I'm curious how agencies and in-house teams actually do competitor research for cold email outreach. Not the ideal workflow, but what you really do before planning next week's sequences or campaigns.

Some questions I'm interested in:

Which tools do you use? (Hunter, Apollo, MailShake, Google Sheets, ChatGPT, etc.)
How much time does competitor research take each week?
Which parts are still manual?
What's the most frustrating or repetitive part of the process?
If you already pay for competitor research tools, what do they still not do well?
What's one task you wish you never had to do again?

If you're willing, I'd love to see your workflow step by step from "we need email ideas for this client" to having a finalized sequence. The more detailed, the better.

For context, I've seen replies like: manual is the word nobody wants to hear but everyone lives in. We use the Meta Ad Library and TikTok Creative Center because they're free and the data is straight from the source. I set a timer for 90 minutes every Monday and if I don't stop I will fall into a black hole of screenshots. The most annoying part is organizing the findings into something the creative team will actually look at. We screenshot everything and dump it into a shared Google Slides deck sorted by content pillar. Nobody reads a spreadsheet.

The one task I would trade a kidney to never do again is manually tagging and categorizing competitor posts by format and hook type. It takes forever and I know I'm missing patterns because my eyes glaze over after thirty carousels. I keep thinking an AI should be able to scan a library of ads and tell me which emotional angles are flooding the market this week but every tool I try still needs me to do the heavy thinking.

Another approach: track your "high performing competitor set." Find competitors in your niche, at similar size and scope, similar audience personas, and filter for those performing well with strong engagement or business results. You only need 3-5. Then point a tool at them to track campaigns, posting activity, cadence, content themes, and how their strategy differs across channels. Some tools send a weekly report and advise on next campaigns, even generate creatives.

But I'm specifically interested in cold email. How do you research what's working for competitors in terms of subject lines, personalization angles, sending patterns, and deliverability? Let's hear your real workflows.