For Business Development Managers ·
What you'll accomplish
Six months from now, a partner candidate you evaluated and passed on last quarter comes back around, and you have no idea where that research went. It's scattered across old emails, a doc someone else wrote, or just gone. A Notion database with AI-assisted tagging and summarization turns that scattered research into a searchable asset. The next time that candidate resurfaces, you find your prior notes in seconds instead of starting the research over.
What you'll need
Click + Add a page in the left sidebar (or use the keyboard shortcut for a new page), then on the blank page choose Table under the "Get started with" options. Alternatively, open a page and type the slash command /database.
What you should see: An empty table with a data source picker. Click + New data source to start from scratch.
Add columns (Notion calls them properties) using the + at the right edge of the column headers. At minimum, set up:
What you should see: A table with column headers matching your properties, ready for rows.
Click New to add a row, then fill in what you know about a candidate partner. If you have existing research documents, you can paste key details directly into the row or link out to the original doc.
For any candidate you've already researched, create a row and either summarize the prior research directly into the Overlap Notes column or attach the original document. Don't try to migrate everything at once. Start with your five or six most active or most likely-to-resurface candidates.
When you add a long research note, use Notion's Ask AI to generate a short summary you can scan later without rereading the whole entry. Access Ask AI through Search in the sidebar (type your question), the sparkle icon at the bottom right of any page, the keyboard shortcut Cmd+Shift+K (Mac) or Ctrl+Shift+K (Windows), or by clicking the six-dot drag menu next to a specific block and choosing Ask AI to act on just that block.
Example prompt inside Ask AI:
Summarize this partner research note into three bullet points: what the partner does, why we were evaluating them, and why we passed or what's still open.
What you should see: A short summary you can paste into a dedicated Summary column, or leave as an AI block directly under the full notes.
The next time a partner name comes up, search the database first (the same Search entry point that opens Ask AI also searches your workspace content). If they're already logged, you save the research time entirely. If not, you're starting a fresh row instead of digging through old emails.
Summarize a long research note:
Summarize this partner research note into three bullet points: what they do, why we evaluated them, and the current status.
Generate follow-up questions from partial research:
Based on this partial research entry, what are the top three questions I still need answered before deciding whether to restart this evaluation?
Draft a one-line database entry from a messy note:
Turn this rough note into a clean one-paragraph summary I can paste into a database row: [paste rough note].