The People You Forgot

Your CRM has maybe sixty people in it.

Your actual network is somewhere north of three thousand. Everybody you've ever emailed twice, sat next to at a conference, worked with at a company you left in 2019, hired, got hired by, referred, been referred by, argued with on a podcast. All of it real, all of it sitting in your email and calendar as raw data, and none of it accessible when you need it.

That gap is the most valuable underused asset in most small businesses, and the reason it stays underused is that the tool for it doesn't exist in the category people look in. You go shopping for a CRM and get pipeline software. Pipeline software is for people you're selling to right now. It's completely useless for the four hundred people who'd take your call and don't know you need one.

This week's tool is Clay, and it's the closest thing I've found to a fix.

Clay connects to your email, calendar and contacts, and builds a searchable graph of everyone you've ever interacted with. Then it keeps that graph current by enriching it from public sources, so when somebody changes jobs, gets promoted, moves cities or starts a company, you find out.

That's the whole product, and the fact that it's a small product is the reason it works. It's not trying to be your sales system. It's trying to answer one question well: who do I know, and what's true about them right now?

Setup is about thirty minutes and it's mostly waiting. Connect Google or Microsoft, connect LinkedIn, let it index. First pass on a decade of email takes a few hours in the background. Come back and you've got a network you can search in plain language.

One note on what to connect, because it matters. Connect the account where your real professional relationships live. If that's a personal Gmail from before you started the business, connect that one, not the shiny company address you've had for eighteen months. The value is in the depth of history, and history is where you actually built the relationships.

I'd skip connecting anything with client confidential material in it. Not because Clay is careless, but because the correct default with any tool that indexes everything is to give it less rather than more, and you'll get ninety percent of the value from your general professional inbox alone.

Job change alerts. This is the headline feature and it's worth the price on its own. Somebody in your network takes a new role, you get told. More on why this matters in a minute, because it's the single best outreach trigger that exists and most people never use it.

Plain language search across your own history. "Who do I know in commercial real estate in Texas." "Who have I met who's worked at an agency." "Who did I meet at that conference in March." It searches people you actually know rather than a database of strangers, which is a completely different thing from what a prospecting tool does.

Pre meeting briefs. Before a call it surfaces who they are, when you last spoke, what about, mutual connections, what's changed since. Thirty seconds of prep that makes you look like you did thirty minutes.

The reconnect queue. It notices when a relationship that used to be active has gone quiet. Not in a nagging way. Just a list of people you used to talk to monthly and haven't spoken to since February.

That last one is the feature that makes the money, and it's also the one people ignore, because a list of names is not a system. Which brings us to the part that matters.

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A tool that surfaces opportunities you don't act on is a subscription with extra steps. Here's the routine that turns it into revenue.

Every Friday, twenty minutes, same slot, on the calendar like a client meeting. You're sending five messages. Not six, not twelve. Five.

Where they come from, in priority order:

1. Anyone with a job change in the last two weeks. These jump the queue always. Take as many as there are.

2. Anyone you've gone quiet with who was previously a real relationship. From the reconnect queue, oldest first.

3. Anyone connected to something you're actively working on. If you're doing work in a vertical, search your network for that vertical and take whoever's relevant.

Fill to five and stop. The stopping is as important as the sending, because the reason people don't do this consistently isn't that it's hard, it's that they try to do forty and then never do it again.

Four templates cover almost everything. Keep them short. The single most common failure in reconnect outreach is length, because length signals that you want something.

The job change one. Two sentences. "Saw you landed at [company], congratulations. [One specific thing you actually think about the move or the company.]" That's it. No ask. The specific thing is mandatory and it's what separates this from the automated congratulations they're getting from eleven people who set an alert.

The gone quiet one. "Been a while. [Thing that made me think of you.] How's [specific thing you remember they were working on]?" The specificity does all the work. Remembering what somebody was building eighteen months ago is a currency almost nobody spends.

The relevant one. "Working on something in [space] and remembered you know it well. Not pitching you, genuinely just curious what you're seeing." People love being asked for their read. Almost nobody asks.

The giving one. You send them something with no ask attached. An intro they'd want, an article about their exact problem, a customer. This is the best one and it's the one you'll use least, which is a sentence worth thinking about.

Rule that makes the whole thing work: no pitch on the first touch. Ever. The first message rebuilds the relationship. If there's business, it appears in message three or four, usually because they raised it. A reconnect that turns into a pitch teaches people not to reply to your reconnects.

Worth spending a minute on this because it's the highest leverage trigger in business development and it's basically free.

Somebody who just started a new job is in a window. They have budget they haven't allocated, problems they've inherited and didn't create, political capital they're looking to spend on a visible win, and a strong incentive to bring in people they trust rather than inherit the last person's vendors.

That window is roughly the first ninety days and then it closes hard.

A message during that window from somebody they already know and like is not a sales call. It's a friendly note that happens to arrive exactly when they're deciding who to work with. The conversion rate difference between that and cold outreach isn't a percentage, it's an order of magnitude.

Manually tracking job changes across three thousand people is impossible. That's the whole reason this feature is the product.

Don't take my word for whether this works for you. Run the number.

For thirty days, log four things in a sheet. Messages sent. Replies received. Calls booked. Opportunities named, meaning somebody said out loud that there might be work.

At the end, you'll have real figures. My expectation from watching people run this: five messages a week is twenty over the month, and you should see somewhere between eight and fourteen replies, two to four calls, and at least one named opportunity. If the relationships are older or the network is smaller, adjust down. If you've been in an industry twenty years, adjust up considerably.

Then do the math against the subscription. One named opportunity in a month against a tool that costs less than a decent dinner is not a close call. Zero replies in a month means either your network isn't what you thought or your messages are too long, and both of those are worth knowing for free.

Keep the sheet after the trial. The compounding is the real story here. Month one is a trickle. Month eight, you've touched two hundred and forty people, and the referral flow from that is a different business than the one you started with.

Being straight about the limits, because I'd rather you skip it than be annoyed.

It's not a sales CRM. No pipeline, no deal stages, no forecasting, no sequences. If you need to manage twelve active deals through six stages, this doesn't do that and isn't trying to. It sits alongside whatever you use for that, and honestly the separation is correct. Mixing "people I'm selling to" with "people I know" is how both lists become useless.

It's not automation. There's no bulk send, and if there were you shouldn't use it. The value is in five personal messages, and the moment you templatize that into a campaign you've rebuilt the thing that doesn't work.

The enrichment isn't perfect. Job data lags reality by anywhere from a few days to a few weeks, and the smaller the company the worse the coverage. For people at recognizable companies it's solid. For somebody who just started a two person shop, you'll likely hear it from them first.

And it can't fix a network you don't have. If you've been heads down for five years and genuinely don't know anybody, this surfaces an empty room. Go meet people first.

Skip this if your business is transactional and local. If you run a service business where customers find you on a map and buy once, your network isn't the growth lever, your reviews are.

Skip it if you're pre revenue and pre network. Spend the money on getting in rooms.

Buy it if you've been in an industry more than five years, if a meaningful share of your business has ever come from somebody who knew somebody, or if you've had the specific experience of finding out a former colleague bought exactly what you sell from somebody else because they didn't know you did it.

That last one stings, and it's the real pitch. Not the software. The number of times that's already happened to you.

Two things that make this better.

Run Fathom on your calls so that when you reconnect with somebody in eight months, the detail you need is in a transcript instead of your memory. The combination of "Clay tells me who to talk to" and "Fathom tells me what we said last time" is most of what a relationship system needs to be.

And put the reconnect log somewhere durable. I use Notion, one row per touch, with the date, the person, which template, and what came back. Six months in, that table tells you which of your four templates actually works, and the answer is usually not the one you'd guess.

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Before you sign up for anything, do the free version of this exercise, because it tells you whether the problem is real.

Open your email. Search for the name of somebody you did good work with three or more years ago and haven't spoken to since. Read the last thread.

Then ask yourself honestly: how many more of those are in there?

If the answer makes you slightly uncomfortable, go connect your accounts and put twenty minutes on your calendar for next Friday. If the answer is "not many," you just saved yourself a subscription and learned something more useful than the tool would have told you.

Jordan

The AI Newsroom | Practical AI for people with a business to run.