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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.

This is one of the most valuable AI-powered sourcing workflows in Clay. If you already know who your best-fit customers are—based on wins in your CRM—you can use AI to find companies that look just like them.

This means similar size, industry, team structure, or even shared competitors. It's like saying, "We already closed McDonald's. Now give me the 10 most similar fast food franchising operations."

This approach is one of the fastest ways to double down on what you already know works.

🌱 Getting Started with Company Lookalikes

Let's start with a simple example. We'll begin with the most straightforward version of this workflow.

You already know a customer that's a perfect fit for your product—maybe it's one of your best customers or someone who recently closed. You could pull this list directly from your CRM, or just experiment manually to get started.

🔄 The Two Lookalike Actions in Clay

There are two actions in Clay for Finding Company Lookalikes:

1. The native Find Company Lookalikes action
2. The Ocean.io action

Both function in similar ways - you input the parameters of the company you want to lookalike by, such as:

• Public vs. private status
• Company size
• Industries

Then, both integrations will return up to 10 company lookalikes based on your shared attributes.

🎨 Working with Lookalike Results

When using the lookalike feature, you'll notice we're getting all 10 lookalikes in the same cell. Since we obviously want to be able to process the data for each of these lookalikes separately, we'll use the Write to Table action.

This action takes each company from the list of company lookalikes and sends them to a separate table for continued automation. For a deeper explanation of Write to Table, check out the lesson from Clay 101 on Write to Table.

You'll also note that we're using a text field to send the "source" of each of these lookalikes to our other table, so we can identify where results came from.

🎮 Why AI Lookalikes Are Perfect for Getting Started

AI lookalikes are perfect if you're just getting started with AI-powered prospecting. You don't need a complex workflow—just a single customer and a few clicks to generate high-quality leads.

Once you review those results, you can:

• Enrich them with additional data
• Score them based on fit
• Move them directly into an outbound sequence

🔧 Taking It Further With Automation

Now that you've seen how it works manually, here's how you can take it further with automation.

Let's say a new lead in your CRM gets marked as closed-won. With Clay, you can automatically trigger a workflow that:

1. Adds that customer to Clay
2. Sends their company info to Ocean.io, an AI tool that finds 10 company lookalikes
3. Adds those lookalikes to a new table
4. Runs a Claygent competitor check to make sure they're not already working with your competitors
5. Pipes those new leads into a workflow for outreach, scoring, or review

This setup only takes a few minutes. And once it's running, you're turning every win into ten new opportunities. It's one of the easiest ways to scale what's already working.

🔍 Conclusion

This type of lookalike prospecting is simple but powerful. By leveraging AI to find companies similar to your existing customers, you can quickly expand your prospecting efforts in directions that have already proven successful.

In the next lesson, we'll move on to the Enrich step of the FETC framework and show you how AI can turn basic records into deeply personalized, highly targeted profiles.

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