Use AI to generate leads from prospect personas

Step 1: Get targeted leads based on your personas

To get started, on your Clay Workspace dashboard, click the “Create new” button and select the “Table” option in the dropdown menu.

Since we’re going to be generating a list of leads, we’ll use the “Find People” table option. Select this template in the “New table” pop-up window.

Now, we’re going to go back to our Persona’s table from lesson two of this course, select a persona, and use its attributes to define our lead list parameters in Clay.

For this example, we’re going to use the “Operations Manager at a Mid-Sized Company” persona.

Back in Clay, make sure the “Method” is set to “Search query,” meaning we’ll build the people search query directly in Clay vs. an external list. Then, we’ll start setting various query parameters to match our persona attributes. To start, we’re going to set the company size to 51-500 people.

We’ll set the “Job title” parameter to the job titles listed in our personas table. We’ll also enable the “Include past experiences” toggle so that we find anyone that currently holds or held these job titles in the past.

Continue building your query with all of your persona attributes. When all of your parameters are set, click the “Preview people” button to see a sampling of the leads from your query.

In our preview pane, we noticed many leads outside the United States, which doesn’t fit our agency services, so we’ll add a “Location” parameter to only include people in the United States and click the “Preview people” button again.

We’re happy with these results, so we’ll click the “Import” button to create a table of these leads.

On the resulting pop-up window, make sure to enable the “Work Email” option so that this contact data is added to the table. We’ll need it to reach out to the leads.

You can repeat this process for each set of personas to generate leads across all of your potential customer profiles.

Step 2: Templatize email outreach in bulk

With our leads list generated, we can create a templatized email for bulk outreach. To do this, click the “Actions” button in the top right corner of your table and select the “Draft email” option in the dropdown menu.

Head back to the personas table in Notion from lesson two and copy the Subject and Body content from the Outreach Email column for the matching persona in the Personas table.

Paste this content into the “Draft Emails” pop-up window in Clay.

Delete the placeholder content from the template (like the prospect’s first name) by typing a backslash “/” and selecting the variable data from your Clay table to insert dynamically. For instance, in this example, we’re inserting the “first_name” data from our Clay table.

When you’re happy with your email template, click the “Save” button and click the “Save and run” option to generate emails for all of your leads.

Step 3: Create outreach campaigns

Finally, we can send these emails in bulk by clicking the “Actions” button in the top right corner and then selecting the “Create Smartlead campaign…” option in the resulting dropdown menu.

In the resulting pop-up window, you can connect your Smartlead.ai account via the “Add account” button and map your newly created email columns to the corresponding fields in the form.

And that's it! Once connected, you’ll be able to send your personalized, templated emails in bulk to the leads in Clay. Cold outreach has never been easier.

In the next lesson, we’ll use ChatGPT and Gamma to create responses to buyer RFPs.

‍

‍

‍

This tutorial was created by Garrett.