Clay finds accurate B2B data from over 50 data vendors to provide a seamless sales prospecting experience, while Persana leverages over 75 data sources to fuel your sales pipeline. Dive into this article to determine the right sales prospecting tool to choose.
A manual B2B sales prospecting operation is an arduous and time-consuming task. You could spend months building a lead list, finding their contact details, and engaging in repetitive tasks to generate results.
These responsibilities can wear you down quickly, especially when you have other demanding tasks. The good news? Powerful AI-powered tools such as Clay and Persana AI can be your secret weapon for outbound prospecting. These B2B sales prospecting tools offer a comprehensive suite of features to streamline your sales process.
But with so many similarities, how do you select one for your lead generation efforts? This in-depth comparison guide will analyze the key features between Clay and Persana, helping you to identify the tool that best fits your sales prospecting needs.
Here is the gist:
Here is a quick comparison table for Clay vs. Persana, but keep reading to learn the distinct differences and similarities between the two sales prospecting tools.
Clay stands out as a B2B sales prospecting tool for your outreach efforts. The sales intelligence platform finds accurate B2B data from over 50 data vendors to provide a seamless prospecting experience for sales professionals.
Its web scraping capabilities coupled with multiple data integrations make it easy to optimize your sales processes. You can find and obtain your prospect’s contact information, automate enrichment processes, and create personalized messages to engage your target audience.
Persana is an AI-powered sales prospecting platform that leverages over 75 data sources to fuel your sales pipeline. Backed by Y Combinator, the prospecting tool automates your sales workflow to scale your personalized outbound campaign faster.
In other words, you can easily find your potential customers, enrich your lead list, and create personalized messages that resonate with them. This saves time and streamlines your processes to boost your lead generation efforts and encourage business growth.
Clay and Persana offer a compelling array of features for cold campaigns. However, let’s see how they stand out with their key features — list building, waterfall enrichment, AI agents, and integrations.
Your cold outreach campaign starts with a rock-solid lead list that features key target accounts and fuels your sales pipeline. Both Clay and Persana can help you ace this process.
On one hand, Clay boasts about using any data source to build your lead list. Whether it’s through a company’s name, CRMs, CSVs, search engines, or social channels like LinkedIn or Twitter, you can access over 10 data sources to create a perfect list and foster your lead generation efforts.
Getting started is simple. Upon logging in, click “Create New,” select “Workflow,” “Table,” or “Folder.” While the “Table” option lets you build a quick lead list, the “Workflow” lets you opt for a more targeted prospecting approach.
It enables you to reach out to people at selected companies and also supports CRM enrichment. And if you want to compile your lead lists into a single file, you can choose the “Folder” option.
That said, the “Table” option features various prospecting opportunities. It’s a perfect fit for anyone researching companies or decision-makers from different sources such as GitHub, LinkedIn, HubSpot, Google Maps, Google Search, Apollo, RSS Feed, and more.
Let’s say you want to generate a local business lead. Click on “Find Local Businesses using Google Maps,” select “Business Types'' and “Number of Results''. The business types range from various industries such as car rentals, restaurants, hair salons, banks, and more.
For this example, we selected “restaurant” and “cafes” as the business types and customized the list to 10 businesses.
Next, Clay will analyze the results based on your location and provides a wide range of nearby businesses. As you can see, you have the business names, their Google Maps URL, websites, phone numbers, addresses, and more.
You can also find decision-makers at specific companies using Clay. To get started, navigate to “Create new” > Table. Scroll down to “Find People” where you will see a list of criteria you must fill in. This will enable Clay to source your data. The criteria include the company, job title, years of experience, location, bio, profile, language, certification, and number of limits. Here is a screenshot of how it looks.
After filling in the details, you must wait for a few seconds for Clay to generate the results. Below is a pictorial example of a result that features decision-makers (CEOs, founders, and co-founders) of companies located in New York City and San Francisco.
On the other hand, Persana also sources its data from various vendors. Whether you intend to gain valuable insights about companies or decision-makers, the sales prospecting tool makes it easy to obtain data.
All you need to do is to input the specific criteria that match your needs. You must fill in the necessary details such as the company type, size, founding year, number of followers, locations, industries, and keywords. This example shows how to obtain data about companies through Persana.
After you fill in the details, Persana analyzes its data sources to provide relevant information about your prospects. It filters the result with these criteria to provide comprehensive data that matches your intent.
Here is an example of some companies’ data that specialize in financial and banking services and are located in the United States.
The same process applies if you’re searching for people. You need to fill out your prospect’s company, job title, location, names, and targeted keywords.
Once you input these details, the sales intelligence platform provides relevant details to advance your prospecting efforts. Here is an example of a Persana search result for recruiters or human resource managers who work at TikTok and Pinterest.
Another Persana sales prospecting option is to use its Chrome extension. The extension tool is useful for sales teams, recruiters, or other professionals who are actively engaged in LinkedIn prospecting.
To get started, you can visit a prospect or company’s profile page and allow Persana to obtain key details about them. You can get prospect’s insights, discover their personalities, and find the right angle to pitch your company to them.
Additionally, Persana also streamlines your LinkedIn outreach efforts with its search query. Once you input the target term in the search bar and filter your results, you can select some profiles, add them to a table, and click “Save selected” to add them to Persana. This quickens your prospecting efforts and prompts you to focus on your outreach activities.
Sifting through every webpage for your prospect’s data can be time-consuming, but an AI agent can improve your efficiency. The AI agent visits any website, gathers information, summarizes the key details, and reports back to you. Clay and Persana offer this feature to speed up your B2B prospecting process.
Clay’s AI Agent, Claygent, is an AI web scraper that can research any detail about your prospect. With this AI sales tool, you don’t have to engage in manual prospecting — searching Google, visiting websites, and sifting through loads of information.
Instead, the artificial intelligence tool requires you to input a specific prompt to obtain data-driven insights about your target audience. It can research crucial details about a company — whether it’s hiring or not, a B2B or B2C company, SOC-II compliant, the competitors, the latest company news, and more. This sales intelligence feature saves you time by providing your results within seconds.
It can also research people working at a particular company or use their LinkedIn profile to obtain the intent data. In this example, the prompt tells Clayagent to search for the pricing plans of some companies in the lead list and report the data in a specific format.
Persana’s AI agent, SalesGPT, is another brilliant tool for sales prospecting. Similar to Claygent, all you need to do is input a specific prompt in SalesGPT to find your ideal buyers.
For instance, you can ask it to find:
Here is an example of a prompt inputted into Persana.
Once you input the prompt, you will wait for the AI-powered sales prospecting tool to generate a response in a few seconds. Here is the result of the search query in the above example.
A waterfall enrichment tool uses multiple data providers to find valid email addresses. Unlike traditional data providers who rely on a single database, waterfall enrichment tools combines different data sources to check the validity of an email address and ensure it’s capable of receiving messages.
Thankfully, Clay and Persana offer these features to advance your prospecting efforts. Clay’s waterfall enrichment accesses over 50 databases to maximize your coverage of the lead’s contact information.
Whether it’s your qualified lead’s work email, personal email, or phone numbers, Clay leverages various tools (Apollo, DropContact, Hunter, Nimbler, MixRank, and more) to obtain the contact information.
To get started with the waterfall enrichment feature, select any lead list on Clay’s home page. Then, click on “Add Enrichment” and scroll down to “Work Email.”
Once this is done, you can select any data source that suits your preference. Some examples of these data sources include Prospeo, DropContact, Hunter, Findymail, and more.
Clay analyzes each data vendor to provide your qualified leads’ email addresses or phone numbers. If a particular vendor doesn’t have the contact information, Clay moves to the next vendor.
This data-sourcing cycle repeats itself till Clay gets verified contact information. In the image below, you will see an example of how Clay enriches your lead list.
In contrast to Clay, Persana enriches your lead list through key sources such as Persana’s AI agent, SalesGPT, AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude, LinkedIn, and Google Search. The AI-prospecting platform enriches your qualified leads, whether people or companies, to foster your lead generation efforts.
You can enrich companies with details such as job openings, company news, technologies, and more. Meanwhile, you can enrich prospects with details with their phone numbers, work emails, and other relevant personal details.
To find your prospect’s work email address, click on the lead list you intend to use. Then, click “Enrich Data > Find Work Email.”
Unlike Clay which sources data from over 50 vendors, this AI sales tool provides two sourcing options to source for a prospect’s work email address. The first is LinkedIn where it extracts useful information. The other is by using their lead’s full name and the company’s name.
Once this is done, determine the number of rows it should run and click “Run” to generate the result. Below is an example of how the result looks like.
Persana will not only show the lead’s email work address but also confirm their status, whether it’s a catch-all email or not.
The two AI sales tools integrate with various software to aid your sales prospecting efforts. However, Clay has a more extensive library of integrations than Persana AI. It integrates with over 50 software including Apollo, Debounce, Google Translate, Lob, Postgres, Tavus, Mixrank, Swordfish, and more.
Meanwhile, Persana AI integrates with 22 software including Apify, Apollo, Claude, ChatGPT, Datagma, Contactout, and more. These integrations quicken your research and prospecting process to generate leads for your business.
The AI sales software, Clay, offers a tiered subscription to suit your needs. Starting with the free plan, you would get 100 monthly credits, AI message writing, and up to 100 per person or company search. However, this free plan comes with its limitations on the prospecting process.
Hence, you should subscribe to any paid version of your choice to maximize your data coverage and discover more qualified prospects. These paid versions include:
Compared to Clay, Persana doesn’t offer a free monthly plan for users. It offers a Starter plan which costs $89 per month and gives you 2,000 credits. This plan lets you create unlimited tables, features unlimited users, grants access to the prompt library and the AI research agent, provides sales signals, and more.
Its Growth and Pro plans cost $189 per month respectively. It includes everything in the Starter plan with additional features such as email tool integration, CRM integration, and more. You can also sign up for its Enterprise plan which requires a custom quote.
The right platform for you comes down to your needs and what can contribute to an efficient sales process.
Choose Clay if:
Choose Persana AI if:
ColdIQ is a great outbound sales agency that can help you select the best sales tools for your outreach efforts. Our experienced sales professionals implement a unique approach to flood you with opportunities that fuel your sales pipeline.
We utilize these sales prospecting tools to generate qualified leads that drive revenue for your business. Book a strategy call with us today!
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