Finding Leads on Clutch Using Clay.com
Discover the untapped potential of finding and enriching new prospects that your competitors haven't even dreamed of using Clay.com. With our approach, you can effortlessly scrape valuable data from Clutch, identify decision-makers at software agencies, and even obtain their LinkedIn profiles and work email addresses, giving you a remarkable advantage in the fiercely competitive sales landscape.
Jonathan Garces
Updated June 28, 2023
a world made of colorful clay, showcasing a house and mailbox as taken from in front of the house
Reading Time: 8 minutes
In the fiercely competitive world of sales, the ultimate goal is to rise above the countless other salespeople tirelessly searching for prospects, right?
To achieve this, we must break free from the conventional tools like Apollo, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, or Lushas.
There’s now a method for unearthing and enhancing new prospects that your competitors haven't even dreamt of. Over the next few minutes you’re going to learn how to find and enrich new prospects that your competitors don’t know a single thing about.
What is Clutch.com?
I used to think that Clutch was a marketplace only for marketing agencies. But it actually also has quite a few categories including Development, Design and Production, IT Services, as well as more generic business services like Call Centers and even Consulting.
Their platform lets you input what it is you’re looking for and if you’d prefer a specific location.
Now let’s search for something like Software Development agencies. Once you search for it, you’ll see over 25,000 different agencies that fall under this category.
There are a few key items to take note of. Since our focus is on enrichment and essentially working backwards from this directory, it’s important to look at the elements available to us.
By elements, I mean like the company name, ratings, pricing, 'visit website' link, and a few others. Essentially pieces of data we can easily scrape with either Clay’s Chrome extension or another web scraping tool we’ll mention in this article.
Scraping Company Lists
As I mentioned earlier, we need to approach this almost backwards. Let's analyze the data points we have, focusing on the important ones. By important, I mean those that will lead us to be able to find the decision makers at these software agencies with the help of clay.
Before we dive into Clay, we need to first scrape the data we want to import into Clay. There are two tools you could use.
The Clay Chrome Extension:
This extension allows you to scrape quite a few data points at scale from any website. You simply click it and it gives you almost all the data you need.
We have the website, descriptions, logos, and almost everything we would need to find decision makers. I have to note though, the only downside is that the Clay Chrome extension does not move through pages automatically.
If you remember, the original category has over 25,000 listings, but this only scraped 88 or so companies. Which means you need to go to every page and scrape manually which is very tedious. Let me introduce you to another alternative.
Instant Data Chrome Extension:
So you might be saying that this is literally the same thing, and I’d reply with “you’re 50% correct”.
With Instant Data Scraper, it will automatically scrape the pages available. So theoretically, you can scrape tens of thousands of companies to enrich with a few clicks of a button.
Usually once I’m finished scraping, I’ll throw this data into a Google Sheet to start cleaning it up. However, with using Clay’s Chrome Extension, you could send it directly to the workspace you’re working with inside Clay.
For this exercise we’re going to use the Instant Data Chrome Extension and Clay.
Step 1 ) Use Instant Data Scraper
Copy + paste the date you get from the Instant Data Scraper tool into a new google sheet. You’re going to have a lot of unnecessary data so we want to clean this up before we import into Clay.
We’re only going to keep the company name + website links for this exercise. This is what your updated Google Sheet should look like.
Remember to rename your columns. It will help you stay organized when you need to reference specific columns.
Step 2) Import into Clay
Download as a CSV your new google sheet and import into Clay.
This is what you should see if you have successfully imported your Google Sheet into Clay.
Step 3} Enrich data with Clay
This is where you will need to pay attention. We’re going to be using the “Google Search Query” and the “Find LinkedIn people” enrichment. But first, we need to clean up the data in this workspace.
We cannot have these URLS that include their UTM tags. We need to have their actual domains and only that. And to do that, we’re going to use their AI formula generator.
Now we’re going to create a new column, and click “Text”. Once the new column is created, click on the header of the column and click “settings”.
Then click the “Use AI” button.
And then you’re going to want to paste this prompt in your AI formula generator.
“if .io OR .com OR .tech OR .net OR .co OR .org OR .team OR .us OR .agency OR .dev OR .pro OR .st OR .eu OR .rocks OR .global OR .house OR .group OR .mx OR .it OR .vn OR .me OR .software OR .international exists in /Website Link then delete everything after”
Let’s break this down. Because we only need the domain URL of the company, we need to get rid of everything else.
The script is searching for the specific TLDs (Top Level Domain) in each row. It’s searching for .net, .com, .org, etc. It then removes everything after. This is the exact formula it generates. Honestly not sure about the exact formula on why it works, it just does lol.
Once you click “Save settings” your new workspace should look like this. Now we have cleaned up data we can now work with.
Step 4) Enrich via Google Search
Now that we have our necessary data points, we can go ahead and start enriching. Create a new column, and click “Enrich Data”.
You’re going to search for “Search Google”.
When you click that enrichment, you’re going to see a few inputs. The box to input your query, number of results to look for and a few others.
In the “Google Search Query” box, you’re going to input the following:
site:linkedin.com/company “/new column" - the slash will allow you to select the column you want to check against. Which would be the URLS we cleaned up. Then click “Continue to Add Fields”.
You then should see a few different fields to map into columns.
I usually leave these off, and just go to save. Nothing toggled here. Click the arrow on the side and select “Save and Do Not Run”.
When you start running the enrichments for each row, you should see LinkedIn URLs starting to show up. This is the LinkedIn url we will need for our next enrichment. Go ahead and run the enrichment for all of your rows.
As you can see below, the enrichment brings back 4+ different search results. Normally the URL we need is going to be the first result so this means we have to map the result over to a new column.
What you’re going to do is hover over one of the rows and click the gray arrow/expand icon. And this is what you should see.
You’re then going to click “Search Results” and click the box where you see “{ ) 0”. You should see the following.
When you hover the “Link” you will see “Add as a column”. Click it, and select “Create a new column” from the drop down.
PS don't worry, you only do this once.
You should now have all of the LinkedIn URLS mapped over.
Now we’re ready for the second enrichment.
Step 5) Find Decision makers on LinkedIn
Go to create a new column and click “Enrich Data” and search for “LinkedIn” and look for the “Find People” enrichment.
Under the “Company Identifier” you’re going to select “Link” from the drop down. Then underneath you will see “Job Title Keywords” and then this is where you will write the specific job title you’re looking for.
In this case, we’ll write “CEO”.
Once you click “Save” you’ll see the data points that you can map to new columns. Now once you’ve mapped over to new columns you’ll see the data.
Almost there! Now we have individual names we can potentially look for.
Step 6) Find and verify their work email
Now, let’s look for their email addresses! Go ahead and create a new column and click “Enrich Data”.
Once you click that, you’ll see “People Data Points”. Go ahead and select it.
Now you’ll see a few different inputs.
You will see a few different inputs. You see Full Name, Company Name, LinkedIn profile and a few others.
Fill out that information and click “Save”.
Now once you click save, you’ll see a few columns created. Once you run the integrations, it will have a waterfall effect. This means if one platform can’t find an email address, it will try another one, and so on.
It will then print the final result in the last column titled “Work email”.
And here you go! We have officially enriched companies on the Clutch directory with Clay.com!
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