Automate Manual Prospecting Research

Researching prospects and companies is critical to selling and building relationships more effectively. However, it’s also incredibly tedious and time-consuming, and no one wants to do it.

Luckily, there are ways to automate a significant portion of it with Clay. (It’s one of the reasons people get so excited and one of the compelling reasons why I joined Clay.)

Before building automation, you’ll want to determine what steps to automate. Yash Tekriwal, a fellow GTM Engineer at Clay, gave me a helpful tip to help me figure this out and reduce a lot of trial and error.

Ask yourself 2 questions:

1. What are the most important data points?

2. What manual steps do you take to find those data points on the web?

The steps could be:

1. Go to each company's website.

2. Read about the product or offering.

3. Determine whether or not a company has a specific offering. (For this company, they offer those missing capabilities and it’s easier for them to sell to companies that don’t have it vs. replacing an existing vendor that is providing that capability already.)

You can now use Claygent, an AI Agent within Clay to which you can assign missions. 

In the example below, I wanted to understand whether a company has a community.

I gave it this prompt:

Then it went and checked every website and gave me the following information:

Another example is in the middle column to determine who backed the company. I asked it to search the web and come back with a list of investors.

That’s pretty powerful. The use cases are endless.