How to find businesses using a specific software
How to find local businesses using a particular software like Jobber, Toast, Square or Mindbody, by reading their own website, and why this is the strongest list a software seller can build.
Look at the business's own website, because most booking, payment and scheduling systems leave visible traces there: a Book Now button that points at the vendor's domain, a checkout that loads the vendor's code, or a powered-by line in the footer. That is free to check one at a time and it is the only method that is genuinely reliable, since a company's customer list is not public.
Why this list is worth more than a bigger one
A business already paying for software in your category has answered the two questions that kill most software sales: does this category of tool matter, and will we pay monthly for one. Everything left is a comparison, and comparisons are a conversation you can win. A business with nothing has to be convinced of the category first, which is a different and much longer sale.
It also gives you a specific opener that is true. "I see you book through Jobber, how is the scheduling side working out" is a real question about their situation. It is not a pitch, and it gets an answer.
How to check by hand
- Open the site and look for a Book, Order or Schedule button. Hover it and read where it goes. Very often it goes straight to the vendor's own domain, which tells you the answer immediately.
- View the page source and search for the vendor's name. Most of these systems load a script from their own domain.
- Check the footer for a powered-by line.
- Try the checkout or booking flow one step. The page you land on usually carries the vendor's branding.
What not to do: guess from the words on the page. A plumber whose site says "online scheduling available" might be running any of forty systems, or a contact form. The word is not the software.
How ZipLead does it
Enriching a lead reads the business's own pages and names the software it recognizes there, read from the code on the page rather than inferred from the text. The list covers booking and scheduling, field service, payments, online ordering and reservations, chat widgets, and marketing and call tracking tools.
- Named systems on the lead, with the day the page was read.
- Who runs their email, from DNS: Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, or nobody.
- Tell ZipLead what you sell, picking one of five buckets, and the lead reorders itself around what matters to that job and hands you one line to say out loud. For a software seller the software it detected is usually the fact it leads with.
- Save the question as a list so it runs across every search you have done, and export a CSV with 38 columns or push to HubSpot.
What ZipLead does not do here
Every one of these is a real gap rather than a hedge. If one of them is the thing you actually need, ZipLead is the wrong buy for this job and it is cheaper for both of us if you know that now.
- ZipLead recognizes a fixed list of named systems, not everything on the market. A business running something not on that list comes back as nothing detected, which is not the same as nothing installed.
- It reads the business's own website. Software that leaves no trace on a public page, which is most back office and accounting software, is invisible to this.
- Nothing detected is not proof of nothing installed. Treat the absence as unknown rather than as a negative.
- It does not tell you which plan they are on, what they pay, or when their contract renews. None of that is public.
- You cannot search the whole database by software. The detection is a reading on a lead you enriched, so the workflow is to search an area, enrich, then filter, rather than to query for every business in the country using one tool.
Common questions
Can I get a list of every business using a specific software?
Not a complete one, from anybody. A vendor's customer list is not public, and any list you buy is assembled from public traces the same way you would do it by hand. Treat every technographic list as a sample with unknown coverage, including ours.
Which software does ZipLead detect?
A fixed list read off the business's own pages, covering booking and scheduling, field service, payments, online ordering and reservations, chat widgets, and marketing and call tracking tools. The lead names whichever ones it found and the day it looked.
Is it better to target businesses using a competitor or businesses using nothing?
Using a competitor, if you are selling software. They have already proven the category is worth paying for and the sale becomes a comparison. Businesses using nothing need convincing that the category matters at all, which is a longer sale and should be priced like one.
Want to try this on your own ZIP code?
Run a free searchHow to find restaurants without online ordering
Open each restaurant's Google profile and its website and look for an Order Online button, a delivery link, or a menu that ends in a phone number instead of a cart. That takes about a minute per restaurant, and it is more reliable than any automated check, because ordering can live on a third-party app the restaurant's own site never mentions.
How to tell if a local business is running ads
Use the free transparency libraries: Meta publishes an Ad Library covering every active Facebook and Instagram ad, and Google publishes an Ads Transparency Center, and both let you search by advertiser. The faster check at scale is looking for advertising tracking code on the business's own website, which tells you they have set up advertising, though not whether a campaign is running today.
How to find local businesses with an outdated website
Open the site on your phone, not your laptop, and check three objective things: whether it is readable without pinching, whether the address bar shows a security warning, and whether anything on it is dated more than two years ago. Those are facts you can say out loud on a call, unlike "it looks old", which is taste and gets argued with.