Clay (Free): to track news mentions, find contacts, and draft outbound messages
Buyers don't always raise their hand. But they do make the news.
This Claybook helps you spot urgent intent signals—like data breaches, new product launches, fundraising, and leadership changes—before your competitors do so you can reach out with context, timing, and a reason to talk.
Find companies in the news, qualify the story with AI, identify the right contacts, and send personalized outreach while the pain is fresh. No scraping, no digging, no waiting.
How it works:
- Add company domains you want to monitor
- Pull in fresh news mentions using Clay’s “News & Fundraising” signals
- Use Claygent to filter mentions for specific topics (e.g. breaches)
- Find high-fit contacts (e.g. Heads of Security, IT, RevOps)
- Auto-draft personalized messages that reference the news
- Push to Slack, CRM, or your sequencer of choice
Steps
Copy this template
First, copy this template in Clay.
If you’re already a user, you’ll be directed to your workspace. If not, you’ll be prompted to create a free Clay account.
The interactive demos on the right will walk you through each step of this Claybook.
Step 2:
Import news and events from target companies
This workbook comes with two tables: the first table is for inputting company names that you want to monitor; the second table is where the actual news stories will live, along with any other actions (e.g. Claygent prompts, Slack notifications, CRM lookups, etc.)
To make this Claybook work for you, start by adding a list of company URLs to the first table, then adding the “News & Fundraising” action from the action dropdown (see demo). This will create a new “second” table for you. Now you can copy over any additional action columns from the original second table to this one.
Step 3:
Customize Claygent prompt to filter mentions
Next, since we’re importing news from several different topics, we use a Claygent (Clay’s AI research agent) to filter news articles to only those that mention data breaches and information leaks. You can remove this column altogether, or you can update the prompt to help you zoom in on a specific type of news mention.
For example, say you only import security breach and vulnerability news mentions, but you want to find a specific type of security breach or vulnerability. Use Claygent to help you analyze the news article and find it.
Step 4:
Find contacts at high-fit companies mentioned in news
Next, we’re going to find senior leaders in IT and security at companies that appeared in recent news for data breaches and information leaks (i.e. high-fit, high-need companies and contacts for our hypothetical cybersecurity software).
Customize the find contact criteria to fit your needs.
Step 5:
Customize outreach AI prompt
Last, customize the Anthropic (Claude) prompt that drafts a personalized outbound message so it fits your business, industry, and preferences.
What else? Endless opportunities. You can automate contacts to your sequencer, stack additional signals like job changes or tech stack changes, or find work emails—all natively through Clay.
Copy the template
Start using news signals to find high-fit, high-need companies and contacts.
Simply copy this template, follow the steps above, and let Clay work its magic.
Learn with our resources
Check out Clay University, read our GTM blog, or try out our top templates to transform your growth ideas into outreach in minutes.
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