How to Use ChatGPT to Create ABM Account Lists for Niche ICPs

The big, shiny databases like ZoomInfo and Apollo are great for broad markets. But what if your ideal customer is “home service franchisors,” “concierge medical practices,” or “AI startups that raised Series A in the last 90 days”?

That’s where ChatGPT comes in.

With the latest GPT models (like GPT-4o and GPT-5), you can use AI to research, compile, and even clean niche ABM lists faster than ever. It’s like having a team of virtual analysts who never sleep.

In this guide, I’ll show you exactly how to use ChatGPT to create ABM account lists for niche ICPs—step by step—and how to combine those lists with enrichment tools like Apollo, Clay, and LinkedIn Sales Navigator to turn them into full, verified, contact-ready datasets.

Why ChatGPT Is a Secret Weapon for ABM

Most marketers still think of ChatGPT as a copywriting or brainstorming tool. They’re missing the bigger picture.

ChatGPT isn’t just a chatbot—it’s a research assistant, data analyst, and API connector rolled into one. It can scour the web for company names, analyze industry databases, summarize unstructured information, and even identify patterns that would take a human days to find.

If you know how to prompt it right, you can build hyper-specific lists like:

• “All franchisors in the U.S. home service industry with more than 10 locations.”
• “All B2B SaaS companies that serve the healthcare sector and raised Series A funding since January 2024.”
• “All independent concierge medical practices in California that focus on functional medicine or weight loss.”

Traditionally, finding data that specific would take you weeks, multiple paid tools, and some manual grunt work. ChatGPT does it in under an hour.

Step 1: Get Clear on Your ICP

Like any ABM strategy, the process starts with precision.

Before you ever open ChatGPT, define your Ideal Customer Profile—who they are, what they do, and what makes them valuable to you.

Ask yourself:

• What industry or industries are they in?
• What’s their company size (by headcount or revenue)?
• What’s their geography?
• Who are the decision-makers?
• What products, technologies, or attributes define them?

If your target market is broad—say, “SaaS companies”—you can use Apollo or LinkedIn Sales Navigator. But if you’re targeting a micro-niche, like “multi-location weight-loss clinics using a specific software,” ChatGPT can help you find those needles in the haystack.

Write out your ICP in one sentence. For example:

“We’re looking for franchisors in the home service industry, like pest control, HVAC, or roofing brands, that have at least 10 franchise locations in the United States.”

That sentence will become the foundation for your prompts.

Step 2: Use ChatGPT’s Deep Research Mode

If you’re using ChatGPT Plus or an enterprise plan, you have access to Deep Research reports (sometimes called “Advanced Data Analysis” or “Projects” depending on your plan).

This is where the magic happens.

You can literally tell ChatGPT:

“Build me a list of 500 franchisors in the U.S. home service industry. Include company name, website, HQ location, and number of franchise locations. Focus on businesses like Mr. Handyman, Mosquito Squad, and House Doctors. Only include active companies.”

ChatGPT will clarify your parameters (“Do you want this exported as a CSV?” “Should I include contact info if available?”), and then it will go to work.

Within 15–30 minutes, it will return a structured list you can export directly—often in CSV format—complete with links and notes on how each company matches your filters.

In older workflows, that kind of research would have taken a week.

Now it’s a single prompt.

Step 3: Expand and Refine Your Prompting Strategy

Prompting is the art of instructing the AI clearly. The more context you give ChatGPT, the better the output.

Here are a few prompt templates that work especially well for ABM list building:

Prompt 1: Industry-Based Lists

“List 200 companies in the United States that operate as franchisors in the home service industry (plumbing, HVAC, pest control, cleaning, roofing). Include company name, website, HQ city and state, and the number of locations.”

Prompt 2: Tech-Specific Lists

“Find 150 SaaS companies that use Stripe for payments and sell to healthcare providers. Include name, website, and LinkedIn URL.”

Prompt 3: Fundraising-Based Lists

“List startups that raised a Series A or Series B round in 2024 in the HR tech space. Include company name, website, funding amount, and lead investor.”

Prompt 4: Geo-Specific Lists

“Generate a list of independent concierge medical practices in California, New York, and Florida that focus on weight loss, integrative medicine, or longevity.”

Each time you run one, ChatGPT will ask clarifying questions or suggest ways to narrow or expand your parameters. That back-and-forth is how you refine your output.

Step 4: Verify, Deduplicate, and Export

ChatGPT is powerful, but it’s not a CRM. It won’t automatically verify emails or phone numbers.

So once you’ve got your list of companies, you’ll want to export it as a CSV and push it into a data enrichment platform. The two I recommend most are:

• Clay, which can append verified emails, phone numbers, and firmographics.
• Apollo.io, which can find associated decision-makers at each company.

Upload your ChatGPT-generated list to either of these tools, and let them handle the enrichment process.

You can even loop ChatGPT back in by asking it to write enrichment formulas or cleanup scripts—for example, to standardize website URLs or remove duplicates.

If you’re using Excel or Google Sheets, you can even say:

“Write a Google Sheets formula that extracts the root domain from a list of URLs.”

And ChatGPT will give you the exact function.

Step 5: Combine ChatGPT Lists with Apollo or Clay

The most effective ABM marketers don’t rely on one tool—they use ChatGPT to feed data into tools like Apollo or Clay that handle enrichment and validation.

Here’s how a simple workflow might look:

1. Use ChatGPT to research and compile a list of companies that fit your niche ICP.
   
   
2. Import that company list into Apollo to find contacts, emails, and job titles (e.g., CEOs, founders, or heads of marketing) who work at those firms.
   
   
3. Enrich that same list in Clay with additional data like personal emails, phone numbers, and firmographics.
   
   
4. Upload the enriched list to your ad platforms (LinkedIn, Meta, Google) and outbound tools (Instantly, SmartLead).

The result is a full 360° ABM dataset—built in hours, not weeks.

Step 6: Use ChatGPT to Validate Fit and Prioritize

ChatGPT isn’t just for discovery. It can also analyze and score your leads once you’ve got them.

You can paste 50 or 100 company websites into ChatGPT and ask:

“Analyze each of these company websites and tell me which ones fit this ICP: franchisors in the home service industry with 10+ locations. Score each one from 0–100.”

The AI will crawl through their site descriptions, identify keywords, and return a ranked list.

Now, instead of spending hours manually researching which companies fit, you’ve got a data-driven ICP fit score for every record.

You can take those top-scoring companies and move them into your “Tier 1” list for high-touch outreach.

Step 7: Automate the Process with APIs

If you want to take this further, you can connect ChatGPT (via OpenAI API or Zapier) to tools like Clay or Google Sheets to automate the flow entirely.

Here’s a simplified setup:

• Step 1: ChatGPT runs a daily or weekly research task (using a prompt) to find new companies in your target space.
• Step 2: It exports those results into a Google Sheet.
• Step 3: Clay automatically enriches them with verified emails.
• Step 4: Those new records are synced to your CRM or outbound system like HubSpot or Instantly.

In a matter of hours, you’ve turned ChatGPT into an autonomous ABM research assistant that updates your leads every week.

No manual data entry. No missed opportunities.

Step 8: Using ChatGPT for Keyword and Vertical Expansion

Once you’ve built your first list, use ChatGPT to brainstorm adjacent markets.

Let’s say you built a list of pest control franchisors. You can prompt:

“List similar verticals in the home service industry that have similar customer acquisition models.”

ChatGPT might come back with: lawn care, cleaning services, HVAC, plumbing, roofing, or pool maintenance.

That gives you new verticals to target with similar messaging—without starting from scratch.

You can then ask ChatGPT to run the same process for each of those verticals and expand your ABM universe methodically.

Step 9: How to Use ChatGPT to Research Niche Leads That Aren’t in Databases

Here’s where ChatGPT truly shines: finding leads that aren’t in traditional data platforms.

If your ICP isn’t on LinkedIn or doesn’t show up in Apollo’s filters—like church pastors, private schools, or regional clinics—you can use ChatGPT to find public lists online.

For example:

“Find directories of private schools in Texas, Florida, and California, including names, websites, and contact pages.”

Or:

“List 200 church organizations in the United States that have 5+ locations or regional networks.”

ChatGPT will surface associations, directories, and trade groups you can scrape or download. You can then enrich those lists using Clay, just like any other dataset.

This is especially powerful for niche markets—where your prospects aren’t well-indexed in business databases but are still visible online.

Step 10: Integrate ChatGPT Into Your ABM Team Workflow

The most successful growth teams treat ChatGPT as a collaborator, not a novelty.

Here’s how to make it part of your weekly rhythm:

1. Every Monday: Run a ChatGPT research prompt to find new accounts or new verticals.
   
   
2. Every Tuesday: Upload those accounts into Clay for enrichment.
   
   
3. Every Wednesday: Update your outbound lists in Instantly or SmartLead.
   
   
4. Every Thursday: Review your ad match rates in Meta and LinkedIn.
   
   
5. Every Friday: Ask ChatGPT to summarize insights—like “What trends are emerging among new companies in this niche?”

That simple weekly process keeps your ABM list fresh and your team’s focus tight.

Step 11: Cost, Speed, and Scalability

The best part? The cost of doing all this with ChatGPT is next to nothing compared to traditional data providers.

For $20–$25 a month on ChatGPT Plus, you can generate hundreds of curated company names per session. Combine that with a few hundred dollars of enrichment in Clay or Apollo, and you’re still operating at a fraction of what ZoomInfo or Clearbit would cost.

Speed is another factor. A human researcher might spend a week finding 500 qualified companies in a niche market. ChatGPT does it in minutes.

And scalability is built in—you can run multiple prompts at once, segment by region or vertical, and even create templates for your team to reuse.

Common Pitfalls (and How to Avoid Them)

AI is powerful, but it’s not magic. Here are a few mistakes to avoid:

• Don’t rely solely on ChatGPT for contact data. It’s great for companies, but not for verified emails. Always enrich afterward.
• Be specific with your prompts. The more context, the better. Vague instructions lead to messy lists.
• Manually spot-check the output. Even the best AI can include outdated or irrelevant data. Review samples before scaling.
• Don’t skip enrichment. ChatGPT finds names; Clay and Apollo make those names usable.
• Protect against duplication. Always dedupe across your tools using email as the unique key.

If you follow those rules, you’ll have clean, high-quality ABM lists every time.

Step 12: Real Example — Building a List of Home Service Franchisors

Let’s walk through a real-world example.

Imagine you’re selling software to franchisors in the home services industry.

You could type this into ChatGPT:

“Build me a list of 500 active franchisors in the U.S. home service sector (pest control, cleaning, roofing, plumbing, HVAC). Include company name, website, headquarters location, and number of franchise locations. Exclude restaurant and retail franchises.”

ChatGPT will generate a list that includes companies like:

• Mosquito Squad
• Mr. Handyman
• House Doctors
• HandyPro
• Aire Serv
• The Cleaning Authority

Once it gives you that initial list, you can prompt it again:

“Now add 50 more emerging franchisors launched after 2015.”

And once you have that, you can ask:

“Export this list as a CSV so I can enrich it in Clay.”

That’s the workflow. You get the strategic research done by AI, and the data verification done by your enrichment platform.

Step 13: Using ChatGPT to Write Your Enrichment Prompts

One overlooked use case is asking ChatGPT to help you craft the right prompts for enrichment tools.

For example, you can tell it:

“Write me a step-by-step enrichment workflow for Clay to add verified work emails and phone numbers to this list of franchisors.”

ChatGPT will outline the exact process, including which columns to use, how to configure waterfalls, and which enrichment providers to prioritize.

It can even help you create AI prompts within Clay—like how to score each company’s ICP fit or generate custom outbound messaging for each contact.

This is where ChatGPT stops being just a research tool and becomes your RevOps consultant.

Step 14: Combining ChatGPT with AI Personalization

Once your list is ready, you can feed it right back into ChatGPT to create personalized outbound messages.

You can paste in 10 company names and prompt:

“Write a personalized first-line email for each of these companies based on their websites. Focus on how our software helps home service franchisors manage multi-location marketing.”

ChatGPT will return tailored openers that you can plug directly into Instantly or SmartLead.

It’s not just saving you research time—it’s saving your copywriting time, too.

Step 15: The Bigger Picture — AI-Driven ABM

We’re entering a new era where marketing and sales operations are merging with AI.

Building ABM lists used to be manual. Now it’s programmatic.

Research that used to require data vendors and full-time researchers can now be done by a single marketer in ChatGPT—augmented by enrichment tools and automation.

The biggest winners in the next five years will be the teams that embrace that mindset early: using AI to replace the grunt work so humans can focus on strategy and creativity.

Final Thoughts

ChatGPT has officially become one of the most powerful tools in the ABM playbook. It won’t replace your data providers—but it makes them exponentially more effective.

You can use it to:

• Discover niche accounts outside traditional databases.
• Build custom lists that align perfectly with your ICP.
• Enrich, validate, and prioritize those lists faster than ever.
• Personalize outreach at scale.

And you can do all of that in days, not months, for a fraction of the cost of traditional data acquisition.

So if you’ve been thinking ABM is only for companies with big budgets and massive sales teams, think again.

With ChatGPT in your corner, you can build and own your market—one hyper-targeted list at a time.

That’s the new way to grow smarter. That’s how you scale with precision.

That’s how you win with ABM in the AI era.

— Ryan Allis, CEO, SaasRise