Ya Can’t Beat Free

One free tool that I’ve been really using a lot lately is Clay.com. It’s entire value proposition is that it connects to tons of other data tools, so you can use all sorts of other tools without paying for them individually.

Each month, you get 100 free clay credits, and you can actually do a ton with that. This tip is good for business owners, marketing people, sales managers, and sales reps, because anyone can do it fairly quickly and easily.

Here are the top three things that I’d recommend using Clay for:

1) Finding target accounts with Google Maps

Clay has a built in Google Maps search tool that hooks to Googles API. This doesn’t cost ANY credits at all, and you can search a target location to grab company data. You can get website, phone number, address, google rating, number of reviews, all for free.

Not too complex, and a pretty powerful way to generate prospect Accounts. You can run the Find Local Businesses query multiple times in one table; I once ran it about 25 times to cover every major metro region in the entire country… 🤤 

Now how can we use this data…

2) Finding a person on LinkedIn, then get their cell phone number

Ok, so we got some companies. Now let’s try to find some people that we want to reach out to. We can use Clay to hunt down people on LinkedIn, and then use their LinkedIn profile to hunt down their cell phone number.

To start this process lets use this very clearly labeled button:

Now we can choose want info we want to hunt for. The cool thing is Clay has an option for you to use a technique called Waterfall Enrichment. This is where they check one data source, and if they do not find a phone number they check a second data source, and if they don’t find a phone they check a third data source. This can eat up the credits more quickly than a single check, but can be worth it if you need to talk to someone.

Ok, so now we have a new table with our people! I’ve done a more limited search on purpose just to show you how this works, but you could do this for hundreds or thousands of records if you wanted to.

You ought to be getting excited now. We can grab a bunch of accounts for free, and find a bunch of people and their info very easily.

It starts to get next level when you learn you can automate a lot of these inputs, so things flow into Clay automatically and all your enrichment workflows happen automatically.

Let’s wrap it up with the final tip…

3) Use AI to do some digging for you

So we have a few contacts who meet the criteria we are looking for and work in the Cincinnati area. What is our angle and our next step?

We can actually connect Clay to ChatGPT and have it visit websites for us, and then analyze those websites. You can use the 100 free Clay credits for this to test it, but if you like it I recommend adding $5 or $10 to your OpenAI developer account and connecting your OpenAI account to Clay, some prompts cost less than a penny to run - that way you can save your clay credits for other things.

Let’s begin!

Now we need to write a good prompt, and be sure to tell the Claygent to visit the company’s website or the contact’s LinkedIn profile to gather information.

I recommend just saving the prompt without running it, because then you can manually run it one row at a time. Then go in and manually run the first row and evaluate the response you got. Usually you’ll want to make some tweaks to your prompt to change the results a bit.

With this data, you can do all sorts of things. You can tell it to look at the contact’s job title and have ChatGPT write and email to them mentioning the three potential pain points we generated.

You can weave this into your cold call script.

I encourage you to play around with this. Clay has a friends sharing link, so get your free profile here (https://clay.com?via=8eda7f), and if you ever upgrade to a paid subscription we both get 3,000 free credits!

Summary

If you are an individual sales rep, you can have a nice little spreadsheet to find mobile phone numbers for you if your company has horrible data.

If you are a business owner, you can use this to get better leads lists for your sales and marketing efforts, and also customize some outreach to them.

These tips are immediately actionable, and I hope they help.

Need help?

If you need help setting this up, you’ve got two options. We can talk and see if it makes sense for me to take you on as a client; where I spend a ton of time, energy, and effort building you a killer sales process. Grab some time on my calendar if you want to learn more: https://outlook.office365.com/owa/calendar/[email protected]/bookings/

Good luck! Let me know how you plan to use Clay!