How to Prospect Into Lookalike Accounts That Are Similar to Your Biggest Deals

TL;DR: If your pipeline is filled with low-quality leads, reps waste time chasing deals that won’t close, forecasts fall short, and marketing efforts go unrewarded. The fix is simple: start focusing on companies that already resemble your best customers aka lookalikes. These companies have proven that your product fits, your pitch resonates, and the budget is there. By prospecting lookalikes, you can quickly turn wasted efforts into revenue-generating opportunities.

You’ve got your pitch down and a long sales list prepped to conquer. Alas, a full pipeline doesn’t equal a strong pipeline. If you’re targeting the wrong companies, deals won’t close, relationships can sour, and precious time is wasted.

Why a Full Pipeline Doesn’t Equal a Strong Pipeline

• Wrong industry fit: Targeting companies that operate in industries that don’t benefit from your solution leads to wasted efforts. These companies either don’t have a need for your product or have completely different pain points, making your outreach irrelevant.

• Mismatched company size: Prospecting companies that don’t have the right budget or scale for your product wastes time and resources. Small businesses might not be able to afford your solution, while larger enterprises may require a more complex, customized offering that your product doesn’t provide.

• Wrong stakeholders: Reaching out to individuals who lack decision-making power within a company can result in dead ends. If you’re targeting entry-level employees or mid-level managers who can’t make purchasing decisions, your outreach might never reach the right person, wasting valuable time.

• Outreach at the wrong time: Contacting prospects who are not yet ready to buy or are in the early stages of their buying journey can lead to a high volume of rejections and low response rates. Timing is critical, and reaching out before a prospect has recognized a need or allocated budget for a solution often results in missed opportunities and frustration on both sides.

The Solution: Surfe Company Lookalikes

Instead of continuing to chase cold, generic sales leads, look to what’s already working. Company lookalikes are businesses that resemble your best customers – the ones that already converted and saw success with your product. These companies are more likely to follow the same path.

By focusing on lookalike accounts, you base your prospecting on real data, not assumptions. Surfe’s Lookalike feature helps you target companies with traits that mirror your best customers, ensuring your sales team spends time only on leads with high conversion potential.

How to Find Lookalike Accounts Using Surfe

Step 1: Identify Your Best Deals

Start by identifying the companies that represent your top accounts. These should be businesses with the fastest deal cycles, highest spend, or strongest retention. 

Step 2: Use Surfe to Find Lookalikes

Open Surfe App and click ‘Start Prospecting’. You now have two options to find companies that resemble your best deals:

• AI Enhanced Company Lookalikes: Add your best customers (the accounts from Step 1) into the ‘Company Lookalikes’ search bar and let Surfe generate similar companies based on industry, size, and other valuable key traits.

• Search by Filters: Apply filters like industry, HQ, annual revenue, employee size, technology and general keywords to narrow your search to companies that match your ideal customer profile.

Step 3: Click run search.

Step 4: Analyze the Results

Surfe will return a list of companies that are similar to the ones you’ve provided. Review and narrow the results of selecting the companies that are the most relevant to your business.

Step 5: Identify the Right Decision-Makers

Once you have a list of lookalike companies, the next step is finding the decision-makers. In Surfe, you can click on ‘View Employees’ and filter by:

• Job title

• Seniority level

• Department

• Personal location

This allows you to target the right individuals who hold the power to buy.

Step 6: Enrich and Capture Your Leads

Select up to 1,000 leads at a time to enrich with Surfe’s waterfall enrichment, which provides:

• Aggregated data from 15+ top-tier providers: This increases the chances of finding accurate contact details across various regions and industries.

• Validated emails through ZeroBounce: Ensures that email addresses are active and capable of receiving messages, reducing bounce rates.

• Filtered results: Removes catch-all domains, personal emails, and invalid entries before they reach your CRM, ensuring only verified, work-based contact details are used.

• Global coverage: Ensures that your outreach is accurate and timely, regardless of the prospect’s location.

By integrating Surfe’s waterfall enrichment with lookalike prospecting, you can ensure that your outreach is based on accurate, up-to-date, and relevant data, leading to higher conversion rates and a more efficient sales process.

Step 7: Export and Integrate

Once your leads are enriched, you can easily:

• Export to your CRM (Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive) for real-time sync and automatic deduplication.

• Export to CSV for external tools or campaigns.

• Save leads directly in Surfe App to organize and prioritize them based on signals like hiring, funding, and job changes.

Surfe Lookalike Technical Breakdown

Every sales rep knows the gold standard: your best customers. They’re the ones who close fast, stick around, and expand. The challenge is finding more companies just like them – and that’s where Surfe’s Lookalike Search comes in.

Unlike basic keyword searches, Surfe’s engine doesn’t just skim company data, it actually understands it. Think of it as uncovering the DNA of your top accounts – things like their industry, size, growth patterns, tech stack, and hiring signals. Once that profile is built, Surfe goes out and finds other companies that share the same traits.

Behind the scenes, Surfe lookalikes are powered by advanced AI models and a semantic search engine that can connect the dots far beyond what filters alone can do. Instead of serving you a messy spreadsheet of “possible” prospects, Surfe delivers a curated list of high-probability targets that already look like your best-fit customers.

The real edge? The system keeps learning. Every search, every feedback loop, and every closed deal makes it sharper. As your ICP evolves, so do your lookalike results. That means the companies Surfe surfaces tomorrow will be even more aligned than the ones you see today.

For you, the rep, this means less guesswork, less wasted outreach, and more conversations with prospects that are actually worth your time.

Company lookalikes offer a more reliable, data-driven approach. Here’s why:

• Proven fit: Lookalikes are modeled on your top-performing accounts, meaning they share the same characteristics and behaviors as accounts that have already proven to need your solution, increasing the likelihood of conversion. 
• Fresh data: Surfe ensures firmographic, technographic, and contact data are always up-to-date, so your outreach is accurate and relevant. 
• Targeted outreach: Instead of casting a wide net, you’re focusing on companies that have already demonstrated a clear need for your product or service. 
• Higher efficiency: With lookalikes, reps spend more time engaging with the right prospects and less time chasing unqualified leads, leading to higher close rates and better ROI.

ROI of Lookalike Prospecting:

Wasting time on low-quality leads will cost you. If your team is chasing poor-fit accounts, the cost of wasted outreach can quickly add up.

Let’s break it down with an example:

Traditional Prospecting Costs:
A sales team spends 20 hours a week prospecting cold leads, generating low-quality opportunities. With a rep’s time costing $100/hour, this results in $2,000 per week in sales costs.

Lookalike Prospecting:
A study by Forrester Research found that companies utilizing targeted, data-driven prospecting techniques (including lookalike modeling) saw a 30% reduction in time spent on unqualified leads. By applying this 30% efficiency gain, sales teams can reduce prospecting time by 6 hours a week, saving $600 per week, which totals $31,200 annually.

Additionally, this process leads to higher-quality leads and more predictable conversion rates.

The bottom line: Using lookalike accounts not only saves time but also leads to greater conversion, reducing costs and increasing sales efficiency. Surfe ensures the data used in prospecting is verified and accurate, so you spend less time and money chasing dead ends and more time closing deals.

Final Thoughts

To build a strong pipeline, you need to focus on quality over quantity. Lookalike prospecting allows you to target companies that resemble your best customers, ensuring your sales effort is aligned with what works.

Surfe’s Lookalike feature lets you focus your efforts on leads that matter, enriches those leads with verified data, and allows you to quickly find and target decision-makers. By grounding your prospecting in real evidence, you reduce guesswork and increase conversion rates.

By prospecting into lookalike accounts, you replicate the success of your top deals, making it easier to scale your sales efforts and build a predictable pipeline.

FAQs

What Are Lookalike Accounts In Sales Prospecting?

Lookalike accounts are companies that share key characteristics with your best customers. These traits might include industry, company size, technology stack, or buying behavior. Because they resemble businesses that have already bought from you, they represent a higher probability of conversion compared to random or purchased lists. Instead of guessing who might be a good fit, sales teams can use lookalike prospecting to replicate proven success and build a cleaner, more reliable pipeline. By targeting lookalikes, you concentrate effort on accounts that are more likely to engage, buy, and grow with your product – turning past wins into a practical blueprint for future deals.

Why Are Lookalikes Better Than Purchased Prospect Lists?

Purchased prospect lists are often outdated, incomplete, and filled with companies that were never going to buy your solution. Reps waste time chasing contacts that don’t respond, and forecasts become distorted. Lookalikes, in contrast, are built from your own customer data. They reflect the accounts that have already converted, which makes them far more likely to convert again. With tools like Surfe, lookalike accounts also come enriched with accurate contact data. That means fewer dead ends, cleaner CRM records, and outreach focused on companies that actually resemble your best customers. 

How Do You Build A List Of Lookalike Accounts?

Building a list of lookalike accounts starts with your existing wins. First, identify around ten of your top customers – those with the largest contracts, fastest sales cycles, or strongest retention. Then, use Surfe’s Lookalike feature to input these companies and generate a list of others with similar traits. From there, review the results, select the companies that stand out, and save them in a dedicated list. Finally, drill down into each account to identify the right decision-makers and export both company and contact lists to your CRM. This creates a targeted database rooted in proven success, not assumptions.

How Can Lookalike Prospecting Improve Sales Efficiency?

Lookalike prospecting improves efficiency by directing outreach toward companies with real buying potential instead of generic leads. Because these accounts mirror your best customers, reps spend less time chasing opportunities that never materialize and more time engaging with prospects that are ready to buy. This reduces wasted effort, improves forecast accuracy, and helps campaigns deliver stronger returns. It also means that morale improves – sales teams are no longer stuck working through bloated lists of unqualified accounts. By scaling what has already worked, lookalike prospecting builds a pipeline that is both leaner and more productive.

What Role Does Surfe Play In Lookalike Prospecting?

Surfe’s Lookalike feature automates the process of finding accounts similar to your best customers. By analyzing firmographic, technographic, and behavioral traits, it generates a list of companies that resemble your biggest wins. Surfe also makes it easy to build structured lists inside the app, identify the right decision-makers, and enrich contact details with fresh data. From there, you can export directly into your CRM or outreach sequences. This eliminates the need for guesswork or manual research and ensures your prospecting efforts start with accurate, high-quality data. Surfe was designed to help sales teams replicate success with precision.

When Should Sales Teams Use Lookalike Prospecting?

Lookalike prospecting is especially valuable when pipelines slow down, campaigns underperform, or new markets are being explored. Instead of starting from scratch, reps can build on what’s already proven to work. By analyzing closed deals and high-retention customers, sales teams can identify which accounts are worth targeting next. This approach is also useful for scaling – once you know the profile of your ideal customer, you can systematically expand into similar accounts. Whether you’re recovering from a stagnant quarter or trying to accelerate growth, lookalike prospecting ensures your outreach is focused where results are most likely.