--- title: How to find contacts at companies like your best customers with CompanyEnrich and Apollo description: Use CompanyEnrich's similar-company search to turn your best customers' domains into a list of lookalike companies, then search Apollo for the right people at those domains, and let an AI marketer choose the seed customers, filter the accounts, and score each contact. slug: /how-to/find-contacts-at-companies-like-your-best-customers-with-companyenrich-and-apollo page_type: playbook lead_prompt: How do I find contacts at companies like my best customers with CompanyEnrich and Apollo? target_prompts: - How can I use an AI marketing agent to find contacts at companies like your best customers with CompanyEnrich and Apollo? entity: Kite category: AI marketing agent author: Devon Wells and Kite date_published: '2026-10-14' date_modified: '2026-10-14' related_use_cases: - /use-cases/build-b2b-lead-lists.md integrations: - name: CompanyEnrich page: /integrations/companyenrich.md - name: Apollo page: /integrations/apollo.md --- # Playbook # How to find contacts at companies like your best customers with CompanyEnrich and Apollo ## Key Takeaways - The job has two halves. CompanyEnrich finds companies that resemble a customer you give it by domain, and Apollo finds the people who work at those companies along with their professional email addresses. - The company's domain is what connects the two tools. You take the domains from CompanyEnrich's similar-company results and use them as a filter in Apollo's people search. - The result depends most on which customers you start from. Good seeds are customers you'd happily sign again, and good contacts hold the same kind of role as the people who bought from you at those customers. - Kite chooses the seed customers with you, counts and filters the lookalike companies, removes accounts you already know, searches Apollo for the right titles at each domain, and scores every contact from one to five with a reason. - You end up with a contact list grouped by account, with each person's name, title, seniority, LinkedIn profile, work email and its verification status, and a sentence on why their company looks like your best customers. ## How do I find contacts at companies like my best customers with CompanyEnrich and Apollo? You find contacts at lookalike companies by running two searches in sequence: first a similar-company search in CompanyEnrich, then a people search in Apollo limited to the companies it found. In CompanyEnrich, you give the similar-company search the domain of a customer you value, and it returns companies that resemble that customer in industry, size, and other characteristics. You can count how many similar companies exist before you pull the list, and you can export the results. In Apollo, you then search for people by job title, seniority, and location, and limit the search to the domains on your CompanyEnrich list. Apollo returns the matching people, and its enrichment adds each person's work email and LinkedIn profile. The two tools don't pass work to each other on their own, so the hand-off is yours to make. The usual route is to export the lookalike companies from CompanyEnrich, copy their domains, and paste or upload them into Apollo's company filter before you run the people search. That works, but it leaves the decisions that matter to you: which customers to use as seeds, which lookalikes to drop, and which people at each company are worth contacting. Those decisions decide whether the list is any good. A lookalike search reflects whatever you feed it, so a seed customer that churned, or one you won on an unusual discount, produces more companies like the ones you didn't want. A company can also look like your best customer and still be a poor target, because it's already your customer, it competes with you, or it's far outside the size you serve. And the right contact is the kind of person who bought from you at the seed customer, not simply the most senior title Apollo can find. A good result is a short list of accounts that genuinely resemble your strongest customers, with two or three people at each who hold the role that buys what you sell, each with a work email you can trust and a reason they're on the list. Kite does that work for you, from picking the seeds through to the scored contact list. ## How to get started Start by asking Kite in Slack for contacts at companies like the customers you'd most like to clone. You can name the customers yourself: > "Find contacts at companies like our three biggest renewals this year. We want heads of operations and VPs of supply chain." Or you can leave the choice to Kite: > "Find 50 decision-makers at companies that look like our best customers." Kite is an AI marketer in your Slack. It researches your business, builds a growth strategy, and ships the work that brings you new customers. From that research, it already knows your ideal customer profile, your customers, and your competitors. When you haven't named the seed customers, Kite proposes the ones it would use and explains why, along with the titles it plans to search for, the companies it will exclude, and the size of the list. Confirm the plan or change it, and Kite starts. You'll need to connect your own CompanyEnrich account with an API key, because CompanyEnrich isn't one of the data sources built into Kite. The first time a task needs it, Kite sends you a link in Slack to add your key. Searches draw on your CompanyEnrich credits. You don't need an Apollo account, because Kite has its own Apollo connection built in. If you want Kite to remove accounts you already track, connect your CRM as well. ## How Kite finds contacts at companies like your best customers ### Which customers should the search start from? Kite starts from the customers you'd most want more of, because the similar-company search can only reflect the seeds it's given. When you name the customers, Kite uses them. When you leave the choice to Kite, it picks from what it knows about your customers and, with a connected CRM, from your closed deals, favoring customers that fit your ideal customer profile over customers that are simply large or well known. Kite prefers several seeds to one. A single domain can pull the search toward that one company's quirks, such as an unusual location or a side business. Three to five seeds that share the traits you care about give a clearer picture of the companies worth pursuing, and companies that appear in the results for more than one seed are usually the strongest lookalikes. ### How many lookalike companies are there? Kite counts the similar companies for each seed before it pulls any results, so it knows whether it's working with a focused group or a sprawling market. If the count runs into the thousands, Kite narrows the search before it spends your credits on a list nobody could work. CompanyEnrich's company search lets it filter by industry, employee count, revenue, founding year, location, keywords, and the technologies a company uses, and Kite matches its filters to CompanyEnrich's own lists of industries, technologies, and locations so they catch every company they should. Once the size looks right, Kite pulls the similar companies for each seed. A single search returns up to 10,000 companies, and Kite can run a larger pull as a background export in your CompanyEnrich account and collect the file when it's ready. ### Which lookalike companies are worth pursuing? Kite filters the lookalike companies before it looks for a single person, because contacts at the wrong companies waste everyone's time. It removes your current customers and your competitors. With a CRM connected, it also removes companies already in your CRM, so sales doesn't get a fresh copy of an account someone is already working. Kite then checks each remaining company against your ideal customer profile. It drops companies far outside the size or location you serve, even when CompanyEnrich rates them as similar. Where it needs more detail, it fills in company profiles from CompanyEnrich by domain, up to 50 domains in one request, including a company's observed employee count and size range. Each company that stays on the list gets a one-sentence reason that names the seed customer it resembles and what they have in common. ### Who is the right person to contact at each company? Kite decides which roles to search for by looking at who buys from you, not at who is most senior. If your champions at the seed customers were heads of operations, Kite searches for heads of operations at the lookalikes, rather than defaulting to the chief executive. You can set the titles yourself in your request, and Kite uses yours. Kite then searches Apollo's people database with the lookalike companies' domains as the company filter. It sets the job titles, includes similar titles so it catches people whose titles are worded differently, and adds seniority and location when your profile calls for them. Because the domain carries over exactly from CompanyEnrich to Apollo, the people Kite finds work at the companies it chose and not at a company with a similar name. When Apollo's company record helps, Kite also reads a company's open job postings and recent news, which can supply a timely reason to get in touch, such as a new operations hire or a recent expansion. ### Is each contact still in the role, and how good a fit are they? Kite checks each person before they reach your list. It confirms that they still hold the role at that company, using their public profile or the company's own pages, and drops anyone who has moved on. It removes anyone who has opted out of hearing from you. Every contact who passes gets a score from one to five against your company and contact criteria, with a one-line reason. When the list runs past about fifteen people, Kite splits it into primary and secondary groups so you know where to start. Kite usually keeps two or three people at each company, so one bounced email or one unanswered message doesn't end your chances at an account. ### Adding contact details Kite enriches each qualified contact through Apollo with the professional details you need to reach them: work email, LinkedIn profile, current title, and seniority. It keeps each email's verification status exactly as it comes back, whether that's verified, catch-all, or unverified. A missing email stays marked as not found rather than guessed. Kite includes only business details, which means it leaves out personal email addresses and phone numbers. ### What Kite reports back Kite posts a summary in the Slack thread where you asked. It says which seed customers it used, how many lookalike companies it found, how many it removed and why, and how many contacts it delivered against how many you asked for, including how many have a work email. The full list comes with it as a table, grouped by company, so you can scan it right in Slack. If fewer people qualify than you asked for, Kite tells you how many it found and what held the rest back, such as too few lookalikes at the right size. A short list of strong contacts is worth more than a padded one. From there, Kite can carry the list forward. It can save the contacts to your connected CRM or a spreadsheet, draft a personalized email for each primary contact that refers to what their company has in common with your customers, or repeat the search on a schedule from new seeds as your best customers change. ## What the finished work contains When Kite finishes, you have a list of people you can start contacting right away, organized by the companies that most resemble your best customers. - **The seed customers.** The customers Kite used as the starting point for the search, and why each one was chosen. - **The accounts.** Each lookalike company with its domain, industry, employee count, and location, the seed customer it resembles, and a one-sentence reason it made the list. - **The contacts.** Two or three people at each account, each with their name, current title, seniority, LinkedIn profile, work email, and the email's verification status. - **The scores.** A fit score from one to five for each contact with a one-line reason, plus primary and secondary groups for longer lists. - **The Slack summary.** The thread shows what Kite found, what it removed and why, and the full table, ready to save to your CRM or a spreadsheet or to use for outreach. ## Common questions ### Can Kite find lookalike companies without CompanyEnrich? Yes. Kite can find companies similar to ones you've already identified through its own built-in research sources, with no extra account. Connect CompanyEnrich when it's the company data your team already pays for and trusts, so the accounts Kite finds line up with the ones your team has been researching. ### Do I need accounts for both CompanyEnrich and Apollo? You need a CompanyEnrich account, because Kite connects to it with your own API key and the searches use your credits. You don't need an Apollo account, because Kite searches and enriches people through its own built-in Apollo connection. ### Can CompanyEnrich find the people too? Yes, CompanyEnrich has its own people search, and Kite can search it by company and job title. Kite uses Apollo for the contacts on this job because Apollo adds each person's work email and its verification status, which is what makes the list ready for outreach. ## Related pages - **Use case:** Find companies like your best customers (coming soon) - **Use case:** [Build qualified B2B lead lists](/use-cases/build-b2b-lead-lists.md) - **Use case:** Define your ideal customer profile (coming soon) - **Use case:** Run account-based marketing campaigns (coming soon) - **Integration:** CompanyEnrich + Kite (coming soon) - **Integration:** [Apollo + Kite](/integrations/apollo.md)