How to Build Lead Lists with Clay for Cold Outreach?

Prospecting for sales can feel overwhelming, like looking for a needle in a haystack. 

You spend hours on LinkedIn, Twitter, and websites, gathering bits and pieces about potential leads, but it’s never quite enough. That’s where Clay comes in, transforming this daunting task into a quick, straightforward process. 

Importing and enriching leads from various sources takes just a few minutes with Clay. Even better, Smartlead’s native integration with Clay means you can effortlessly move your leads over and start campaigns. This method not only saves you time but also lets you focus on what really matters: closing deals. 

In this blog post, learn how to build your lead lists for successful cold email outreach easily.

How to Build Lead Lists with Clay for Cold Outreach? 

Finding sales leads can often feel like searching for a diamond in the rough. While platforms like Crunchbase and ZoomInfo offer a wealth of company data, digging through them is hardly quick or easy. 

Enter Clay, a tool that transforms this arduous task into something you can accomplish in mere minutes. Forget about the endless cycle of searching for prospects and transferring their details into a spreadsheet. Clay does the heavy lifting for you, pulling data from multiple web sources based on your specific criteria and automatically organizing it into a neat spreadsheet. Here’s a simple guide to build high-quality lead list with Clay:

1. Start by creating an account with Clay.
2. Once you're in, hit “New Table” and choose your data source. Clay allows you to fetch data from LinkedIn, Twitter, Github, Google, Google Maps, and beyond.

3. Next, set your search parameters. These might include the company's name, size, location, the role of the person you're targeting, or the industry they're in.

4. Decide on the number of results you want. Remember, more isn’t always better; the key is refining your search to generate a manageable list.
5. Hit run, and watch as Clay fills your table with potential leads, ready for you to reach out to.

This streamlined process is all about making lead generation as painless as possible, giving you more time to focus on crafting those perfect cold emails. 

How to Qualify Your Sales Leads for Targeted Sales Outreach? 

After identifying potential sales leads, the next critical step is ensuring they align with who you're aiming to reach. This phase is where true sales prospecting begins, as it narrows down your focus to those who are most likely to become valuable customers. Here's a streamlined approach to effectively qualify your sales leads:

Identify Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

First and foremost, understand the characteristics of your ideal customer. This involves creating an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), a blueprint that outlines the specific demographic, geographic, and psychographic traits of your target market.
If you're new to customer acquisition or still figuring out who your ICP is, start broad based on industry research and refine as you learn more about your market. Recognizing your ICP's pain points is crucial since your solutions are designed to address these issues.

Leverage Clay for Lead Information

With your ICP in hand, compare your sales prospects against this profile. This can be challenging if you lack detailed information about your leads. This is where Clay's enrichment feature becomes invaluable, offering access to detailed data from over 50 sources. Here's how to use it:

1. Navigate to your prospect list in Clay and click the “+” next to the last column to select “enrich data.”

2. Clay offers enrichment from more than 40 providers, so choose the one that best fits the type of information you need, such as company size or funding details.
3. After selecting a provider, you'll enter your search criteria in the provided tab. For instance, the LinkedIn “Enrich Company” option requires a profile link. You can also apply conditional formatting for more targeted searches.
4. Simply click “Run” to activate the enrichment process.

Upon completion, you can review the enriched data directly within your results. This enables you to map out key information on your spreadsheet.

Qualify and Filter Your Leads 

With enriched data at your fingertips, utilize Clay's sophisticated filtering tools to sift through the information and decide which prospects should advance to your sales team. This process ensures you're only focusing on leads that match your ICP, making your outreach efforts more targeted and effective.

Following these steps can transform a pool of potential contacts into a list of qualified leads ready for targeted sales outreach. 

Gathering Contact Details for Your Leads

Congratulations on identifying new leads! The next crucial step is figuring out how to reach them. Whether it’s through direct calls by your sales team, engaging via social media, or crafting personalized emails, choosing the right communication method is key to making that initial successful contact. 

This part of the sales journey can be challenging, particularly without the right resources. Without direct customer referrals, leveraging cold outreach strategies is essential to fostering customer relationships. Thankfully, Clay offers solutions for this challenge as well.

Clay streamlines the process of obtaining contact information, including work and personal emails, phone numbers, and social media profiles of essential contacts within your target companies. By tapping into a variety of integrations, Clay not only speeds up the sales cycle but also provides valuable contact details that propel you closer to a sale. Here’s your action plan:

1. Determine the Most Effective Contact Method

The preferred outreach strategy varies by industry. While some businesses find more success with phone calls, others might benefit from initiating contact through email campaigns. New businesses must identify the most effective communication channel early on to maximize potential conversions. Exploring common sales tools within your industry, such as Salesforce, can offer insights into effective outreach strategies. Our BuiltWith integration can assist in this discovery process.

2. Identify Key Decision Makers

Although you might have started this process earlier, pinpointing the top decision-makers within a prospect’s company is vital. These are the individuals with the power to make purchasing decisions, so ensuring they're the focus of your outreach is essential. A compelling sales pitch is only effective if it reaches someone capable of making a commitment.

3. Leverage Clay for Contact Information

Clay’s vast array of integrations enables you to find nearly any type of contact information you need, whether that’s through our “Find Work Email” feature or by identifying social media profiles. The process for utilizing these integrations follows the same steps as those for lead qualification.

The Smartlead & Clay Integration: Making Personalized Outreach Easier

Clay is cloud-based software designed to help you build lead lists, enrich lead information (by leveraging over 50 data sources and real-time web scraping), and create highly personalized cold emails for your outreach campaigns. Tailoring each email to its recipient can be a difficult task, and frankly, it's hard to do on a large scale. That's where Smartlead comes in, joining forces with Clay to streamline your cold emailing process.

Due to this native integration, you can now build lead lists with Clay and directly start a Smartlead campaign. 

Connect Clay with Smartlead 

How to Connect Clay with Smartlead? 

Step 1

Click on the “Integrations” tab from your Smartlead App dashboard. 

Step 2

Hover over “Clay” and click on “Connect App”. You will be redirected to another tab where you have to login to your existing Clay account. But before moving forward, follow the next step. 

Step 3

Hover to the top right corner, and click on the drop-down arrow on the profile icon. Click on Settings. 

Now, copy your Smartlead API Key. Just click on the copy button.

Step 4

Now, open your Clay account and click on “Workspace Settings” on the side bar of the dashboard.  

Step 5

Under the “Integrations” section, scroll down, click on Smartlead.ai. 

Click on Add an Account and input your Smartlead API Key (that you’ve copied from your Smartlead account). You can see we already have an account connected to Clay. 

Once you’ve pasted the API key, click on Authenticate, and you are ready to go. 

Start a Smartlead Campaign with a Scraped lead List from Clay

Once you have enriched your lead list, click on the drop-down menu “Actions” and click on “Create Smartlead campaign.” 

Now, fill in the necessary details for the campaign and click on Ok. 

Additional Resources

1. Check out how you can iterate through different prompts, demonstrated by Clay.com engineer Tess Bianchi. 
2. AI Messaging with AI with Clay x Smartlead: an end-to-end process. 
3. Check out the Clay guide on using AI Personalization for emails. 
4. If you are still trying to figure out AI for sales emails, read this.