As a marketer who works in a smaller niche with a fairly specific set of criteria that quality a prospect, this is a question I’ve been chewing on lately. On the one hand, we can get part of the way there with generic tools. On the other, our needs are so specific and our potential prospect list is well enough defined that even after trying a bunch of platforms I still end up turning to the same solution. There are a few key reasons for this:

• They don’t allow me to check prospect sites for multiple types of code
• They don’t allow me to specify prospect sites are checked for code
• They don’t allow javascript to execute on the prospect’s site
• They don’t allow have a broad enough database of prospects to account for everyone

Let me dig into a few of the platforms I’ve used to check prospects websites for specific snippets of code and explain the shortcomings of each.

BuiltWith

I really dig BuiltWith as both a platform and a company. It’s a really simple, clever model that works for 90%+ of sales teams. The biggest challenge, however, is three-fold:

1. You don’t know if they are missing prospects on your list
2. You don’t have control or visibility over the rules they’re using to scan websitse
3. You don’t have the ability to search prospects with multiple types of code

That said, they do a really good job of adding new ones if you document the code well and can wait a few days or weeks for them to take your request, add the rule to their engine, and check their database for that code, but you still don’t have any idea how many of your prospects’ website they aren’t scanning.

Zoominfo

There are a lot of tools like Zoominfo that I’ve used, so I mention them only as a leader in the category folks will recognize, but the gist is that they have a database of businesses that they gather lots of information about. One of those things is, as you might notice in that screenshot, “Technologies.” They do solve a few problems, for example:

1. You can search prospects by multiple technologies.
2. You can search the database by other factors you might use to qualify prospects.

But, even more than BuiltWith, these databases are built for selling to the 90% of sales teams and that may or may not be your audience. Their data is pretty solid for massive companies, but it gets iffy for everyone else. And, even if they do add a rule, you don’t know which sites have been scanned for that code and how long it’s been since they checked.

Three Problems

When it comes to checking prospects website for code, there seem to be three areas that I just can’t seem to find a pre-built solution for.

1. Control over the exact code and snippets I want to look for.
2. Control over the exact prospects’ sites I want to check.
3. Control over how frequently those sites are checked.

So, I often come back to building my own solution. For example, this interface allows me to upload a list of email addresses or domain names, build/add/edit a list of code snippets to look for (that part isn’t actually pictured), scan each list on demand, and filter results by the list I uploaded or the time I checked their website.

I’d be curious if other people have run into the same situation where they’re stuck without a solution because of the type of prospects they chase, the industry they work in, gaps in the datasets of other tools, really niche code/software snippets, or something else.

If that’s you, let me know. I’d love to hear what you’ve done to solve this.

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