prospecting. Reviewing how reps spend their Deep contact quota each month is a fast way to see whether prep is being directed at the deals that need it.