Partner Prospect Research

This drill identifies companies with newsletters whose audiences overlap your ICP, audits their newsletters for fit and reach, and produces a ranked partner prospect list ready for outreach.

Input

• Your ICP definition (firmographics, buyer persona, pain points)
• Minimum audience size threshold (default: 1,000 subscribers)
• Target number of qualified partners (default: 20)

Steps

1. Source partner candidates from Clay

Use the clay-company-search fundamental to find companies that share your ICP's audience but are not competitors. Search for:

• Companies in adjacent categories (complementary products, not substitutes)
• Companies serving the same buyer persona (same titles, same industries)
• Companies at a similar or larger stage (their newsletter needs to have meaningful reach)

Set Clay filters: industry overlap with your ICP, employee count 10-500, and exclude companies in your direct competitive set. Pull 100-200 candidates.

2. Enrich partner candidates

Use the clay-enrichment-waterfall fundamental to add:

• Company domain and website
• LinkedIn company URL
• Employee count and funding stage
• Contact info for the partnerships/marketing lead (name, email, LinkedIn)

3. Audit each partner's newsletter

For the top 50 candidates (sorted by company fit), run the partner-newsletter-audit fundamental. For each partner, assess:

• Does the newsletter exist and is it active?
• What is the estimated subscriber count?
• Does the audience match your ICP?
• Do they already feature partner content?

Score each newsletter on the 1-5 scale across four dimensions (audience overlap, audience size, engagement quality, co-marketing friendliness). Keep partners scoring 14+ out of 20.

4. Check account overlap with Crossbeam

If you have Crossbeam configured, use the crossbeam-account-mapping fundamental to check which partners share the most overlapping target accounts. Partners with high account overlap are the highest-value co-marketing targets because their readers are literally your prospects.

5. Build the ranked partner list in Attio

Use the attio-lists fundamental to create a list called "Newsletter Partners — {date}". Add qualified partners with fields:

• Company name and domain
• Newsletter name and signup URL
• Estimated subscriber count
• Newsletter score (out of 20)
• Account overlap count (from Crossbeam, if available)
• Contact name, email, and LinkedIn URL for the partnerships/marketing lead
• Status: "Prospect" (initial state)

Sort by newsletter score descending. The top 10-20 are your outreach targets.

Output

• Ranked list of 10-20 qualified newsletter partners in Attio
• Each partner scored on newsletter quality, audience fit, and account overlap
• Contact info for the right person at each partner company
• Ready for outreach via the warm-intro-request or cold-email-sequence drill

Triggers

Run this drill once at Smoke level, then quarterly at Baseline+ to refresh the partner pipeline.