How do you build an account list from the tools a market uses?

You build an account list from the tools a market uses by starting with the software your buyers run, not just their industry and size. Pick the industry and the tool, pull the companies that use it with BuiltWith in Clay, add the decision-makers at each one, then watch the list for new leaders who might need you.

I built my first one in public, as day one of a daily Clay standup, and posted it on LinkedIn. The target was telecom and IT consulting firms that use HubSpot. This post is what I learned doing it.

Why start from the tools a market uses?

Starting from the tools a market uses works because the software a company runs says something real about it. Industry and headcount tell you who a company is. Its CRM, marketing platform and website stack tell you how it works, what it has already invested in, and whether what you sell will fit into how the team runs today.

That matters most when your product or service plugs into a particular tool. A firm that builds on HubSpot can only help companies that run HubSpot. A list of every telecom company of the right size would be mostly noise. A list of telecom companies that use HubSpot is a list of companies you could actually work with.

It also changes the first sentence of the message. Knowing that a company runs a tool you know well lets you write about something specific to them, instead of something true of everyone in the industry.

How do you build the company table in Clay?

You build the company table in Clay by describing the market in two parts, the industry and the technology, and letting the BuiltWith integration find the companies that match. The result is a table with one row per company, ready for contacts and enrichment, instead of a spreadsheet you assemble by hand.

The steps I followed:

1. Name the industry precisely. "Telecom and IT consulting" is a market. "Technology" is not.
2. Name the one tool that defines fit. For that list it was HubSpot.
3. Pull the companies through BuiltWith in Clay into a new company table.
4. Add the filters you would apply anyway: headcount, location, and anything else that makes a company a poor fit.
5. Read a sample before you build anything on top of the table.

It was my first attempt with the integration, and the steps above are the ones I would repeat.

How reliable is the technology data?

Technology data is reliable enough to build a list on, but not reliable enough to trust without checking. A detected tool is a strong hint that a company uses it. Some companies will have moved off it, some will use it for one team only, and some that do use it will be missed altogether.

When I posted the first version, the question I asked the community was how to get better data on CRM usage, because that was the weak spot. A few habits help.

• Check a sample by hand. Open twenty companies and see whether the tool shows up where you would expect. If most pass, the table is usable.
• Prefer two sources to one. If a second provider or the company's own job postings mention the tool, the signal is stronger.
• Keep the reason in the row. Record which source said the company uses the tool, so a rep can see why the account is there.

How do you find the right people at each company?

You find the right people by deciding which roles own the problem you solve, then searching each company for those roles and filling in their email and phone. For the telecom list, the people I wanted were the leaders of sales and marketing, because they are the ones who would care about how their go-to-market runs.

On day two of the standup, I took the same list and found the key contacts at each company. Finding a contact is one step. Finding their email and phone reliably is another, and it is where most lists fall apart. In Clay, the answer is to run several data providers in sequence until one finds the detail, which I wrote up separately in what waterfall enrichment is.

Why add job-change monitoring to the list?

Job-change monitoring makes the list useful beyond the day you built it, because it tells you when something has changed at a company you already know is a fit. When a company hires a new sales or marketing leader, that company might need exactly what you do, and the new leader is the person deciding.

So on day two I set up monitoring for new hires and job changes on the contacts at each company. The list stops being a snapshot and starts working as a feed.

This is where a technographic list meets a signal-based one. Fit comes from the tools and the firmographics, and is decided once. Timing comes from events like a new leader, and is checked every week. The signal-based list post covers how the two combine, and our hiring signal feed shows how we rank job postings.

Building these lists, and the plays that run on them, is part of what we do in GTM engineering.

What should you try first?

Pick one industry and the one tool that most defines a good customer for you. Pull the companies that use it, read twenty of them by hand, and count how many you would genuinely want to work with.

If most of them are real fits, add the leaders of the team you sell to, and switch on job-change monitoring for those people. Then wait for the first new hire, and write to them about something specific to how their company works.