Automate Founder Prospecting in < 6 Mins
By orchestrating research to outreach w/ Clay + La Growth Machine
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I was inspired to write this post based on feedback that I’ve received over the past 2 weeks while working at Clay. Everyone from Founders to SDRs to Account Executives are struggling to prospect efficiently today. So, this process can really be used by anyone who needs to prospect.
Before we get to the demo today, let’s talk a bit about Founder-Led-Sales and why Founders need to prospect beyond their network in the early stages of company building.
Importance of Selling Beyond “Friendlies”
There’s a strong belief in the venture ecosystem that Founders should sell the first $1M in revenue before hiring traditional sales. Founder-Led-Sales is important for a number of reasons:
Customer conversations & short feedback loops help the team build the most optimal product based on customer feedback.
The Founder often knows the most about the market/problem/solution and is therefore the best equipped out of the gate to land early sales + build momentum.
The playbook and lessons will help new sales reps ramp much faster.
Obviously, the easiest way is to start with ‘friendlies’, existing network, and the VC’s & advisors’ networks. However, these customers don’t provide the most real feedback…
So, you need to pair the above approach with cold prospecting.
Jyoti Bansal, an Entrepreneur who started AppDynamics (sold for $3.7B), Harness (valued in the billions), and Unusual Ventures, explains why in an interview:
During the customer discovery process, Jyoti recommends moving beyond “friendly” contacts. He is a firm believer in cold outreach because customers outside the founder’s network are going to be more direct and blunt with their feedback. Jyoti recommends having at least 50 “cold hard conversations”— this is the best way to validate early assumptions, and iterate on early messaging, ICP, and personas.
Founders need to learn how to sell and become comfortable with rejection. Initially, a big part of selling is reaching out to many people, articulating the pain, and the solution. This is critical to the process of finding product-market fit.
The Current Process Today is Grossly Inneficient
I know, I’ve been one of the first sales reps at 6 Series A companies (Acquia, Outlearn, Scalr, Snyk, Dazz, & Chainguard.)
The process is something like this —> find companies in your ICP —> research companies —> do a LinkedIn search for contacts —> research which people are the best to reach out to —> switch to ZoomInfo or Apollo to find contact information —> import that data into a sequencing tool like Outreach or ZoomInfo —> write a cadence —> do more research on the person to personalize —> execute the cadence (some steps are manual) —> go to LinkedIn profiles to send connect requests —> go back to those who accept and write a message to start a conversation —> land a meeting.
There’s a lot of smaller steps inbteween that compound the amount of time spent on this. It. Is. Horrible.
The research part alone takes an enormous amount of time if you’re doing it correctly.
Altogether, you need to use 6 tools at minimum:
LinkedIn 2. LinkedIn Sales Navigator 3. Google Searches 4. Other sources of information such as 10ks, recent news, etc. 5. Outreach or Salesloft 6. and of course, ChatGPT at some point.
That’s the bare minimum.
Founders don’t have the time to do that efficiently or effectively… especially on top of all other demands.
This is How to Automate The Process in <6 Minutes
This is possible with 2 tools: Clay + La Growth Machine
I’ll show you how to combine both of these tools to do the following (all under 6 minutes):
Find companies that match your ICP.
Enrich data for those companies.
Find all the people at those companies that match your desired persona.
Enrich those profiles with info such as emails, phone numbers, etc.
Create a campaign in La Growth Machine.
Automate sending LinkedIn connection requests to the list.
Here’s a video of the workflow and how I connect the two:
Adding in an automated LinkedIn message after someone accepts a connect request is super easy. I just didn’t show it in this video.
Just choose this templated campaign + compose the first message you want sent.
Additional Automated Research Examples w/ Clay
You can automate an absurd amount of research with Clay.
These are some examples:
Scrape websites
Pull in recent news
Enrich contact info
Find social profiles (Twitter, Linkedin, Instagram, etc.)
Pull in profile info
Google searches
Find recent LinkedIn posts
Find warm intros in LinkedIn
Find job openings
Pull in job info
Count people in a specific team
Find followers on GitHub
And, so much more.
Examples of Enrichment Data Points + Providers
La Growth Machine is my 2nd Favorite Tool
These are some examples of automate sequences that you can build. This is my favorite outbound sender because of its simplicity and ability to visualize these outreach streams.
Linkedin + Email:
Linkedin + Email + Twitter:
I’ll be posting more Clay tutorials for GTM engineering in the future that can be used by any Founder or GTM team.
Since I’m doing some contract work with Clay for a couple weeks, I’d be happy to spend time with anyone looking for help to build in Clay. Just shoot me an email: alex.lindahl@clay.com.
I have been experimenting with Clay and have been very impressed.