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Find Your Next Customer with Company Lookalikes
💡 The Ocean.io action mentioned in the video has been sunset. Instead, use the native Find Company Lookalikes action.
In the last lesson we explored how to use AI to generate your Ideal Customer Profile from your own website—one of the fastest ways to go from zero to targeted leads. Now, let's take it a step further and show you how to find new customers who look like the ones you've already closed.
By the end of this lesson, you'll be able to turn a single closed-won customer into 10 lookalike companies that match what's already working for you, then automate it so every new win generates ten fresh opportunities. If you just closed Acme Corp, this is how you tell Clay: now give me 10 more Acmes.
🎯 The Simple Lookalike Lookup
Start with the simplest version, no workflow required.
- Pick a customer you know is a perfect fit, one of your best accounts or someone who recently closed.
- Drop their company name into Clay and run the Find Company Lookalikes action.
- Review the 10 lookalikes it returns, matched on shared attributes.
The lookalikes are matched on attributes like:
- Industry
- Company size
- Hiring trends
- Revenue and growth signals
- Technology usage
You don't need a complex workflow, just one customer and a few clicks to generate high-quality leads. From there, enrich them, score them, or push them straight into an outbound sequence.
⚙️ Automate It: Turn Every Win Into Ten
Once the manual lookup clicks, trigger it automatically off a closed-won deal. When a lead in your CRM is marked closed-won, Clay can run a workflow that:
- Adds that customer to Clay.
- Runs the Find Company Lookalikes action to find 10 company lookalikes.
- Adds those lookalikes to a new table.
- Runs a Claygent competitor check so you don't chase companies already working with a competitor.
- Pipes the new leads into a workflow for outreach, scoring, or review.
It takes a few minutes to set up, and once it's running it's automatic. One closed-won deal in, ten competitor-checked lookalikes out.
🚀 What's Next
You can now turn any closed-won customer into 10 vetted lookalikes, by hand for a quick lookup or on autopilot every time a deal closes.
Next, we move to the Enrich step of the framework, where AI turns these basic company records into deeply personalized, highly targeted profiles.



