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!

Finding Potential Sales Candidates

One of the hardest parts of finding sales candidates is finding a source of potential sales leads to qualify. Of course, there are platforms such as Crunchbase and ZoomInfo with company data for you to peruse through, but this process is tedious and time-consuming.

With Clay, this process can be squished down into a few-minute ordeal. Instead of having to manually find each prospect and copy their info into a spreadsheet, Clay scrapes multiple web sources to find the prospects that meet your parameters, which then populate into a spreadsheet. Here are some videos on how to do it, but if you don’t feel like watching, here’s a step-by-step below:

1. Create a Clay account
2. One signed up, click “New Table” and then find the source that you’d like to pull from. Clay can scrape LinkedIn, Twitter, Github, Google, Google Maps, and more!
3. Once you’ve selected a source, input the parameters that you’d like to apply to your search, This can vary depending on your source, but some common examples are company name, company size, location, a person’s position in a company, or the industry in which a prospect operates.
4. From there, you can select how many results you’d like to show. Many searches from a source generate thousands of results, so it’s important to be both concise and to limit how many results you’d like to appear on your table.
5. After that, run the operation and prospects will magically populate your table!

Qualifying Your Sales Leads

Once you’ve found some potential sales leads, it’s important to make sure they’re really the person or company that you’re looking for.  The sales prospecting process really begins here, because you begin to hone in on the customers that will eventually convert. Here’s how to properly qualify your sales leads:

1. Define Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

Making sure a sales prospect fits your ideal customer profile (ICP) is imperative to successful outbound outreach. Having a buyer persona in mind can immediately make this process easier. You may not even know what your ICP is yet- this is often the case with companies just beginning to find customers and generate revenue.

A good ICP contains three different aspects - demographic, geographic, and psychographic attributes. These three things define the entire process of finding new prospects. If you don’t have previous customer data to analyze, then it’s important to do research about your industry to define a broader, beginner ICP that you can later refine. People in your ICP have pain points that you, as a company that provides value, can alleviate.

2. Use Clay to find information about the people on your sales prospect list

Once you’ve defined your ICP, it’s now time to figure out whether the people and companies on your prospect list matches your ideal customer profile. However, a problem can arise if you can’t find information about the prospects you’re hoping to sell to. Clay solves this too with our 50+ enrichments. Here’s how to use it:

• Go to your sales prospect list, click the “+” sign next to your last column, and select “enrich data.”
• You’ll notice that Clay has enrichments available from 40+ providers. Because of how many options we have, it’s important to figure out what data you’d like to find before going to enrich. For example, if you’d like to find your customer’s company information, there are several enrichments where you can find company size, funding information, and more. It’s best to know what platform or data provider would be best fit for this as well.
• Once you’ve selected a provider, a tab will pop up with a place for you to input your parameters for the enrichment. For example, our “Enrich Company” LinkedIn enrichment asks for a profile link. You can also input any conditional formatting if you have a specific parameter you’d like the search to match.
• After inputting your parameters, just click “Run”!
• If you click on any result run by the integration, you can see more data that the enrichment has found. You can map any significant data out to your table.

From there, you can sort through your data using Clay’s advanced filters to determine which of your prospects to send to your sales team. Boom, you have some qualified leads!

Find your Prospects’ Contact Information

So, you’ve found new leads. Great! However, you need to figure out how to contact them. Whether you’re planning on cold calling them using sales reps, contacting their social media profile, or sending them an email, it’s important to find the right people to contact, using the right methods.

This stage of the sales process can be one of the more difficult ones, especially without the right tools. Without existing customers or referrals, you need to find methods of cold outreach so you can start building some kind of customer relationship. Fortunately, Clay can do this too.

Clay can help find work emails, personal emails, phone numbers, and social media accounts of key decision makers using some of our dozens of integrations. We help expedite the sales process by moving you further down the sales funnel via actionable contact info. Here’s how to do it:

• Figure out which method of contact is best for your industry. For some companies, a phone call may be the best form of outreach; for others, it could be creating some email templates for a cold email campaign. For a new business, it’s important to make this determination early in the sales process so you don’t miss out on any conversions. A way to figure this out is finding what sales tools companies use. You can figure out whether a company is using tools like Salesforce using our BuiltWith integration.
• Find decision makers. You may have already done this in the early stages of our process, but if not, you can use company enrichments to find the head honcho of your prospect’s company. Most potential buyers are going to be decision makers, so you want to get them in front of your salespeople. A sales pitch doesn’t do much if the person you’re pitching to can’t convert themselves.
• Use Clay to find desired contact information. We have several integrations that allow you to find pretty much any means of contact you’d like, from our in-house “Find Work Email” integration to finding a person’s social media accounts, at scale. The steps to using these integrations are the same as they were for qualifying leads.

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Just like that, you’ve got a list with qualified sales leads and their contact information, all in one place! Lead generation has been taken care of, and you can focus on other aspects of your business. Clay’s sales automation in your b2b sales pipeline can save you time and increase conversion rate.

If you need help on other sales prospecting techniques or other parts of the sales cycle, check out our other blog posts on how to get prospects pouring through the floodgates.

For pricing or any other questions, feel free to contact us here!