<aside> 💡 Your prospecting tech stack needs to do five things: find leads, verify emails, enrich leads & craft personalized messaging, send personalized emails, and track conversations.
You can accomplish all of this Clay + an email sending tool + a CRM. Let’s go through each part.
</aside>
The first part of your outbound prospecting will be using a data provider to find a list of leads with associated emails, and possibly also LinkedIn URLs or phone numbers.
Data providers like Apollo, Seamless, and LeadIQ scrape LinkedIn and work well for prospecting to online businesses. Google Maps scrapers, like Outscraper or Leadfinder, are better for selling to local businesses.
Instead of subscribing to various individual providers, you can use Clay to access all of them. This includes data providers that are typically too expensive for small businesses, like People Data Labs, PredictLeads, Owler, or Builtwith, some of which have starting subscriptions at hundreds of dollars a month.
Once you have a list of emails, you need to verify that they are valid addresses before using them in campaigns. Sending emails to invalid addresses that bounce will hurt your deliverability and make you more likely to be marked as spam.
Common tools for verifying emails Debounce, Zerobounce, Clearout, and Email List Validation. Debounce and Clearout have the best prices per credit. Email List Validation is the most cost effective option, but also has a smaller pool of IP addresses. You can access any of these providers on Clay.
On Clay, you can use someone’s email address or LinkedIn URL to automatically scrape the web for any other information on the Internet about them or their company.
This includes things like job title, employment history, company name/size/location, etc. It also includes things like company job listings, web traffic, tech stack, or recent news. You can even identify if companies are remote-first, SOC II compliant, or if they mention certain words on their website! If you can find a piece of information about a lead manually, Clay can help you automatically enrich all leads with it.
Clay also integrates with ChatGPT to help you use AI craft highly relevant, personalized emails for each of your prospects automatically, using the automated research that you pulled about them above.
Warming inboxes is a prerequisite to sending outbound emails. When you use an email warming tool, you’ll be added to a pool of email users who’ve opted in to sending and receiving each other’s emails for mutual benefit. You’ll agree not to mark them as spam and reply to them, and they’ll reciprocate—boosting both parties’ domain reputations.