Rebuild Clay in Zapier

Ever heard of Clay.com?

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“All it is is just a spreadsheet connected with APIs and integrations.”

- Eric Nowoslawski, Clay Agency Owner [YouTube clip]

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“Dearie me, Eric, spot on! A connected spreadsheet is exactly what Clay is.”

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And it sounds a lot like Zapier Tables. Heyo! Time for a rebuild. 

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Welcome to my post where I’m going to rebuild Clay with Zapier: it will build lists from LinkedIn, automate email finding and verification, enrich leads, draft AI-emails, get recent news, and way more.

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And it’s 70% cheaper.

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Let’s build.

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Pricing and who should actually rebuild Clay in Zapier

First off, Clay is super expensive. 

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It uses a credit-based pricing system (similar to tasks in Zapier) and unless you pay $134/month you’re extremely limited.

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And look, if you’re already a Clay expert and want waterfall enrichment, built-in prospecting, and a dev team to submit feature requests to, then knock yourself out with Clay.

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But hot dog if you only need the core features of Clay, can work around some of the limits, want to take advantage of 7,500+ integrations and save thousands of dollars…

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Zapier might be a better bet.

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You can rebuild Clay in Zapier for $40/month. Let me show you how.

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Building lists and enriching data

As our friend Eric mentioned, Clay is simply a spreadsheet with app integrations. To rebuild it, we’ll start with two Zapier Tables:

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• Companies
• People

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First, you need to build a prospecting list. Then, you can refine and filter from there. To build lists, you’ll use LinkedIn and Zapier Central. 

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This is so easy I feel silly. But here goes.

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Start with companies.

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Simply set up a behavior for the Central Assistant to do two things:

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1. Find each company’s domain
2. Add each company’s domain to the Zapier Table

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Central adds the domains to the table, and the table kicks off a Zap to enrich all the companies with Clearbit.

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That was shockingly easy.

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Now, to find people.

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Each company record has a link that catapults you off to LinkedIn to see employees of that company. Tell the Central Assistant to “add people” and it will Google Search the correct email format for the company’s employees, take an educated guess at their email, and then add them to the People table. 

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Once you’ve got your lists, you can slice and dice them with filters in Tables. When you’re ready to take the next step, you’re only a couple buttons away…

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Getting recent news

If you’re oblivious to news about a prospect’s company, you could end up looking really dumb. So, go get a free account at newsapi.org (100 free requests per day) and create a Zap that fires off when you click a “Get news” button.

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My Zap gets recent news for the company then uses ChatGPT to pull out the top three articles before adding it back into the table.

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You’re one step closer to a fully automated lead machine.

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Next up, let’s send those emails.

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Verifying emails and AI draft emails

To verify email addresses, use Quickemailverification.com which gives you 3,000 credits/month for free and integrates with Zapier. 

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Did I mention how easy it is to rebuild Clay in Zapier? Zapier has done all the integration heavy lifting for you. Amazing.

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Click a button in the table and it will verify the email. I’ve yet to have an invalid email so far because Central is so good at guessing format from LinkedIn.

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The last step is to generate an email. It’s up to you how you use AI for this step. What I would do, though, is to have AI only generate one or two sentences specifically about the recent news headline and tie it back to the person. Then, you hardcode what the rest of the email would say. 

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Your call. 

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With Zapier, you can use any AI provider and customize the prompt based on any one of your beloved AI influencer’s mega-sales-prompt guides of choice. 

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Wrapping it up

You can add more automation to send leads into your CRM or email marketing platform and actually send out the emails, but let’s cool those building engines for now. You get the picture.

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I had a lot of fun with this one. I hope you take advantage of it.

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Any app that is based on a spreadsheet is up for a rebuild. What’s next?

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To recap:

• Clay is simply a spreadsheet with integrations—perfect for a rebuild in Zapier Tables.
• Zapier Central helps build lists from LinkedIn, easily.
• Integrate with any one of the thousands of different apps on Zapier to enrich data, verify emails, get recent news, and a whole lote more. 

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That’s all for this week!

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Happy Building,

Bryce