The Scenario
You're a sales development rep and your manager just dropped 40 target accounts into an Excel workbook at 8:45 AM. Executive sync is at 9 AM tomorrow and you're expected to have personalized one-liners for each account plus their latest news headline — the kind of thing that makes your outreach not sound like a template.
Column A has company names. Column B and C are blank. You need a one-sentence company description in B and the most recent news headline in C, sourced from a live web search, before you start writing sequences.
The bad version:
- Google the first company. Read their about page. Write a one-liner. Google "[company] news 2026". Find the most recent article. Copy the headline.
- Repeat 39 more times.
- Run out of time around account 22, send out sequences with half the cells blank, and get a reply from a VP who noticed you called them a "B2B software company" when they're clearly a hardware manufacturer.
The accounts won't research themselves. And you have 39 other things on your list today.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook. It reads column A, runs a live Tavily search for each company, and writes the description and news headline directly into columns B and C.
For each company name in column A (rows 2 through 41), search Tavily for a company overview and latest news, then write a one-sentence company description to column B and the top news headline to column C. Skip rows where column A is blank.
What You Get
- Column B: one-sentence company description sourced from live search results, not from a stale database.
- Column C: the most recent news headline Tavily finds for each company.
- Blank rows in column A are skipped without errors.
- Companies with no news result in the last 6 months get "NO RECENT NEWS" in column C.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Company names are ambiguous — several could match multiple businesses
For each company in column A, also read column B which has the company's industry. Use the company name and industry together as the Tavily search query. Write the description to column C and the latest news headline to column D.
You want the news headline to link to the source URL
For each company in column A, search Tavily for the latest news. Write the headline to column C and the full URL of the news article to column D. If no news is found, write "NO RECENT NEWS" in column C and leave D blank.
You need to filter — only research companies in the "fintech" industry listed in column B
For each row where column B says "fintech", search Tavily for that company's overview and latest news. Write the description to column C and the news headline to column D. Leave rows with other industries blank.
Disambiguate, research, filter, and link all at once
For each company in column A where column B says "fintech" or "SaaS", combine the company name with the industry as the Tavily search query. Write a one-sentence description to column C, the latest news headline to column D, and the news article URL to column E. Write "NO RECENT NEWS" in column D for companies with no news found in the past 6 months.
One prompt handles disambiguation, filtering, description, headline, and sourcing in one pass.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook with a list of target accounts in column A, then ask it to research each one via Tavily and fill in descriptions and news. Or see how the same approach works for competitor pricing extraction and the hub overview.