Replace manual account research with competitive displacement data in the CRM
This agent researches target accounts to find which competitor they use and why, then puts that context in the CRM. Reps get something they can sell against instead of a bare yes or no.
Paste this into ChatGPT, Claude or your agent tool. See the prompt
- Prospecting / Outbound
- intermediate
- RevOps
- Sales leader
- AE
- Category
- Prospecting / Outbound
- Difficulty
- Intermediate
- Est. cost
- Not stated in comparable terms; the case study says the Clay contract cost less than the prior manual research contract (sourced)
Works with
Problem
A contractor's manual research produced yes or no answers about accounts that did not tell reps who the incumbent was or why. Reps needed competitive context they could sell against.
Setup
A-LIGN's GTM operations team built Clay workflows that researched a list of target accounts for whether each used specific services, why, and which competitor provided them, then pushed the results into Salesforce for reps. A separate workflow enriched contacts with current locations from LinkedIn for event targeting.
Prompt
Starter prompt by The GTM Agent Weekly, written from the setup described on this page. It is not the source's own prompt; see the source link below for their write-up.
# ROLE
You are a competitive research assistant for a sales team. For each target account you find
out which of our service categories they already buy, why, and from which provider, so reps
can open with a displacement angle instead of a generic pitch.
# INPUTS
- {{ACCOUNT_LIST}}: company names and domains to research (e.g. a Clay table or CSV).
- {{SERVICE_CATEGORIES}}: the services we sell that a competitor might provide today.
- {{COMPETITORS}}: known providers in each category.
- {{WEB_SEARCH}}: a web search tool, plus the company's own site and public filings.
# TASK
For each account:
1. For each category in {{SERVICE_CATEGORIES}}, answer three questions, not a yes or no:
which service do they use, why do they appear to need it, and which provider supplies it.
2. Use only public evidence (their site, press releases, trust or compliance pages, case
studies, job posts). Keep the URL for every answer.
3. If you cannot find evidence, write "unknown". Never guess a provider.
4. Write a one-line displacement angle the rep could open with, based only on what you found.
# OUTPUT FORMAT (one row per account)
account | category | current provider or "unknown" | why they need it | evidence URL | opening angle
# GUARDRAILS
- No invented providers, dates or contract details.
- Prefer recent sources; flag anything older than {{MAX_AGE_MONTHS}} months as "possibly stale".
- Contact or location data from old pages goes stale fast: mark the source date next to it.
- Output is for the CRM fields {{CRM_FIELDS}}; keep each value short enough to fit. Replace every {{PLACEHOLDER}} before running. Works with any capable LLM and runner.
Tools
Steps
- Rewrite the research questions from yes or no checks to 'which service, why, and which provider'.
- Run the research workflow across the target account list in Clay.
- Push the resulting competitive fields into Salesforce where reps work.
- Tag opportunities sourced from the displacement data so results can be tracked (the source used a SPIFF program for this).
Results
The vendor case study reports large gains in research volume and lower cost versus the contractor, and attributes pipeline and closed revenue to tagged displacement deals. Figures are vendor-reported; see the source.
What goes wrong
Gotchas
- Attribution relies on reps tagging deals as displacement deals, which can over- or under-count. (editor note)
- Contact data from email signatures was stale; the team pulled locations from LinkedIn instead, so check freshness of any enrichment source.
- Research quality depends on asking specific questions; the source's first version only produced checkboxes.
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Source and credit
Clay customer story, quoting Arthur Lorente, A-LIGN · vendor
Source dated 2026-10-11 · last reviewed 2026-10-11. Summarized in our own words; see the source for details.