Sales Prospecting: Finding your next customer with Clay

Sales prospecting is difficult if you're relying on the same tools as every other salesperson. Most teams subscribe to a single data source and only have the data made available to them through that tool.

What if there were a better way? Now there is, with Clay. 

Clay helps you find your next customer by stitching across multiple data sources to build better lists.

In this video, Harris shows a list he built for a prospective client in just a few minutes.

We took one ideal customer, scraped their investors' website for comparable portfolio companies, and then enriched the list to find another company that they're likely to work with next.

In this example, we use web scraping, LinkedIn, and BuiltWith to build this custom list.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Harris Kenny: Hey everybody. I recently posted about a tool that I'm using called Clay. I'm just getting the hang of it, but I had a call with a prospect and I built a sample worksheet for them, and I thought I would share it to show why I'm excited about this tool. The short version is that I'm gonna show you in this video how Clay allows you to work across data sets.

[00:00:18] Harris Kenny: So the way a lot of sales people and marketing teams work today is they're subscribing to single data providers and then building campaigns based on demographics. W really restricted to the type of data that's available within the platform that they're using. Clay changes that Clay allows you to be a customer of multi data providers and build some really unique lists based on that.

[00:00:42] Harris Kenny: Let's jump in. The prospect I talked to, they are a video service provider. They had a single project that went particularly well and they wanna find more clients. The customer that they helped is a VC backed startup. So what we did is we used the Clay Chrome extension and we went to the VC firm's website and we scraped all their portfolio companies.

[00:01:08] Harris Kenny: Now, all we got from this website initially was a list of domains. This is where Clay shows what it can do because we're able to tap, in this case, LinkedIn and built with, to get a sort of composite look at a few specific companies that are a. Using LinkedIn, we're able to enrich based on this domain value that we have here in the first column.

[00:01:33] Harris Kenny: And this is an example of what that match looks like. We're pulling the computer software industry, for example, here with Actuate and their employee count. Um, but we've got 76 companies here and we're doing this at scale, right? So you're not paying an individual person to do this on Upwork or you're not doing it yourself.

[00:01:52] Harris Kenny: You, you can do this. A thousand rows, 10,000 rows. And now that we've got their LinkedIn profile and we've got some basics that we're gonna use later for personalization, we've also got the ability to search within the profile some particularly interesting information. Now I'm gonna switch over to a filtered view here where we're just looking at the prospects that are the most interesting.

[00:02:11] Harris Kenny: And so I'm gonna pick this one example here. We're matching for job titles of founder, co-founder, ceo, owner, and we've gotta match. This is a LinkedIn profile of that executive level decision maker that we could potentially get a referral into. We've got a secondary search where we're looking at people in marketing or creative roles, and we've got two matches there.

[00:02:36] Harris Kenny: There's two employees that fit that job function. And then lastly, we're looking to see are these companies that invest in video or host video in some form on their site. And so we're using built with. To check if there are video player or video analytics tools on the websites of the prospects that we're looking at in the first place.

[00:02:59] Harris Kenny: So tying it all together, what we've got here is a list of portfolio company contacts, suggested executive decision makers, and then you can determine how big the company is and how much they're investing in marketing or not based on marketing head count. And you can also. Know that they're using video in some way.

[00:03:19] Harris Kenny: And so there's a number of different hypotheses that you could test on this just with this small sample size, including references around the company's industry. And you can pull a lot of other personalization traits into a potential sequence. But if I'm this company and I'm starting with one customer and I wanna go find another, I think the odds are pretty good.

[00:03:39] Harris Kenny: If a company meets all these requirements that there's a second or a third customer here on this list of 22, and I'll just say backing into it, the customer they helped in the first place who's really happy is actually on this list and meets multiple criteria that we talked about, including they've got, you know, an identified executive founder and they've got a marketer on the team and they're embedding video content.

[00:04:02] Harris Kenny: So I think that if I'm that company, probably gonna get my second customer from this portfolio. Through a project like this, let me know what you think. I'm new to Clay. I would love to know what questions you would want to ask based on this, and if you're using the tool. I would love to know what I missed and what I could do better, because I'm still getting the hang of it.

[00:04:18] Harris Kenny: All right. Thanks for watching.