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Get access to our community's favorite templates. Clay gives your prospecting superpowers! đ§
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Get access to our community's favorite templates. Clay gives your prospecting superpowers! đ§
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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 donât feel like watching, hereâs a step-by-step below:
- Create a Clay account
- One signed up, click âNew Tableâ and then find the source that youâd like to pull from. Clay can scrape LinkedIn, Twitter, Github, Google, Google Maps, and more!
- Once youâve selected a source, input the parameters that youâd like to apply to your search, This can vary depending on your source, but some common examples are company name, company size, location, a personâs position in a company, or the industry in which a prospect operates.
- From there, you can select how many results youâd like to show. Many searches from a source generate thousands of results, so itâs important to be both concise and to limit how many results youâd like to appear on your table.
- After that, run the operation and prospects will magically populate your table!

Qualifying Your Sales Leads
Once youâve found some potential sales leads, itâs important to make sure theyâre really the person or company that youâre looking for. Â The sales prospecting process really begins here, because you begin to hone in on the customers that will eventually convert. Hereâs how to properly qualify your sales leads:
- 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 donât have previous customer data to analyze, then itâs 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.
- Use Clay to find information about the people on your sales prospect list
Once youâve defined your ICP, itâs 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 canât find information about the prospects youâre hoping to sell to. Clay solves this too with our 50+ enrichments. Hereâs how to use it:
- Go to your sales prospect list, click the â+â sign next to your last column, and select âenrich data.â
- Youâll notice that Clay has enrichments available from 40+ providers. Because of how many options we have, itâs important to figure out what data youâd like to find before going to enrich. For example, if youâd like to find your customerâs company information, there are several enrichments where you can find company size, funding information, and more. Itâs best to know what platform or data provider would be best fit for this as well.
- Once youâve selected a provider, a tab will pop up with a place for you to input your parameters for the enrichment. For example, our âEnrich Companyâ LinkedIn enrichment asks for a profile link. You can also input any conditional formatting if you have a specific parameter youâd like the search to match.
- After inputting your parameters, just click âRunâ!
- 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 Clayâs advanced filters to determine which of your prospects to send to your sales team. Boom, you have some qualified leads!

Find your Prospectsâ Contact Information
So, youâve found new leads. Great! However, you need to figure out how to contact them. Whether youâre planning on cold calling them using sales reps, contacting their social media profile, or sending them an email, itâs 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. Hereâs 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, itâs important to make this determination early in the sales process so you donât 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 prospectâs company. Most potential buyers are going to be decision makers, so you want to get them in front of your salespeople. A sales pitch doesnât do much if the person youâre pitching to canât convert themselves.
- Use Clay to find desired contact information. We have several integrations that allow you to find pretty much any means of contact youâd like, from our in-house âFind Work Emailâ integration to finding a personâs 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, youâve 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. Clayâs 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!
