Searchbase for manufacturing: buyer, distributor and supplier lists in one prompt

Quick answer: manufacturers use Searchbase to map the companies that make, buy or distribute a specific product in a specific country, using what those companies publish about themselves, product catalogues, certifications, plant locations, trade fair listings. Describe your ideal customer. Searchbase finds them across Europe in one prompt, with the source on every cell. A list of three hundred companies in a category takes minutes and a few hundred credits, and the free plan renews 150 credits a month so you can map one niche before paying anything.

What manufacturing teams ask for

Industrial segments are defined by product and process, not by job title, so the prompts name the thing being made:

• "Companies in Baden-Württemberg that manufacture aluminium extrusions, with the product page and a sales contact."
• "Distributors of industrial packaging film in Poland, with the brands they list on their site."
• "Furniture manufacturers in the Veneto region that export to France, with the page where they state their export markets."
• "Companies in Spain with ISO 14001 certification in the plastics sector, with the page stating the certificate."
• "Machine tool makers in the Czech Republic hiring CNC programmers right now, with the job post link."
• "Companies exhibiting at packaging trade fairs in Germany this year, with the exhibitor page and their website."

Each of these is a claim a company makes in public about its own capability. That is the whole basis of industrial prospecting, and it is exactly what a general contact database does not store.

What comes back

A table that fills while the agent works. For an industrial list the usual columns are company name, domain, country and region, the product or process in the company's own words, certifications where stated, plant or office locations, export markets when the site names them, a contact page or email, and the signal that put the row in the list.

Every cell carries a link to the page it was read from, a badge with the collection date, and the extraction method. The link matters more here than anywhere else, because a purchasing manager will ask where a certification claim came from and the correct answer is a URL, not a vendor's word. Where a value is not published, the cell says n/a. Searchbase does not assign a revenue band or a certification it did not read.

Contact columns are usually a role inbox or a contact form, sometimes a named sales manager on a team page. Today teams use LinkedIn Sales Navigator for finding the person once the company is on the list, and Apollo for direct contact data. Searchbase produces the list itself, which is the part that normally takes a junior analyst three weeks.

Sources that matter for manufacturing

Company pages dominate, and industrial company pages are unusually rich. Product catalogues, technical datasheets, certification pages, plant location pages, news sections announcing a new line or a new market. Each page read costs about one credit, so reading three or four pages per company across three hundred companies is still an inexpensive run.

Directories matter because industrial categories are indexed by product code and sector, and trade fair exhibitor pages are effectively a curated directory of everyone active in a category this year. Press covers expansions, certifications, acquisitions and plant investments.

Nine job boards are a strong and underused signal: a plant hiring maintenance technicians for a second shift is scaling, and a company posting for a specific machine operator is telling you which machines it runs. Twelve social platforms carry less weight here than in consumer verticals, but they still hold the leadership and the recent announcements. Three ad libraries, Meta, Google and TikTok, matter mainly for manufacturers who sell direct to consumers as well as to trade.

A worked example

Prompt: "Companies in Baden-Württemberg that manufacture aluminium extrusions, with the product page and a sales contact."

The agent plans first, and you see the plan before it spends anything. It searches the product term in German and English, collects candidate companies from directories and trade listings, then opens each company site to confirm they actually extrude rather than resell, then reads the contact page.

Then it runs. Around 400 pages get read at roughly one credit each, so the run lands near 400 credits. Rows appear while it works, so if it is pulling in traders instead of manufacturers you correct the prompt after twenty rows instead of after the whole sweep.

The output is around seventy companies with a product page that proves the capability, a location, and a contact route. For the ten that matter most, Deep Research at 20 to 40 credits per report returns a cited profile covering what they make, where, and what they have announced recently.

From the table to the first message

Industrial buyers reply to messages that show you understand the process, so the specific detail in the row is the whole message. From the table, the agent drafts email and LinkedIn sequences that reference the actual product line, the actual certification, the actual plant.

Every draft goes through a review step, and nothing leaves without your approval. This matters more in a long sales cycle than anywhere else: one badly aimed message to a technical buyer closes a door for a year. Sending from the campaign wizard is still rolling out, so the workflow today is review then export. Export is JSON on every plan, CSV from Starter, an API from Pro and webhooks on Business, so the list can land in the CRM the sales engineers already use.

Pricing for a manufacturing team

Free costs nothing and renews 150 credits a month, enough to map one narrow product category in one region and judge whether the output is usable.

Starter at €29 a month gives 1,000 credits and CSV export, which covers roughly two full category maps a month. For a company entering one new export market a quarter, this is often enough.

Pro at €79 a month gives 4,000 credits and API access, which fits a team maintaining several category maps across countries and refreshing them before each trade fair season.

Business at €199 a month gives 12,000 credits and webhooks, for groups running the same mapping across several divisions or pushing new matches into their own systems. Prices are in euros, the company is European, and the product works in English and Italian.

Frequently asked questions

Can it tell manufacturers apart from resellers? It works from what the site says. A company describing its own production, plant and processes reads differently from a catalogue of other people's brands, and the row links to the page so you can confirm in one click. Where the site is ambiguous, the row is ambiguous too, which is more useful than a confident wrong label.

Does it find certifications? Where the company publishes them, yes, with the page that states the certificate. It does not query certification registries, so a company that holds a certificate without publishing it will show n/a.

What about companies whose site is only in the local language? That is normal in industry and it is handled. Prompts can be written in English or Italian while the pages read are in any language.

How deep can it go on one company? Deep Research produces a cited report on a single company for 20 to 40 credits. Most teams build the broad list first and spend deep research credits only on the shortlist.

Does it send outreach? The agent drafts email and LinkedIn sequences and you approve each one. Launching from the campaign wizard is being switched on progressively, so today teams review and export.

Can it monitor a category over time? Yes. Save the prompt, rerun it, and compare. Each rerun reads the pages again and stamps every cell with a new collection date, so you can see who added a product line or a market since last quarter.

Prices checked on 2026-09-08 on searchbase.org.