How to find companies similar to your best customers with CompanyEnrich

You find companies like your best customers with CompanyEnrich by giving its similar-company search the domain of a customer you already sell to well. CompanyEnrich compares that company with the others in its database and returns the ones that resemble it in industry, size, and other characteristics. It can also tell you how many similar companies exist before you pull them, which is worth knowing because a search that matches 8,000 companies needs narrowing before anyone can work it.

CompanyEnrich gives you a few other tools that help with this job. Its company lookup takes a domain and returns a company profile, so you can see what your best customers actually look like on paper. Its company search lets you filter by industry, employee count, revenue, founding year, location, keywords, and the technologies a company uses. A single search returns up to 10,000 companies, and larger pulls run as a background export in your account. Each lookup uses credits from your CompanyEnrich plan.

The search itself is the easy part. The hard part is the judgment on either side of it. Before the search, someone has to decide which customers count as "best." That usually means the customers who bought quickly, paid well, and stayed, not simply your biggest logos or the ones your team talks about most. If your best customers fall into two different groups, such as regional logistics firms and mid-sized retailers, each group needs its own search, or the results blur into a list that looks like neither. After the search, someone has to merge the results, remove the companies you already sell to or compete with, and check that each match really does the kind of work your customers do.

A good result is a list of companies your sales team would recognize as the next customers worth winning. Each one resembles a specific customer you're proud of, none of them are already in your pipeline, and each comes with a short reason that explains why it made the list.

Kite does that work for you. It chooses the customers to start from, runs the searches through your CompanyEnrich account, and returns a scored list with the reasoning attached.

Start by telling Kite what kind of list you want. You can name the customers yourself:

"Find 150 companies like our five biggest logistics customers using CompanyEnrich, and leave out anyone already in HubSpot."

Or you can let Kite choose them:

"Use CompanyEnrich to find companies like our best customers and give me a ranked list of the top 100."

Kite is an AI marketer. It researches your business, builds a growth strategy, and ships the work that brings you new customers. You can work with it in the Kite web app or in Slack. By the time you ask, it already knows your positioning, your current customers, and your competitors from its research on your business, so it can suggest which customers to start from without a long brief.

To use CompanyEnrich, connect your CompanyEnrich account to Kite by adding its API key. Kite then runs every lookup on your own CompanyEnrich plan, so the credits come from your account. Connect your CRM as well if you want Kite to choose customers from your closed deals or remove accounts your team already tracks.

Before it pulls a full list, Kite tells you its plan. It names the customers it will start from and why, says roughly how many similar companies CompanyEnrich found for each, and lists who it will remove. Confirm the plan or change it, and Kite starts.

Kite starts from the customers you'd most like to have more of, because the list can only be as good as the companies it copies. When you name them, Kite uses the ones you gave it. When you don't, it draws on two sources.

The first is its research on your business, which already records who your customers are and which segments you serve. The second is your connected CRM. There, Kite reads your closed deals and looks for the customers who closed fastest, paid the most, or have stayed the longest. It sets aside the accounts that don't represent where you want to grow, such as a one-off deal in an industry you don't target or a customer who signed at a deep discount.

If your strongest customers fall into more than one group, Kite keeps the groups apart and runs a separate search for each one. It tells you how it grouped them, so you can move a customer from one group to another before it searches.

Kite looks up each starting customer in CompanyEnrich by its domain, so it can see the pattern before it searches for more. CompanyEnrich can look up several domains at once, and Kite reads each company's profile, including its industry, employee count, revenue, founding year, location, and the technologies it uses, where CompanyEnrich has them. It also reads each company's observed employee count and size range.

From those profiles, Kite writes a short description of what the group shares, such as "US freight and logistics companies with 200 to 600 employees, founded before 2010, running Salesforce." That description becomes the standard for judging every match later. When a customer turns out to look very different from the rest of its group, Kite says so, because one unusual starting point can pull the whole list off course.

Kite counts the similar companies for each starting customer before it pulls a list, because the count tells it whether to narrow the search. A count of a few hundred means a focused set of companies Kite can review closely. A count in the thousands means the similarity is too loose to be useful on its own, so Kite adds filters such as size, location, or industry until the list is one your team could realistically work.

Kite can also check your remaining CompanyEnrich credit balance before a large pull. If the full list would use more credits than you have, it tells you and suggests a smaller first batch.

Kite runs CompanyEnrich's similar-company search for each starting customer and combines the results into one list. A company that comes up as similar to several of your best customers moves toward the top, because it resembles more than one company you already win. Kite keeps track of which starting customer each match came from, so every company on the final list can be traced back to a real customer.

For a large market, Kite runs the search as a background export in your CompanyEnrich account and collects the results when the export finishes. When a lookalike search returns too few companies, Kite can widen the net with CompanyEnrich's filtered company search, using the shared description it wrote earlier. It matches its filters to CompanyEnrich's own lists of industries, technologies, keywords, and locations, so a filter catches every company it should.

Kite removes the companies you already know before it judges the rest. It drops your current customers, your competitors, and, with your CRM connected, any company your team already tracks there. A lookalike search will happily return your existing customers, since they're the companies most like your best ones, and a list padded with them wastes your team's time.

Next, Kite checks each remaining company against the shared description of your best customers. It reads the company's own website to confirm what it actually sells and who it sells to, because two companies can share an industry code and still do very different work. It drops companies that have shut down or been acquired, and companies whose business turns out to be outside the work your customers do.

Every company that passes gets a fit score from one to five, with a one-line reason that names the customer it resembles, such as "Regional freight carrier with 340 employees that most resembles your second-largest logistics customer and runs the same CRM as three of your customers." When the list runs long, Kite splits it into primary and secondary groups so your team knows where to start. If fewer companies qualify than you asked for, Kite tells you how many it found and why the rest fell short.

When the work is done, Kite saves the list where you asked for it and reports what happened in the conversation. It can add the companies to a connected spreadsheet, or create them as company records in your connected CRM with their domain, industry, size, location, fit score, and reason. The full list also comes as a table you can scan in the conversation.

The report names the customers Kite started from, how many similar companies CompanyEnrich found for each, how many Kite removed and why, and how many made the final list in each group.

From there, Kite can find the right people at each company, such as the heads of marketing or operations, and add their professional email addresses through Apollo, which comes built into Kite. It can then write a personalized outreach email for each contact, using research on their company and the customer it resembles, and it shows you the emails before anything is sent. If you win new customers regularly, ask Kite to run the same job every month, and it will start from your newest strong customers and leave out every company it has already given you.

When Kite finishes, you have a ranked list of companies that resemble your best customers, each one new to your pipeline and each with a reason your team can use in the first conversation.