Weekly AI Tools: Clay Takes Some of the Work Out of Finding Customers

For a small business trying to grow, sales prospecting can be surprisingly time consuming. It can mean searching for companies, looking for the right contact, checking whether they are a potential customer and keeping all that information in a spreadsheet. Do that every week and it becomes a job in itself.

Clay is aimed at that part of the process.

The platform combines prospecting and company research tools, allowing businesses to search for potential customers and gather information about them before making contact.

Finding companies that fit

The starting point is the type of customer a business wants. A recruitment company may be looking for businesses that are hiring. An IT provider might want to find companies that have grown quickly but have small technology teams. 

A marketing agency could be looking for businesses that have recently launched a new product. Clay can be used to build prospect lists around those requirements. That gives a salesperson somewhere to start rather than spending hours jumping between company websites and search results.

Then comes the research

A company name is not enough. Before contacting a potential customer, there is usually some basic research to do. What does the company actually do? How large is it? Who should be contacted? Is there anything happening at the business that makes the timing of the approach relevant?

Clay can pull together information from different sources to help answer some of those questions. The salesperson still has to decide whether the company is worth pursuing, but the research does not necessarily have to start from scratch.

AI is part of the process

Clay also uses AI to work with the information collected during prospecting. Businesses can use it to analyse prospect data, find companies that match particular requirements and prepare information for outreach.

That can be useful when a sales team is dealing with a large number of prospects. But there is a limit to what the software can do. A poorly targeted sales message is still a poorly targeted sales message, even if an AI tool helped write it.

The small-business problem

This is where Clay is perhaps more interesting for smaller companies. A business with a large sales department can have people whose entire job is finding and qualifying prospects. A five person company probably cannot.

The founder might be doing sales between other responsibilities. One employee may be handling sales, marketing and customer support at the same time. Reducing some of the manual prospecting work could make a difference in that situation.

It also means the business can spend less time maintaining lists and more time deciding which prospects are actually worth approaching.

Check the information

There is still some housekeeping involved. Business information changes. Employees move to new companies. Contact details become outdated and a company that looked like a good prospect six months ago may no longer fit. That means businesses should check important information before relying on it for an outreach campaign. Clay can make prospecting faster, but it does not remove the need for someone to know the market and understand the customer.

A different use of AI

Much of the conversation around AI tools for small businesses has focused on writing, images and chatbots. Clay sits somewhere else. Its use is closer to the work that happens behind a sales call  finding companies, researching them and deciding who might be worth contacting. For a small business that spends too much time doing that work manually, that is the part worth testing.