Which lead lists does a portfolio company already own?
Six: deals lost in the last 18 months, champions who changed jobs, former employees of customers, the investors' other companies, inbound leads nobody answered, and people who engage with the company's LinkedIn posts. Each is one query against data the company or its fund already holds, plus an enrichment step.
The usual move when a portfolio company needs pipeline is to buy a cold list and send to strangers. The six lists below are warmer, and the company already owns the data for five of them. The sixth belongs to the fund. Write the six queries once and every company in the portfolio gets its lists, refreshed every week.
Why start with lists the company already owns?
Because the people on them have already met the product, the company or the fund. A lost deal knows the pitch. A former champion bought it once. A shared investor can make the introduction. None of that is true of a purchased list, however well it is filtered. The lists below need no new data beyond enrichment credits, and the first three come straight out of the CRM.
How is each list built, and who works it?
| # | List | Data it comes from | Clay step | Who works it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Deals lost in the last 18 months | CRM closed-lost opportunities | Import the accounts; enrich for new executives, funding rounds and headcount change since the loss; flag the ones where something changed | The rep who owned the deal |
| 2 | Champions who changed jobs | Contacts on closed-won deals | Job-change check on each contact; when the employer changes, create the new company as an account and score it against the ICP | Account manager, then a rep |
| 3 | Former employees of customers | Customer domain list | People search where the past employer is a customer and the current one is not; enrich the current company; score | SDR |
| 4 | The investors' other companies | Cap table, plus the fund's portfolio | Investor enrichment to list each investor's portfolio; remove customers and open deals; score against the ICP; record the shared investor as the intro path | CEO and the board for the intro; the fund's operating partner builds it |
| 5 | Inbound leads nobody answered | Form fills and leads with no activity logged | Enrich, score, route to a rep in Slack with the original message attached | Inbound owner or SDR |
| 6 | People who engage with the company's LinkedIn posts | Public likes and comments on the company's and founders' posts | Pull the engagers through a LinkedIn data provider; enrich; score against the ICP; push matches to a sequence | Whoever writes the posts, then an SDR |
Deals lost in the last 18 months
Pull closed-lost and check what changed since. A new executive, a funding round, a competitor gone quiet. Those are the deals to reopen, and the rep already knows the account. Clay's PE playbook has the same row in its portfolio matrix: closed-lost moves from "no re-engagement process" to "context-based auto-reactivation".
Champions who changed jobs
The person who signed off on your product now works somewhere else. Their new company is a warm lead, and they take the call. The enrichment is a job-change check against each contact's current employer, run monthly.
Former employees of your customers
They used the product every day. Find where they work now. This is a people search with two filters, past employer and current employer, and it returns people who can describe the product better than the sales deck can.
Your investors' other companies
The fund's portfolio, plus every VC and angel on the cap table. A shared investor is the warmest intro there is, as a customer, a partner, or one day an acquirer. This list only exists if you own more than one company, and it is the one list the portfolio companies cannot build for themselves. Keep each company's data its own: the fund holds the overlap, not the CRMs.
Inbound leads nobody answered
Demo requests and form fills that sat in the CRM for weeks. Enrich them, score them, route each one to a rep with the original message attached. Hg's blueprint lists inbound lead enrichment, combining firmographic, technographic and intent data for every prospect, among the first workflows worth standardising.
People who engage with the company's LinkedIn posts
Pull the likes and comments, score them against the ICP, reach out. The post does the prospecting. The engagement tells you who to call. We run this list on our own posts. Use the company's own accounts and a data provider whose terms you have checked.
How often do the lists refresh?
Weekly, on a schedule. Each list is one query. Set the six to rerun in Clay every Monday and send each company's results to its own Slack channel with the count and the top ten names.