How agencies can reuse research across client work
Agencies can reuse category-level, public-source research across clients, and must keep client context, goals and conclusions separate. The split to maintain is between facts about a market and judgements made for one client.
What carries over and what does not
| Reusable across clients | Stays with one client |
|---|---|
| Public claims about a shared competitor (pricing, plans, stated positioning) | The client's ICP, pricing, win-loss notes and internal documents |
| Source list and retrieval dates | Which competitors the client considers threats |
| Method: field lists, review checklists, source types | Insights, recommendations and their rationale |
| The history of what changed on a competitor's page | Anything the client told you in confidence |
Why reuse often fails
Research ends up in a deck, the deck goes to the client, and the working notes live in one person's folder. Six months later the next engagement starts from the deck. The deck has conclusions but no source list, so nobody can tell which parts are still true.
A structure that supports reuse
- Keep one workspace or folder per client for context, goals, insights and actions.
- Keep a shared, client-neutral set of claims about public competitors and categories, each with a source and retrieval date.
- Tag each claim with its last check date, so an old claim is visibly old.
- When starting a new client, copy only the claims whose sources are still fresh, and re-check the rest.
A worked example
An agency serves Fieldnote and, later, a second client in the same category. Both compete with Meridian. For Fieldnote, the agency recorded eight claims about Meridian's plans and onboarding in July. In October, the second client signs. The team reads the eight claims, sees that six are under 90 days old and two relate to pricing, re-checks those two, and finds one has changed. The second engagement starts with seven checked claims instead of a blank page. The Fieldnote insight about mid-size agencies is not copied across because it was written for Fieldnote's segment.
Confidentiality checks before reusing anything
- Is the claim from a public source? If it came from a client interview or document, it stays.
- Does the claim name the client or reveal its strategy?
- Would the client be surprised to learn that it informed work for someone else?
If an answer is unclear, ask the client or leave the claim out.
What to tell clients
Say in the engagement terms that public-source research about competitors may inform other work, and that client context, goals and conclusions never do. Most clients accept that when it is explicit. They object when they find out later.
Client research in Sigblaze
Sigblaze gives each client a separate workspace with its own context, sources, claims, insights and actions. It does not merge evidence across workspaces. Approved intelligence can be exported as Markdown or JSON, which is one way to carry public claims into another workspace by hand.
This piece contains no external statistics. Fieldnote and Meridian are fictional companies, and the figures in the examples are synthetic.