Timing your outreach in B2B is the secret sauce to a stacked pipeline, more engaging sales conversations, and increased revenue. In the highly competitive world of B2B SaaS companies and startups, standing out is crucial. Mining fundraising data can help you identify which companies are ripe for investing in your services or solutions since they have the financial backing and resources to do so.

In this article, we will explore how mining fundraising data using AI can ramp up your outreach results. We’ll provide a step-by-step workflow to help you build and enrich a dataset of recently funded companies, ensuring you reach out at the optimal time.

But why should you start scraping funding data in the first place? Let’s understand that.  

7 Key Reasons Why You Should Start Mining Fundraising Data for Cold Emails?

Finding funded companies for outreach is a critical decision for many reasons, some of which are as follows: 

1. Identify Financially Ready Prospects

Mining fundraising data for outreach helps you identify companies that have recently secured funding and are financially ready to invest in new services and solutions. These companies are more likely to have the budget and willingness to engage with your offerings.

2. Improve Outreach Timing

Timing is everything in B2B sales. By knowing when a company has received funding, you can time your outreach perfectly to coincide with their growth phases, increasing the likelihood of engagement and conversion.

3. Target High-Potential Leads

Scraping fundraising data for outreach reveals which companies are on a growth trajectory. These companies are likely to be expanding their operations, entering new markets, or scaling their infrastructure, making them high-potential leads for your outreach efforts.

4. Reduce Waste in Marketing Efforts

Focusing your efforts on how to find funded startups with ample financial backing and growth momentum reduces the likelihood of wasting resources on prospects who might not buy. 

By doing this, you’re able to use your marketing and sales teams’ efforts in a more targeted and effective manner. 

5. Enhance Personalization

Knowing a company’s recent funding status allows you to tailor your pitch to their current needs and growth plans. This personalized approach can significantly improve your engagement rates and the overall effectiveness of your outreach.

6. Stay Ahead of Competitors

Being proactive in identifying and reaching out to newly funded companies helps you stay ahead of competitors who might be slower to react. This early engagement can give you a strategic advantage in building relationships with high-growth startups.

7. Build Long-Term Relationships

Companies that have just received funding are at the beginning of their growth journey. Engaging with them early on allows you to build long-term relationships, positioning your company as a trusted partner as they continue to grow and evolve.

By mining fundraising data, you can transform your outreach strategy, ensuring you connect with the right companies at the right time, thereby maximizing your chances of success in the competitive B2B landscape.

Get Started with Mining Fundraising Data for Outreach: Full AI Workflow

Mining fundraising data gets easy with Clay, the AI-powered data enrichment platform for outbound. Over the next few paragraphs, we’ll explore how to find funded startups, scrape their data and use these triggers to time your outreach for success: 

Step 1: Initial Setup and Criteria Definition

To start mining fundraising data, you need to define the criteria for your target companies. This helps in narrowing down the list to the most relevant prospects and ensures that your outreach efforts are highly targeted and effective.

Here’s a quick example of precise targeting & criteria definition: 

• Location: Companies based in the UK or Europe 
• Employee Count: 10 to 20 employees
• Funding raised: $1 million and above in the last 6 months 
• Industry: B2B SaaS 
• AOV: $5,000 and above 
• Founder Status: Targeting first-time founders 
• Team composition: Exclude companies with sales executives, and focus on targeting companies that don’t have a Head/VP of Sales or similar roles. 

In addition to the above, we’ll be focusing on companies with a growing headcount in the last 6 months – which is a strong indicator of companies which are likely experiencing increasing demand for their product or services. Such businesses are often in the market for new tools and solutions to aid their expansion. 

By clearly defining these criteria, you set a strong foundation to leverage fundraising data for outreach efforts, ensuring that your time and resources are spent on the most promising prospects.

Step 2: Using Sales Navigator for List Building

While there are multiple ways to build a strong list of funded companies’ decision-makers, we’ll be using the LinkedIn Sales Navigator for this example. We’d look to identify first-time founders with job titles such as the following under the ‘Current job title’ filter: 

• Founder
• Co-founder 
• Owner
• Partner

It’s important to exclude any past titles along similar lines under ‘Past Job Titles’. Once you do this, you can add other filters such as the location of your prospects among others. Going in with a really broad search, it’s entirely possible to have a large number of leads, which can be beneficial for your outreach. 

To scrape more narrow fundraising data, you can apply filters such as the industry, 

Step 3: Mining fundraising data & enriching it

To start mining fundraising data for outreach, you can use a tool like PhantomBuster, which allows you to extract company data from the Sales Navigator and then export it as a CSV for further processing. 

After this, we’ll start enriching the fundraising data for outreach using Clay, the AI-powered data enrichment tool. Simply upload the CSV on Clay, and use Clay’s deduplication feature to remove duplicate entries, if any. 

Since these company data lists also contain the company description, you can leverage a ChatGPT prompt to analyze these descriptions and determine if the companies on your list are B2B SaaS businesses or not. 

The prompt could something like: 

“You are an outreach expert with 20+ years of business understanding. Based on the company description provided, can you check and analyze if the given company is a B2B software-as-a service business or not? A software-as-a-service (SaaS) company is one where a cloud provider hosts applications and makes them available to users on the Internet. Make sure the output is either a ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ only. Do not return any other output or sentences justifying your answer.”

Now this isn’t a fool-proof, error-free method, but it can definitely be a good starting point. You can start mining fundraising data for these companies once you know which of them are a fit as per your criteria. 

Step 4: Using Claygent to identify sales-led companies 

The next step to start mining fundraising data for outreach involves identifying companies that are sales-led in nature. By utilizing the AI web scraping capabilities of Claygent, you can ask the scraper to go to the website and locate any links, buttons or menu items that allow visitors to book a call or a sales demo with the reps.

If Claygent is able to locate this option on the prospect’s website, we can ask it to return a value ‘1’ (where 1 equals true) and if it isn’t, the output should be 0 (where 0 equals false). Make sure to mention that the output shouldn’t be anything else than the above two values. 

Similar to the GPT method, this technique isn’t fool-proof, but can be a good starting point. If you want to enrich the information further (especially around pricing), you can choose to fetch insights from the likes of G2, Capterra and others. 

Step 7: Checking for key personnel & headcount growth 

In the next step to scrape funded companies with Clay, you’ll need to check for key personnel within the company. Here, we usually would want to check if the companies have a VP or Head of Sales alongside tracking the headcount growth in the company’s sales department over the past 6-12 months. 

To do this, you can leverage the ‘Find Company Headcount Growth’ enrichment and analyze the percentage growth in employee count for the last 6-12 months. Anything above zero is good, and the higher the number, the better it is for our outreach. 

Make sure to leave out companies with a negative headcount percentage growth in the specified period. 

Step 8: Mining fundraising data for outreach 

The next step after checking for headcount growth is to start mining fundraising data for your outreach efforts. To do this, you can leverage external sources like Crunchbase, ZoomInfo or Pitchbook – scraping relevant data to find companies that have raised over $1 million in the last 6 months. 

To do this, you can leverage the Google search API by serper.dev, which offers a cheaper alternative compared to spending exclusive Clay credits – using it to put together a search query (site: pitchbook.com/profiles/company www.autone.io) via Crunchbase, Pitchbook or Zoominfo. 

In the next step, we leverage a tool called Firecrawl to give them a website & receive scraped information about the company/website in markdown format. Once you have this information, you can either use GPT to further ask questions around the scraped information, or simply apply a formula to extract specific information from the content. 

We’ll create a new column titled “Funding information” and run the following formula there: 

“{{HTTP API (1)}}? .data?.content?.split (* ### How much funding has’ + {{Find People from Sales Navigator URL}}?.companyName + ‘raised over time’?) [1]?.split (*) [0]”

Using the above formula you can ask questions around the total funding raised by a company alongside insights like the date of their last deal, how much money they’ve raised over time and so on. 

Step 8: Automation & final compilation 

In the final step to start mining fundraising data for outreach, you can use PhantomBuster to extract data from Sales Navigator and integrate it with Clay to automate the filtering and data enrichment processes. 

Once you’ve ensured that all the criteria are met and all hypotheses validated, you can finalize the data set to start your outreach. You can start small, narrowing down your outreach to say, 400 companies by applying the filters & running the automation inside Clay. 

Mining Fundraising Data & Scaling Outbound Like A Pro With Cleverviral’s AI Outbound Solutions 

By following the above steps, you can effectively start mining fundraising data & create a highly targeted list of prospects for your outreach efforts. Using tools like Clay and GPT allows you to enrich your data & ensure you’re reaching out to the right companies at the right time. 

Once the data strategy & list building part is solved, you can simply write highly-personalized cold emails and use the insights from the above workflow to launch a cold email campaign yourself. 

You can also leverage the experience of AI outbound experts at Cleverviral, where we assist companies with their outbound efforts using a variety of sales triggers, AI workflows and personalized communication. 
To move ahead, simply fill out the form on our website or write to us on [email protected]. Once you do so, our experts will get in touch with you shortly and understand your requirements.

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