Salespeople Are Finding Customers by Spotting Garbage From Space
Software now lets sales teams turn a hunch into a customer list, without knowing how to code.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy · Kareem Amin - The Unusual Approach to Company Building - [Invest Like the Best, EP.478]You can find your next customer by spotting piles of garbage from space.
Kareem Amin, the co-founder and chief executive of Clay, a software company most recently valued at around four billion dollars, gives this example. He says one company "sells to businesses that have a lot of garbage" and uses Google's Satellite View to look for areas with a buildup of trash, treating a business surrounded by it as a likely buyer.
Amin built Clay for people in sales and marketing, who he describes as creative but often unable to turn their ideas into working tools.
His point is that the hunch is easy and the execution is hard. Having the idea is one thing, but checking building after building at scale is super hard to do by eye. Amin says software like Clay can translate that idea for sales teams and do the filtering at scale.
Large piles around a business are visible from space; small details are not.
Questions people ask
What is Google Satellite View?
Google Satellite View is the satellite imagery layer in Google Maps and Google Earth. It stitches together aerial and satellite photos so you can zoom in far enough to see buildings, parking lots, and large piles of material around them.
What does Clay actually do?
Clay is a sales and marketing software company that helps teams find leads and personalize outreach using data from across the web. It lets nontechnical users combine spreadsheets, data providers, and artificial intelligence models to build lists and automate research. The company was most recently valued at around $4 billion.