The Sales Kiln

Clay's "Enrich Person from LinkedIn Profile" integration allows users to extract valuable information from LinkedIn profiles, such as emails, company info, and keywords. This data can be mapped to a Clay Table for client outreach, personalization, and more.

If you want to scrape headcount and other company data from LinkedIn, Clay's Enrich Company with LinkedIn integration allows you to retrieve information such as company size, location, description, employee count, followers count, and founded date. This feature may be slow, especially if data hasn't been refreshed in over 45 days.

If you want to scrape your company's LinkedIn followers, the Integrations Page provides a step-by-step guide using the Clay Chrome Extension. Learn how to access the LinkedIn company page, create a Clay table, and enrich the data for better insights.

If you want to scrape LinkedIn handles, Clay's "Enrich Person from LinkedIn Profile" feature allows users to extract valuable information from a person's LinkedIn profile, such as their full name, job title, location, and more. This data can be used for client outreach and personalization. Learn more on the Integrations Page.

Clay's Find Mobile Number integration allows users to extract and enrich prospect data, including mobile numbers, using LinkedIn URL input. This valuable information can be used to enhance prospective client strategies.

If you want to scrape LinkedIn Profile URL, the Enrich Person from LinkedIn Profile integration allows users to extract valuable information like emails, company info, and more. This data can be mapped to a Clay Table for client outreach and personalization purposes.

If you want to scrape Headcount Growth, the Clay integration uses LinkedIn data to track employee growth within companies. Users can enter a company's LinkedIn URL for detailed reports on employee counts and growth rates, providing valuable insight into a company's performance.

If you want to scrape emails and other valuable information from LinkedIn profiles, Clay's Enrich Person from LinkedIn Profile feature is the perfect solution. This feature allows users to extract data for client outreach, personalization, and more.

‍

If you want to scrape Recent Posts from LinkedIn users, the Integrations Page provides information about the "Find Recent LinkedIn Posts for User" integration, data inputs, and returned data. It also offers video tutorials and resources for using Clay and its features.

‍70% of sales professionals agree that AI tools will make them more productive — but how do you make sure your team cashes in on that sales performance boost? AI sales assistants are increasingly playing an integral role in B2B sales teams: they can help find, research, and reach out to leads faster and in a more personalized way than ever.

Many of the repetitive and mundane tasks in sales can be automated with AI, whether that means automation, ChatGPT, an AI agent, or AI sales assistant software. With each new tool that enters the market, the configurations for your tech stack can seem more and more complicated.

In this blog post, we’ll share 11 easy, concrete ways that an AI sales assistant can accelerate your team's performance to maximize your growth. 

If you want to scrape jobs, the Clay website offers a guide on using Clay's Chrome Extension to scrape LinkedIn job postings, apply advanced filters, and utilize AI-powered summaries for job descriptions.

How can you double your positive replies and meetings booked—with half your sales team? 

Mehak Batra, the co-founder of Qrew, a recruiting software company, figured it out with Clay.

Before using Clay, Qrew’s sales team was spending hours finding, qualifying and researching potential prospects. Their process was slow—and their emails were unpersonalized.

It wasn’t their fault. Even his fastest and most skilled SDRs had to manually look at LinkedIn posts and company descriptions before they could even think of writing cold emails or phone calls. That left no time for writing personalized emails. 

One SDR focused purely on research: coming up with a company list, looking up the CEO, seeing if they did anything interesting online. Unpersonalized messages, of course, meant low response rates. 

“Our ICP is companies that are under 50 employees that don’t have a recruiting or an HR team. There are quite a few of these, and we wanted to personalize based on who they were and what they did—but we simply didn’t have the bandwidth to manually personalize emails,” Mehak said.

“As a result, we were just sort of spraying and praying and hoping to kind of get someone at a good time. It was a whole bunch of outbound emails going out with minimal results.”

One day, as Mehak was scrolling through LinkedIn, he came across a post from our own Eric Nowoslawski featuring workflows he was creating in Clay. 

At first, he was skeptical. He’d used many tools before that promised a fully automated outbound flow, but delivered limited results. However, he eventually decided to try Clay.

Fast-forward to now, and his sales team is half the size and generating around double the positive responses from their outreach campaigns. 

Venture capital is a business that lives and dies by networks—and having a living, breathing updated CRM lies at the heart of the challenge. When your CRM has over 220k contacts in it, however, keeping it enriched and updated is a challenge.

“Our CRM is a critical source of truth for us,” says Ryan Donnan, the Director of IT at First Round. “We use it to matchmake our founders with customers, to find experts to help with diligence, and more.”

“Having an updated, accurate CRM drives actual monetary value to our portfolio companies. But keeping our CRM updated was nearly impossible before Clay.” 

In this case study, we’ll share how First Round uses Clay to research each of their CRM contacts in detail—and make sure everything stays up-to-date. 

‍

Getting your cold email setup right is crucial for any business relying on sales from cold email outreach. Even if your product and copywriting are stellar, neglecting your domains and inbox setup can lead to serious deliverability issues that will tank your campaigns.

There are many components to consider in your cold email setup, including buying domains, setting up inboxes, configuring tracking, etc. In this comprehensive guide, we'll walk through everything you need to know to set up your cold emails to reach the inbox. 

We’ll go through the basic process of multiple domains and inboxes for cold email setup, as well as powerful, never-before-seen automations. We'll also troubleshoot common cold email deliverability issues so you can resolve problems before they impact your sender reputation and land your cold emails in the spam folder.

Cold email copywriting done right can transform your business—and your life. A well-executed cold email can help you land new customers, candidate employees, or partnerships with influential people you’ve never even met.

The actual email that lands in your reader’s inbox is the tip of the iceberg. Behind every effective B2B cold email is a deep understanding of the writer’s business and the reader’s problems—and how to connect them seamlessly.

Cold email copywriting can seem like a mysterious dark art, but we’re here to break it down. (Once you’ve figured out the fundamentals, you can use AI to accelerate your research and writing process.)

In this post, we’ll teach you everything we know about cold email copywriting, stemming from our background as cold outreach specialists who send more than 800k emails a month. Our cold emails have landed countless future customers and gotten responses from Fortune 500 CEOs, NYT bestselling authors, and famous founders and investors.

Using AI for B2B lead generation can help you turn one person into your company’s entire lead generation engine—and get more responses and conversions than ever.

Sales and marketing teams invest huge amounts of time and money into B2B lead generation, or the process of finding and nurturing potential customers. Robust lead generation is a make-or-break skill for any business. In the AI era, there are no more excuses for wasting resources on mediocre research or outreach.

In this guide, we’re going to show you how to use AI-powered workflows to scale your most creative, effective outbound ideas. These core skills can help you land more customers, whether you’re a solo founder, sales team, or growth agency owner. 

We’ll cover topics including how to: 

• Understand B2B lead generation fundamentals
• Set up powerful AI lead generation software
• Build lead lists that fit your ideal customer profile with AI
• Enrich leads with detailed AI-powered insights
• Write personalized cold emails with AI
• Structure an AI lead generation team
• And more!

At Clay, we use AI lead generation to automate the process of finding leads, enriching them, and sending them personalized cold emails at scale. Using AI in our B2B lead generation process has helped 2-3x response rates and conversions across the 800k+ cold emails we sent each month.

Let’s get started—feel free to skip ahead to the sections that are most relevant to you! 

Finding and using the best B2B email list providers is crucial for any sales team’s success. Accurate email data is the bedrock of cold outreach, and using bad data risks hurting a company’s deliverability and brand.

In today’s crowded marketplace of B2B email list providers, however, it’s difficult to discern who offers the best email data. We decided to run a test across eight of the top providers on the market to see for ourselves. In this blog post, we pit Findymail, Snov, Nymblr, Datagma, Drop Contact, Hunter, Prospeo, and People Data Labs head-to-head to see whose data is the most accurate.

In this post, we’ll share our ranking methodology and results, explaining each provider’s unique strengths and pricing. We’ll also share behind-the-scenes insights on how email list providers acquire and validate work email data to help you understand variance in quality across providers.

Rankings aside, no one email list provider can do it all. Instead of picking a single provider from our list, the best strategy is to use all of them in a waterfall. (First submit your data to Provider A, getting a set of emails. Feed the remainder to Provider B, and continue cascading.). You can easily waterfall all these email list providers on Clay, paying only for the emails you get.

Early to mid-sized sales teams often drop the ball on their inbound leads. Some teams waste hours with bad-fit prospects; others lose customers on dead spreadsheets.

This guide contains our advice on researching inbound leads, scoring them, and assigning them to different automatic email campaigns. All you need is Clay and a CRM! Everything below is based on our experience building an inbound lead engine that nets dozens of leads a day.

Hi friends. We are excited to launch the second generation of Clay’s pricing plan! In this piece, we’ll go through our changes and share a behind-the-scenes look at our internal deliberation process.

Following up with sales prospects is one of the most important—and difficult—tasks for any salesperson to get right. Outstanding follow-ups can help you stand out strongly from other salespeople that use automated emails and undifferentiated copy. In this article, I’ll go over how to follow-up with prospects effectively and creatively, including many detailed examples from my past experience.

‍

‍

‍

‍

When you are personalizing cold emails for a prospect, there is a spectrum of value you can show. The most valuable personalizations communicate a simple but powerful message: “I know you have this problem because I did the research—and here’s how I would fix it.”

The worst personalizations are just attention hacks: snippets that make someone feel like you’re sending them a 1:1 email but add zero value. If your personalizations have nothing to do with the problem you’re solving, they are attention hacks. Use these sparingly! Attention hacks can work well for industries that aren’t bombarded by cold email warriors daily. However, they can kill the value of your messages for SaaS or e-commerce companies by revealing that you’re using automation—yielding nothing but eye rolls.

‍

I’m Avery, the CEO of Candid Wholesale, a B2B platform for businesses that sell products wholesale. Using Clay transformed our sales motion from a time intensive, manual, and error-prone process to a fast and streamlined process that took much less SDR time and training. In this post and video, I go through it step by step.

‍

I run sales at ChatMetrics, a 24/7 managed live chat software service. We sell to mid-sized software companies, helping businesses communicate with website visitors and improve their lead conversion rates. In this post, I’m going to describe how our team has used Clay to completely eliminate the need for sales development representatives and hours of manual work. Watch this video interview, done with Clay’s Eric Nowoslawski, to learn more!

‍

My company, IntroCRM, is a fractional sales agency that helps small sales teams excel with email deliverability, list building, and messaging. Clay is a critical part of how we help our customers generate, qualify, and book time with leads. In this blog post, I’m going to describe our life before Clay, why and how we use it today, and show you an example of a creative prospecting campaign that we ran for a client.

In this post, we’ll go over how we automated six different outbound cold email campaigns using a single Clay table. Follow along step-by-step in our video.

In this campaign, we were selling sales engagement tools to marketing leaders in American B2B companies with under 100 employees. At a high level, we started with just a broad list of prospects’ names and emails from Apollo. From there, we used Clay to sort prospects into the following buckets: management consulting, recruiting, or financial services.

‍

Nailing your outbound sales and prospecting process can help you generate leads, acquire customers, and drive revenue growth. In this guide, we’ll share a step-by-step approach to troubleshooting each stage of your outbound sales campaign—whether you’re a new sales professional or a seasoned team leader.

We’ll cover how to check early campaigns, identify quality prospects, analyze insights from metrics, double down on well-performing sequences, and more, with detailed examples from our own experiences. You can use the table of contents to easily navigate to the areas that are most relevant to you.

When it comes to B2B sales, one of the biggest challenges is identifying potential customers and transforming them into qualified leads. However, by utilizing effective sales prospecting methods and tools, you can achieve more conversions and grow your business. In this ultimate guide to B2B sales prospecting, we'll delve into the most effective techniques, tools, and strategies to help you generate more quality leads, build a strong sales pipeline, and close more deals.

‍

Sales prospecting efforts can be a time-consuming and challenging task for any business. Finding the right prospects and gathering the necessary information to approach them can often feel like searching for a needle in a haystack. You may spend hours scouring various sources such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and company websites, only to come up with a fragmented and incomplete picture of your potential customers. The process of aggregating this information and organizing it into a usable format can take even more time and effort. However, what if we told you that you could create a sales prospecting list in just a few minutes? With Clay, an in-depth  sales prospecting tool, you can quickly and easily import prospects from multiple sources and enrich them with valuable information. You can also export this data to your preferred platform such as a CRM, saving you time and allowing you to focus on what you do best - closing deals!

‍

In today's fast-paced and highly competitive business landscape, it's more important than ever to have a solid sales strategy in place. While inbound sales and social media marketing can be effective in attracting potential customers, outbound sales is still a crucial component of any successful sales plan. Outbound sales refers to the process of actively reaching out to potential customers through methods such as cold calling, email marketing, and cold outreach. In this blog post, we'll explore the benefits of outbound sales, the types of businesses that can benefit from it, and how to execute a successful outbound sales strategy.

Open AI has taken the world by storm with their generative image and text capabilities. The use cases in Sales and Marketing seems almost infinite. From coming up with ideas, writing customer facing copywriting, and automating customer support, every business can leverage AI in some way to boost their productivity.

The ‘job to be done’ for us is to prompt AI correctly to give better answers than what a person could write on their own.

I like to say, “Open AI is wildly powerful but it’s like a five year old at a bowling alley. On their own, the odds of getting a strike are zero. With bumpers, bowling ball ramp and some heavy direction, they can get a strike every time.”

When creating your own prompts, remember to be specific and feed as many details and examples into the data as you can.

Why should you do outbound sales?

You need to prove/disprove your hypothesis about the market.

Outbound sales is beneficial if you have hypotheses but need more certainty about who must have your product and why. It enables you to quickly create, test, and validate these hypotheses with real potential customers.

You get more control than you would with marketing.

Marketing allows you to get content in front of groups of people, but you have far less control over the exact people who will see it. In contrast, outbound sales allows you to pick the specific people that you want to target. This level of control removes the uncertainty of "did the people I want to test this with actually see my message?"

‍

When building a Clay table, the sources, integrations, and CRM plugins can accomplish the goals of most users. Sometimes, there is a need for some data merging, splitting, or otherwise clean up that is needed in your table. This is where you can use Formulas to accomplish your goals!

In this blog, we are going to first go over how to think about formulas using the AI formula generator and then we will go over common formulas that you can write yourself in your Clay table.

Clay is a spreadsheet that fills itself with data from many data providers across the internet. We partner with data providers on your behalf to bring lots of different data sources — like job listings, tech stacks, news and more — into your workflows.

In this blog, we will go over a couple of functions in Clay that can will help you optimize your credit usage in Clay. There are many ways to optimize credit usage in Clay that the team has built into the product that we will go over in this blog. We will cover formulas that optimize your workflows and some features that are often overlooked that can help keep your credit usage down.

Here are 3 ways to optimize your Clay credit usage

Getting started with Google's Search Operator to creatively find new leads

Welcome to the second post in our series on how to use formulas in Clay!  We’re going to walk you through prioritizing your lead list using scoring formulas in Clay 🌶️

Ever wanted to learn formulas in Clay but didn't know where to start? Join the club. Just kidding. Read this and you'll be well on your way to mastering the basics of formulas.

Ever wondered how many people use spreadsheets? Some estimates say around 800 million people use Microsoft Excel, and another 160–180 million use Google Sheets. Not bad for a tool that started as a basic visual calculator.

Does using AI to write cold emails work? After sending close to a million cold emails using AI, we can confidently say yes — but only if you know how to do it right.

AI for sales isn’t a magic wand. To be successful with AI, you need to learn when to use it (hint: for chunks of emails, not full emails!) and how to prompt well. That’s what we’ll focus on in this guide.

We’ll cover:
• A framework for creating AI prompts for any use case you can dream up
• basic & advanced AI prompting frameworks
• 16+ case studies and prompt templates from our own experience

Our results speak for themselves: AI has saved our sales team hundreds of manual research hours—and doubled or tripled positive response rates. The time savings alone is worth the investment in the learning.

Sales teams have already used this guide to set up campaigns and land meetings in a matter of hours. With this guide, you can quickly get ahead of the curve and uplevel your outbound motion using AI.