Every B2B publisher has the same problem. People change jobs, companies grow, and the database slowly goes stale. The usual fix is to buy a list, and anyone who's done that knows how it goes: half of them already on file, a chunk out of date, and no idea where the rest came from.
Prospecting in Adeptis takes a different route. It looks at the websites of companies you care about, finds the people they publish there, and gives you only the ones you don't already have.
Only the people you don't already have
The crawled contacts screen surfaces people published on company websites who are not already on your database and not already on one of your lists. Duplicates of people you know are filtered out before you see them.
Each candidate comes with name, job title, company, email, phone where there is one, a confidence score and the source page. Work through them in batches. The batch summary shows how many were kept, how many have already been exported and how many were rejected, so you know how much of the crawl was useful.
Published and derived addresses, kept apart
This is the part to understand before you use it. Some email addresses are read straight off a company's web page: those are published addresses. Others are derived, built from the address format that company is known to use.
Adeptis keeps the two separate. You can filter by all sources, published only or derived only, and derived addresses are clearly marked as unverified. Expect some of them to bounce, and check them before you load them into your email platform. We'd rather say that plainly than have you find out from your bounce rate.
Guard-rails built into the code
The rules aren't left to good intentions. They're enforced in the software:
- robots.txt is respected. If a site says don't crawl a page, Adeptis doesn't.
- Role addresses are flagged. Generic addresses like sales@ or info@ are marked as such, so you're not treating a shared inbox as a person.
- Exports are re-checked. Every export is checked against the database again, so nobody who's been added since the crawl slips through as "new".
- Every person has a source. The page they were found on is right there in the list.
Export per batch
When you've reviewed a batch, export it to CSV. "Export new" gives you only the candidates you haven't exported before, so running it again doesn't hand you the same people twice.
Batches also make the work manageable. Rather than a single enormous file that nobody gets to the bottom of, you review a sensible number at a time, reject the ones that don't fit, and keep a clear record of what's been exported and when. Over a few months that adds up to a steady flow of the right people, found at the right companies.
What you do with them next is up to you and your data protection policy. Adeptis gives you a source for every person, which is a good place to start if you're ever asked where you found someone.
How it fits with the rest
Prospecting works best alongside the CRM. Once a new contact is in, they get the same record as everyone else, with consent recorded by channel as described under security and GDPR. From there they can be picked up in audience selection like anyone else.
It pairs nicely with email insight, too. Email insight tells you which companies are showing interest. Prospecting helps you find more of the right people at those companies.
Prospecting is part of Adeptis and isn't in Avio. If you're weighing the two up, Avio or Adeptis explains who each is for.
Book an Adeptis demo and we'll walk through a batch with you, including how the published and derived filters work.
Questions
Does it make up email addresses?
Published addresses (read off a page) are kept separate from derived ones. Derived addresses are clearly marked as unverified and should be checked before you use them.
Does it respect robots.txt?
Yes. That's enforced in the code, along with flagging generic role addresses and re-checking every export against the database.
Will it give us people we already have?
No. It only surfaces people who aren't already on your database or on any of your lists, and every export is checked against the database again.
Can we see where each person came from?
Yes. Every candidate shows its source page and a confidence score.