Revive Old Lead Lists with AI Lead List Clean-up

This is a pain point that almost every company that I have worked with has struggled with.

If you've been in business for over a year, chances are you have a few old Excel or Google Sheets full of leads kicking around.

These leads might have been approached through past campaigns or past outbound hires. However, they never progressed further and were not categorized into a middle-of-funnel sequence or marked as inactive.

This could have happened over a year or more ago, and circumstances may have changed since then.

You might have new service or product offering now that aligns better with their needs. Additionally, circumstances on the prospect's end might have changed, making it an opportune time to reach out again.

But combing through hundreds of rows off contacts manually and reading notes left by reps who didn’t follow any type of structure when entering them can be a daunting task.

Companies usually wind up kicking these lists over to new hires to tackle again but dialling into old dead lists is a great way to discourage a new sales hire.

Let’s see if we can make this more efficient and more effective leveraging some workflows and custom logic that we can build into our table.

Let’s take a look at a workflow I spun up to help me clean up some old lead lists and quickly identify any that were not just warm but also meet our minimum criteria for reengaging.

I ran this on a small sample to help gauge the costs but this can be scaled to thousands of contacts and pricing will remain reasonable if we are careful.

The video gives a pretty good breakdown but if you really want to understand each step in this process, check out the full blog post and don’t hesitate to reach out if you wanted to take a look at some of your old lead lists and see what we can come up with.

So, our first step was to start with an old lead list that I had kicking around from some campaigns I was running a few years back.

While I haven’t necessarily shifted business models, I do offer a much wider range of services and products and now have offerings that suit almost any budget so I do think it is worth revisiting some of these.

Now these were a mix of companies and offerings we were discussing, and I was doing custom engagements back then so every deal was unique along with the clients. They all worked in Tech or Software development, but they came from different verticals and had different product offerings.

So this was a great use case for our demo but it will be a lot easier for companies that have much more precise verticals and solutions.

We do want to normalize all the emails and phone numbers and start cleaning our data now so lets do that with Clay.

Once that is done we want to filter these on companies that were still active so the best bet was to check if they still had a website and if so, list it here so we can use it later on for more data later on.

We would set this filter to the "Does not contain" and this way we will only work with companies that have an active website.

You can see above that I am using my Open AI key and we can always check our usage periodically to ensure we are staying within a reasonable budget when running these queries.

You can see my usage for May is less than a dollar and I have been running these on a few hundred leads and testing with multiple queries so if you have an API key, its definitely worthwhile.

Now that we have all the companies with websites, we can start to make sense of the notes and try to quickly classify these.

You can use any kind of custom logic you want here and any criteria you want to categorize these and then let AI do the rest.

I asked it to not only summarize the notes but use them to help us classify the leads into pools of Dead, Neutral or Warm.

I can always give the Agent further instructions but there are limits and when we have the ability to more seamlessly add our Custom GPT's to the tables we will have a lot more flexibility.

Now we can filter on all the warm leads and that is a great starting point for our leads.

Let’s take it a step further and start using AI and their website to see what they are focused on today.

The nice thing about Clay is we can run a test on the first 5 entries in our list to make the logic is working correctly.

To make sure we don’t run this Agent on all the leads, we can add in a bit of logic to make sure it verifies that other fields are filled in before attempting a run. This will make sure we only run this on leads that we feel are worthwhile.

We can then start to dig into the company more if we want to arm your new reps or yourself with more information when engaging.

I always feel like the more information we have the better but spending too much time researching that information can work against your team.

That is why I love this workflow.

It is as adaptable as you need it to be and can be adjusted as need based on the campaigns or lists you are working with.

So for our last trick with Clay, I wanted to take all our information and build a quick introduction that we could quickly scale out to all our prospects.

You can then connect this directly with your CRM or Outbound sequencers or export to a CSV to use as you wish.

Personally I don't like to go the full automation route but I also don't have thousands of old leads to reach out to so your use case may vary.

If you have some old lead lists kicking around that you would like to test this on, Pleas reach out and I would be happy to run through this exercise and I can export the workflow if you wanted to use it for more lists in Clay yourself.