The Importance of Clean Data When Prospecting with Jake Biskar

Prospecting is never easy, especially with inbox fatigue, call screening, and email deliverability rates steadily decreasing. That’s why when we hear about a new tool like Clay.run that makes the sales development process more accessible, we’re eager to try it out.

We sat down with Jake Biskar, Consultant at Iconic Air and Marketing Manager for Yahoo Business, to discuss how combining clean data and AI can help sales development reps (SDRs) improve prospecting.

How Inaccurate Contact Data Affects Prospecting

Prospecting is hard enough; sending your sales team out with inaccurate data can only make it harder.

You can hire the best outbound sales talent, equip them with top-notch tech stack, but if the data is low quality or invalid, their efforts will fall short.

What qualifies as poor-quality data?

Outdated information (job title, phone numbers, emails, etc.)
Missing contact fields
Invalid email (bouncing)
Data entered in the wrong field
Duplicate entries
Misspellings, typos, and spelling variations

Poor-quality data puts your business at risk of losing money. According to Gartner, poor-quality data costs organizations an average $12.9 million every year.

How poor quality-data harms your business

Invalid or poor data can impact your sales and marketing efforts in various ways, from inaccurate targeting that prevents lead generation to a slow sales pipeline that struggles to convert.

How Clay Streamlines the Prospecting Process

As an SDR, a lot of your time goes toward researching prospects, finding the right contacts, and adding them to Salesforce. Clay does all of that in one place.

You can search 50+ data sources to find prospects based on LinkedIn data, find keywords on different websites, scrape job listings, and even use GPT-3 to craft personalized emails. All of that information is then pulled into a single spreadsheet that integrates with your CRM.

Clay enables SDRs to enrich that data for a more targeted approach, helping them prioritize accounts with a higher likelihood of converting into meetings. It also improves the efficiency of their prospecting.

Most sales reps spend a lot of time on LinkedIn. It’s easy to lose sight of what you’re researching and get sucked into browsing content. Tools like Clay allow reps to get the necessary data out of LinkedIn and push that information into their CRM–so they spend less time searching, and more time prospecting.

Another benefit is that automating as much of this process as possible reduces task switching between research and outreach, making it easier for reps to jump fully into prospecting.

How Clay Integrates with LinkedIn for Better Account Scoring

SDRs are often handed a list of accounts from marketing, but not every contact on that list will meet their ideal customer profile (ICP). Clay can help reps determine where to focus their efforts.

With all of the data in one place, you can scrape for factors like employee size, company description, and industry to identify the best-fit prospects.

Tools for Better Targeting

The more companies that sell data and the more data sources are available, the better the quality becomes. Most companies can’t afford to pay for access to multiple large data sources, but Clay allows you to search 50+ sources with one tool.

This data can tell you who has the highest likelihood of responding to your outreach, so there’s no need for SDRs to waste time on the wrong contacts. Intent data, like website visit reports, make this approach even more targeted.

Using Data and AI for Faster Sequence Design

Clay also integrates with tools like ChatGPT, which can help reps perform more efficient email outreach.

With data pulled directly from a prospect’s LinkedIn description, you can then ask ChatGPT to summarize the description in 15 words or less. This summary can go directly into your email outreach.

As spam filters become more and more sensitive, it’s important to switch up your prospecting so you’re not sending the same email to dozens of people. ChatGPT allows for easy customization and can even help you write new sequences from scratch.

Sequence design can be time-consuming, but the ChatGPT function makes it faster and easier than ever to mix up your email outreach.

The Future of the SDR Role

Tools like Clay and ChatGPT are never going to replace the value of human SDRs, but they will enable SDRs to perform better outreach.

Being an SDR is no longer a junior role. The position has changed significantly in recent years, and it will continue to do so. Instead of reps spending time customizing emails and making phone calls, that time will be spent making sure they have the right data to perform optimal outreach.

If you’re a sales leader and you want to enable your reps to do a good job, make sure you’re either providing them with clean data or giving them access to a tool like Clay so they can do it themselves.

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