Competitive Displacement Research Automation
2025Objective
The team was paying $60K/year for a contractor to manually research 2,000 accounts over six months. The output: a spreadsheet with yes/no answers across 15 compliance services. Not actionable. Reps couldn't do anything with "yes, they do SOC 2" — they needed to know who was providing it and why the company needed it. The goal was to replace that with automated research that actually helped reps sell.
About the build
Built a Clay workflow that researched 2,000 accounts across 15 compliance services. For each service, the workflow captured three things: whether the company used it, the reason they needed it, and which competitor was currently providing it. That three-part structure turned binary data into displacement intelligence. The results were pushed directly into Salesforce where reps work.
Timeline: deployed 20/03/2025, fully live in Salesforce by 22/05/2025. The Clay contract also cost $10K less than the manual research contract it replaced.
Results
Where it stands now
Since the initial proof of concept, I've taken this from pilot into full production ownership. The technical build and the list inputs (who gets researched, on what cadence) are mine. BDRs own outbound execution; I sit alongside them in a consultative role.
Scale
The refresh cadence has grown substantially too, from roughly monthly early on to a steady run every two to three weeks today, well over two full batches a month on average. Between batches, AEs add one-off findings manually as they work accounts.
Frameworks tracked have grown from 15 at launch to roughly 20 today.
Two process changes worth flagging. First, the original pilot pushed every account-service check into Salesforce, hit or miss. After watching how reps actually used the data, I changed that, only confirmed positive findings get pushed now, null results were dead weight nobody touched. Second, I built automatic suppression into the Clay workflow itself: once an account is searched, it won't be searched again for 3–6 months depending on segment, and old account-service records clear out automatically when a newer finding supersedes them. No manual list-checking required.
Pipeline impact
These are program-wide totals as of time of writing, and include the original 2025 figures cited in the Clay case study below, not in addition to them.