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Get Company & Account Context before any Outreach or Meeting
Research informs two critical things: who to target and what to say. Instead of bouncing between LinkedIn, news sites, company pages, and your CRM, you can do it all in one place.
That context is the difference between an email that gets a reply and one that gets archived.
🏢 Company-Level Research
When you research a company, you're looking for signals that tell you what they're doing and where they're headed.
Key areas to investigate:
- Hiring trends
- Tech stack
- Funding history
- Product launches
- Leadership changes
- Expansion signals like new markets, headcount growth, and open jobs
Sample prompts:
Research stripe.com's recent product launches, hiring trends, and expansion signals. What are their top priorities this year?
What is notion.com's funding history and current headcount growth? Are they in expansion mode?
Research and compare the hiring trends of openai.com and anthropic.com. What are they each focused on?
What You'll Get Back
When you research openai.com, Clay returns a comprehensive widget with:
- Company overview
- Recent news
- Open jobs
- Annual revenue and revenue model
- Headcount growth data
- Recent product launches
Open the widget for an enhanced view where you can pull in additional data points and add functions to further enrich the company profile. All information is presented in the chat in readable format, broken down by sections.
👤 Contact-Level Research
You're looking for:
- Career history
- Recent thought leadership
- Public statements
- Podcast appearances
- Meeting briefs with background, talking points, and org context
Sample prompts:
Research [Name] at stripe.com and find their recent interviews, podcasts, and public statements
I have a meeting with [Name] at notion.com tomorrow. Give me a summary brief with everything I should know and 3 talking points
Find me the buying committee at [Account] — I need Finance, IT, and Operations at the VP and Director level."
Pull every VP and above at [Account] across Revenue, Finance, and IT. I want names, titles, tenure, and contact info."
What Contact Research Looks Like
When you research someone like Sarah Friar at OpenAI, Clay returns a widget linking to their LinkedIn profile with previous job experiences. Open the widget to get summarized work history and thought leadership. You can further enrich this contact right from the widget.
In the chat, you'll see a summary of interviews and podcasts they've done, plus a blurb summarizing what they're about.
🥊 Competitive Research
Understanding your prospect's competitive landscape helps you position your solution more effectively.
Sample prompts:
Research notion.com's tech stack. Who are their main competitors and what are they doing differently?
What tools power hubspot.com's GTM motion?
What Competitive Research Returns
When you research OpenAI's tech stack and competitors, you'll get a widget showing names, roles, and locations of executives at their competitors. Open this widget to add additional data points like emails.
You'll see their tech stack broken down by categories:
- Core languages
- Infrastructure
- Machine learning training
You'll also get an overview of the competitive landscape—who the companies are and what they're focused on.
📋 Getting Better Results with Structured Prompts
Ask for structured output. Instead of "tell me about this company," try: "Give me five bullets on priorities, three on risks, and two on leadership changes."
Structured prompts deliver more reliable, scannable results. Less rambling, more signal.
🔄 What Makes Clay Research Different
Clay uses live data providers, which means results are grounded in verified, up-to-date sources. That makes it more reliable for contact and company data than generic web search.
🎯 Coming Soon: Clay Audiences
When your RevOps team connects Clay Audiences, you'll query your own first-party CRM data in the same conversation:
- Open opportunities
- Previous touches
- Account history
- Signals Clay has already detected
This transforms account research from "what does the market know about this company" to "what do we know about this company."
Audiences is currently available to Enterprise customers enrolled in the Audiences Open Beta.
🚀 What's Next
You now know how to research companies, contacts, and competitive landscapes from inside your AI tool.
In the next lesson, we'll take that research and turn it into personalized outreach.
