How to research target companies with UpLead

You research target companies in UpLead in one of two ways: you search its company database by the traits of the accounts you want, or you look up companies you already have by their website domain. A company search lets you filter by industry, location, employee count, revenue, and the technology a company uses, then save the matches to a list. A domain lookup works when you already have a list, such as accounts from a trade show or a spreadsheet your sales team keeps, and you need the details on each one. You can do this in UpLead's web app, through its browser extension, by uploading a file for enrichment, or through its API.

Either route gives you a firmographic profile for each company. Firmographics are the basic facts that describe a business, the way demographics describe a person. UpLead's profile covers details such as these:

• The company's name, domain, and a short description
• Its industry and industry classification codes
• Its employee count and estimated revenue
• Its headquarters address and main phone number
• Its social profiles, such as LinkedIn

That's the raw material for research, but it isn't the research itself. Researching a target company means deciding whether it belongs on your list. A 200-person logistics company in Ohio is a strong account for one seller and a waste of time for another. Someone still has to compare each profile against your customer profile, notice that three companies on the list already pay you and one is a competitor, and write down why each remaining company is worth a salesperson's time.

A good result is a short, ranked list of accounts that fit, each with the facts that make it fit and a reason to reach out now. Kite does that work for you. It pulls each company's profile from your UpLead account, judges the fit, adds what's changing at the company, and hands you the list with its reasons attached.

Start by giving Kite your companies or your criteria and saying what you want from the research. You can hand over domains you already have:

"Here are 60 company domains from our event list. Look each one up in UpLead and tell me which ones fit our customer profile."

Or you can describe the accounts you're after:

"Find mid-size manufacturing companies in the Midwest that would be good targets for us, and research the best 25 with UpLead."

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 Kite in your browser or in Slack. By the time you ask, it already knows your customer profile, your current customers, and your competitors from its research on your business. So it can propose the industries, company sizes, and locations to target without a long brief. Confirm the profile or adjust it, and Kite starts.

You'll need to connect your UpLead account by entering your UpLead API key, because Kite works in UpLead through your own account and its credits. If your companies are in a spreadsheet or a CSV file, share it in the conversation. To have Kite save the results to your CRM or a spreadsheet, connect that account too.

Researching accounts is routine work, so Kite does it and then tells you what it found. Updating your CRM works the same way. Kite asks before it sends any outreach to the companies on your list.

Kite starts from the domains you give it, or it builds the list from your criteria when you don't have one yet. A list you share can come from a spreadsheet, a CSV export, your CRM, or a set of addresses pasted into the conversation. Kite reads the company domain from each entry, and when an entry is a work email address, it takes the domain after the @ sign.

When you give Kite criteria instead of names, it finds the companies first. Kite's connection to UpLead looks up companies by domain rather than searching UpLead's database, so Kite uses its own built-in company search for this step. That search filters by industry, size, location, headcount growth, funding, and the technology a company uses. Kite can also find companies similar to ones you've already named, such as your three best customers. The companies it finds then go through UpLead like any other list.

Kite looks up each domain in your UpLead account and reads the company profile it returns. The industry, employee count, revenue, and headquarters location answer the first questions most customer profiles ask: what market the company is in, how big it is, and where it is. The description says what the company does in its own words, and the industry codes help Kite group companies that describe themselves differently but do the same work.

Kite checks UpLead's profile against the company's own website before it relies on the details that decide fit. Data providers refresh their records on a cycle, and a company that just raised money, merged, or pivoted can look different on its website than it does in a database. Kite reads the company's site to confirm what it sells and who it sells to. When the website and UpLead disagree on something that matters, such as whether the company still serves the industry you target, Kite goes with the current source and notes the difference.

Kite adds recent events to each profile, because a timely reason to get in touch makes an account more valuable than its size alone. UpLead describes the company as it stands. Kite's built-in sources, Crustdata and PredictLeads, add what's changing: funding rounds, open roles, new executives, product launches, and partnerships. A company hiring three salespeople or opening an office in a new region gives your team something specific to say in the first email.

Kite compares everything it found against your customer profile and gives each company a fit score from one to five, with a one-line reason. A reason might read: "Contract manufacturer with 350 employees in Ohio, hiring a head of operations, uses the ERP your product connects to." Before scoring, Kite checks each company against your existing customers and your competitors, and it removes any match with the reason stated.

Kite keeps facts and judgment apart. Each fact in the list, such as the employee count or a funding round, names the source it came from. Each conclusion Kite draws, such as "likely sells to enterprise buyers," is labeled as its own inference. When the list runs past about fifteen companies, Kite splits it into primary and secondary groups so your team knows where to start.

Kite can look up the people you already know at a target account, and it can find the right people to contact at the ones you don't. When you have a work email address, such as a contact from a webinar signup, Kite looks it up in UpLead to get the person's name, title, and company. This tells you whether the person is a decision-maker or someone further from the buying decision. When you need new contacts at a strong account, Kite searches for them by job title, seniority, and location through its built-in Apollo connection, and it marks whether each work email is verified.

When the research is done, Kite posts the results in the conversation where you asked. You get a table of every account with its fit score, its reason, its key firmographics, and any recent event. Below it, Kite lists the companies it removed and why, and the domains UpLead had no profile for. Kite also saves what it learned to your team's knowledge base, so later work on the same accounts starts from what it already knows.

With your CRM connected, Kite writes each company's industry, employee count, revenue, location, and website into the company record, and it adds a note with the fit score, the reason, and the sources. With a spreadsheet connected, it writes the list there instead. From there, Kite can find contacts at the primary accounts, draft a personalized email for each one, or build a landing page for an account-based campaign. If new target companies keep arriving, ask Kite to run the same research every week.

When Kite finishes, you have a ranked list of target accounts and the evidence behind each one, in a form your team can act on right away.