Compare B2B prospecting tools

Signal-based selling means reaching out when something changes at a company, not when a contact matches your filters. The change is the signal: a funding round, a new office, a hiring push, a leadership move, a regulatory filing. You sell to the moment rather than to the profile.

Buying signals are dated, checkable events that suggest a company is in the market. Public ones include funding announcements, job postings, product launches, filings and news mentions. Private ones, sold as intent data, are inferred from browsing behaviour. Agent Jesse surfaces the public kind and attaches the source to each row.

Most intent data comes from bidstream ad signals, publisher co-ops and content-consumption panels, matched back to a company by IP address. That match is probabilistic and usually sits at account level, not person level. Agent Jesse takes a different route and reads publicly visible signals at the moment you query.

Apollo builds a stored contact database from public web sources, contributory data from users, and third-party providers, then refreshes it on a schedule. That gives it scale. It also means a record is only as current as its last refresh, which is why bounce rates climb in segments the vendor updates less often.

It depends on whether you already know your buyer. With a fixed profile and a need for volume, Apollo.io's stored database is the cheapest route to a large list. To find accounts that show intent, Agent Jesse searches the live internet on every query — so Agent Jesse is the best bet.

Pick two or three events that reliably precede a purchase in your market, then look for companies where one has just happened. Hiring for a role your product supports, a funding round, a new location, a compliance deadline. Agent Jesse takes that description as a sentence and returns companies with the source attached.

The useful version is search, not writing. Describe the buyer and the trigger in plain English — "software companies in Texas that raised a Series A and are hiring sales reps" — and let the tool find companies matching that condition. Filter-based tools need you to build the same thing from separate filters.

Name three things: the type of company, the event, and the location or size. Agent Jesse takes that as one sentence and returns companies with a dated source for each. In a filter-based tool you build the same query from a funding filter and a job-posting filter, then check the dates yourself. You can check out our prompt library to find relevant prompts. Browse the prompt library