In marketing and sales, AI is mostly used for content creation, media budget allocation and content delivery to different target groups. However, there is a huge potential for B2B marketing and sales that has mostly gone unmentioned: the use of intelligent algorithms to identify and evaluate prospects – business clients, suppliers or takeover candidates.
Finding and evaluating the right prospects is crucial – and very time-consuming
At the same time, finding the right prospects has never been more urgent: military conflicts and trade wars have disrupted many supply chains around the globe. Profound structural change in industries like automotive and energy has prompted many industrial companies to enter new markets. Well-run companies are increasingly pursuing a buy & build strategyin order to grow through suitable acquisitions.
However, identifying the companies that are a good fit for your business from among millions of companies has been thus far a labor-intensive and expensive task: You have to first identify companies that are suitable based on their industry, business activities and region - which requires a long search through various registers. Furthermore, you have to examine tens or even hundreds of thousands of companies to determine which ones really fit your ideal profile: Do the companies offer the right products? Do they meet the relevant standards? Do they have the right qualifications in their team? Are they economically sound? And do they have happy customers?
It is precisely these steps of lead generation (research and qualification) that tie up countless working days - days that you would rather spend closing deals. Those days cannot easily be outsourced. You can surely buy expensive company lists from industry databases. But the lists will not tell you which leads are the most suitable. There are a few software solutions today that collect data from a wide variety of sources - for example, company registers, federal gazettes, company websites, job advertisements, online reviews, etc. But they merely collect data without evaluating it - while only a proper evaluation can answer the question of whether a company is a good fit for you.
This is a perfect match for AI’s central strengths
This is precisely where AI can play to its three core strengths:
- Complex data integration: Anyone who has ever tried to collect and merge data from very different systems knows how frustrating it can be. Seemingly simple things like locations, times or company names are broken down differently in different sources. Thousands of careless mistakes and data errors can creep in during the merging process. Analytic AI is best suited for resolving these issues.
- Understanding content and context: Language models and AI algorithms can understand our language not only word for word but also in context. Algorithms such as those used by NEUTRUM automatically get to the heart of what matters most: the content aspects that you really want to know about a website or job advertisement. For instance, does a certain company comply with ISO standard XYZ? Are their employees offered company bikes? Does the retailer have bad reviews due to counterfeit merchandise? The only alternative here is to read all the websites yourself – that would be a mission from hell.
- Automatic modelling: Data is silver, but knowledge (i.e. data in the proper context) is gold - only insight drives progress. Insight means identifying correlations and success drivers in data. For example: Which of the countless attributes that I can collect make a company more likely to be an A customer? How can I best identify which suppliers are not reputable? At this point, every database solution and every typical management consultancy gives up. Either expensive forensic experts get to work slowly – or AI takes over at lightning speed, because finding the best models among millions of possible combinations is the domain of algorithms. If you make Analytic AI explainable, as we do with NEUTRUM.AI, it can account at any time for why and on what data basis it has reached a conclusion.
A real-life case study from the industry
A large medium-sized company supplies industrial precursors to manufacturing companies in a wide range of countries and industries. For about a year now, the company has noticed that order quantities have been declining. The company needs to compensate for the loss of business volume – but the data does not show the patterns behind the decline or the type of customers that it needs to attract in order to offset it sustainably and continue to grow... let alone where to find these customers.
With NEUTRUM B2B Client Finder – the “Best Solution for Lead Generation” (International Business Awards 2025) – the company can automatically answer these three questions with 95% less work at 99% less cost than before:
NEUTRUM.AI algorithms automatically enrich the customer data from the CRM system. Based on the company websites, the language model determines which industries and sub-industries the clients belong to, which products they offer and for which use cases. Sales figures and employee count is collected from official databases; customer reviews are collected from the corresponding online profiles. Information is gathered from the relevant platforms about how which jobs the company is offering, how many website visitors it gets and where they come from, what the firm spends on online advertising etc. For the relevant countries, data is also collected on how market demand developed for the different products. NEUTRUM automatically finds the best AI model that will use these factors to determine what really constitutes the ideal customer.
NEUTRUM uses this ideal customer profile to go on the prowl. Various corporate databases are used to identify companies that fit the profile based on their industry or product range. Data that predicts customer value according to the model is then collected for these companies - for example, which industrial processes they use, which customers they have, or what qualifications they value in their product managers. This information is used to automatically evaluate the given companies and assign them to a revenue category (from “less interesting” to “likely to be an A customer”).
The company thus receives a fully automated, prioritized list of businesses that it should acquire as clients,along with sales-related information, from the best use case and product fit to the contact information listed on the website. The sales department can thus increase its acquisition performance by a significant double-digit percentage.
Use AI where it creates the best value
Amidst all the hype surrounding AI, it is often forgotten that the investment – like any investment – must be worthwhile. In lead generation for business acquisition, the enormous time and cost savings mean that the investment in an AI solution like NEUTRUM B2B Client Finder will pay for itself rapidly; because you can acquire more customers with a higher hit rate more rapidly.
Try it for yourself - See a Demo!
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