The traditional, database-driven approach to list building is giving way to AI-powered tools that help sales teams build smarter prospect lists faster. By using intent signals and lookalike audience matching, AI tools are able to pinpoint prospects who are not only a good fit but are also likely to be actively interested in your solution.
In this blog, we will walk you through some of the best AI-powered list-building tools for sales outreach, showing how each tool uses these methods to identify high-potential leads ready to engage.
The Shift to AI-Driven List Building using Intent Signals and Lookalike Audience:
1. List Building Using Intent Signals
Intent signal-based list building identifies potential customers through two key indicators. First, it tracks digital behaviors—like content consumption and social media engagement—that reflect a prospect’s interest in your type of solution. Second, it captures organizational signals, such as recent hiring activity, funding rounds, or acquisitions, which often signal a company’s readiness to invest in new solutions.
AI tools use these intent signals to sift through extensive databases to identify prospects who not only fit the ideal customer profile but also show real interest and buying intent. They monitor digital behaviors and business events to build a highly targeted list of leads actively exploring solutions in your space, helping sales teams focus outreach on the most relevant and qualified prospects.
2. List Building via Lookalike Method
Lookalike list building is a powerful approach that helps you find prospects who mirror your best existing customers. AI-driven lookalike list building studies your existing customer data, drawing insights from sales calls, CRM information, and engagement patterns to identify the characteristics of your most successful customers. By analyzing these data points, AI builds a detailed profile of what an ideal customer looks like, considering everything from company size and industry to specific challenges and purchasing behaviors.
Using this profile, the AI tools scan vast databases to find prospects with similar attributes and behaviors. This approach enables the tools to consistently add high-quality, conversion-ready leads to the pipeline—prospects who, based on data, are more likely to see value in your offering and convert. By continuously learning and refining this profile, AI keeps improving the quality of contacts.
6 AI-Powered List Building Tools To Consider in 2024:
1. SDRx
SDRx is an AI-agent that automates and improves outbound prospecting, research, and email writing. It creates targeted prospect lists, writes personalized emails, and adapts follow-ups based on each prospect's engagement level.
Here's how SDRx does list building:
- Lookalike Method: SDRx enables users to upload up to five ideal customer domains. Using AI, the platform generates a list of lookalike companies that closely resemble these domains. Users can further refine these lookalikes with criteria such as funding and hiring trends.
- Intent-Based List Building: SDRx monitors key buying signals—such as recent funding and active hiring—to identify companies likely ready for a new solution. Its research agents can answer specific questions about individual companies, such as “Are they hiring?” and provide precise results on whether the company is currently hiring or not.
Pricing:
Get in touch with us to get the pricing information.
2. Telescope
Telescope is an AI-powered platform that helps businesses generate targeted B2B leads & conduct market research. Drawing insights from a vast database of over 100 million companies, the platform learns your preferences and automatically builds targeted prospect lists that mirror your most successful customers.
How Telescope Does List Building with Lookalike Search:
- Lookalike Analysis: Telescope studies several data points of over 100 million companies, including firmographics, technographics and location, to identify companies that resemble your existing high-value customers.
- Similarity Scoring: It compares attributes of known customers & assigns similarity scores to potential leads, highlighting those most aligned with your ideal customer profile.
- Dynamic Learning: Telescope's AI learns from every interaction, using your accept/reject decisions to sharpen its prospect recommendations over time, ensuring increasingly accurate matches to your ideal customer profile.
Pricing:
3. Common Room:
Common Room is a tool that enhances list building through intelligent data consolidation. It unifies buying signals from multiple channels and allows sales and marketing teams to create highly targeted prospect lists that facilitate meaningful engagement.
How does it do List Building via Intent Signals:
Here’s how CommonRoom gets the job done:
- Multi-Channel Data Gathering: CommonRoom collects data from diverse sources like product usage, CRM systems, social media, and community discussions to identify potential customers showing interest in relevant solutions.
- AI-Driven Scoring and Segmentation: The platform automates lead scoring and audience segmentation using AI based on intent signals as it helps sales teams prioritize the most promising prospects.
- Intent-Based Sales Playbook Automation: CommonRoom allows for the automation of sales playbooks triggered by specific intent signals, enabling personalized outreach based on prospect actions and interests.
Pricing:
4. UserGems:
UserGems is a software platform that helps businesses generate sales pipelines by identifying and engaging with high-potential prospects. It achieves this by capturing buying signals and automating the next steps with AI assistance.
How It does list building
Diverse Signal Library: UserGems offers a library of person and company signals, allowing users to select relevant signals to trigger workflows and build targeted lists.
UserGems Tracks:
- Past Champions' Job Changes: When a former customer (or "champion") changes jobs, UserGems tracks this and adds their new company to a list for potential outreach.
- New Hires & Promotions: UserGems AI identifies companies with new hires or promotions in specific roles, signaling shifts in priorities that may align with your offerings, and builds targeted lists of these companies.
- Champion Referrals: UserGems tracks referrals from champions. If a champion refers to someone at another company, that company is added to a list for potential outreach.
- Website Visits & Intent Data: UserGems monitors website activity to identify companies and individuals researching solutions similar to yours, building lists of high-intent prospects actively exploring options in your market.
Pricing:
UserGems doesn’t have a dedicated pricing page.
5. Clay
Clay is a data enrichment and outreach automation platform designed to help revenue and growth teams, including RevOps, SDRs, and enterprise-level organizations, implement various outreach strategies. It does list building via look alike method as well as intent signals.
How It does list building:
- AI-Powered Lookalike Audience: CLAY's AI-driven platform empowers you to expand your prospect pool by creating highly targeted lookalike audiences. The system examines your existing ideal customer profiles (ICPs), extracting the defining characteristics.
It then uses this intelligence to identify new leads who share uncannily similar traits, giving you a head start on engagement with prospects primed for conversion. - Intent Signal-Based List Building: Clay provides access to multiple data sources, including intent data providers, enabling users to build lists based on various intent signals such as: Job changes, new hires and promotions, website visits and content engagement etc.
- Data Enrichment: One really cool thing about Clay's platform is that it connects to over 75 different data enrichment tools. So if you've got a list of leads or customers, you can use this to flesh out that data with all kinds of additional details and information.
Pricing:
6. KeyPlay:
Keyplay is an innovative data enrichment and account prioritization platform designed to support the sales teams. It focuses on helping users identify their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), prioritize target accounts, and track account signals to enhance sales and marketing efforts.
How It Does The Job:
Keyplay utilizes intent signals for its list-building capabilities. Here’s what it does:
- Hiring Signals: Keyplay analyzes companies' hiring patterns to identify businesses actively seeking individuals for specific roles. This information can indicate growth, changing priorities, and a potential need for solutions related to those roles.
- Data Insights: Keyplay offers firmographic, tech stack, and online presence data to enhance list-building.
- Automated ICP Research: Keyplay offers Pre-built and customizable signals. No need to spend time manually researching prospects to determine if they match a business's ICP as Keyplay provides predefined signals (such as industry, company size, technology usage, hiring trends, etc.) that align with common attributes of your ideal customers.
- Personalized Account Scoring: Users can create custom scoring systems based on unique signals to prioritize accounts.
By combining the data points and applying the user-defined scoring system, Keyplay builds a rich list of leads.
Pricing:
7. Ocean.io
Ocean.io is a B2B data platform and business intelligence tool that specializes in helping businesses discover and engage with potential customers.
How Does it do list building?
Ocean.io uses lookalike methodology to do list building and here’s how:
- Ideal Customer Input: Users enter the URL of an ideal customer, and Ocean.io’s AI identifies similar companies, or "lookalikes.". This feature enables users to rapidly discover new prospects that mirror their top customers.
- Data Sourcing: The AI pulls data from sources like social media, company sites, and public records to find companies matching the ideal profile.
Pricing:
Conclusion
It is clear that the future lies in AI-powered list building tools. These new-age AI solutions go beyond merely collecting contact details—they analyze intent signals, use lookalike modeling, and tap into behavioral data to build prospect lists that are highly relevant and conversion-ready.
There are already a handful of tools in the market—it's just a matter of you making the shift and utilizing the full potential of AI in sales.
