Clay AI Development for Vendor Recruitment System

Clay AI Automation & Lead Generation Specialist — Build Automated Vendor Recruitment System

Project Type: One-time setup + potential ongoing development
Platform: Freelancer.com
Experience Level: Expert
Preferred: Someone with proven experience building systems in Clay

About the Project

Our Financial Health (OFH) is building a nationwide network of qualified financial-service and professional-service providers who can serve clients in our financial wellness and Pathway to Homeownership programs.

We are looking for an experienced Clay developer / AI automation specialist to build an automated prospecting, verification, qualification, and outreach system.

The goal is to create a system that can continuously identify qualified professionals online, research and verify them, organize them into the appropriate category, and automatically initiate personalized email and SMS outreach.

What We Need the System to Do
1. Find Qualified Professionals

The system should be able to identify businesses and professionals such as:

Insurance agents and independent insurance brokers
Life insurance professionals
Financial-service professionals
Credit repair companies and credit specialists
Estate planning attorneys
Wills & trusts attorneys
Elder-law / estate-planning professionals
Mortgage professionals
Other financial and professional-service providers we may add later

The system should be able to search the web and relevant business/data sources to identify potential vendors.

2. Research & Verify Prospects

The AI should research each prospect and determine:

Business name
Contact person's name
Professional/company type
Website
Business location
Email address
Phone number
Services offered
Whether the business appears legitimate/active
Whether they fit OFH's vendor requirements
Other relevant information needed for qualification

We want the system to verify information before adding prospects to an outreach campaign whenever possible.

3. AI Qualification

We want AI to review the information it finds and categorize prospects.

For example:

Category: Insurance
Type: Life Insurance Agent
Website: Verified
Email: Verified
Phone: Verified
OFH Vendor Fit: Yes
Reason: Offers financial products/services relevant to OFH clients.

The qualification criteria should be adjustable so our team can change the requirements without rebuilding the entire system.

4. AI-Personalized Outreach

Once a prospect is verified and qualified, the system should be capable of generating personalized outreach based on information found about that particular business.

The system should support:

Personalized email
Follow-up emails
SMS outreach where legally permitted and appropriately consented/handled
Different messaging for different vendor categories
Different campaigns for insurance, credit repair, estate planning, etc.

The outreach should not look like generic mass spam.

5. Automated Follow-Up

We want an automated sequence such as:

Day 1: Initial email
Day 2–3: Follow-up
Day 5: Additional follow-up
Day 7+: Final follow-up / appropriate closeout

The exact sequence should be configurable.

SMS should also be configurable separately with appropriate opt-out and compliance controls.

6. Response Handling

We would like the system to identify responses and categorize them where possible:

Interested
Wants more information
Wants to schedule a meeting
Not interested
Wrong person
Unqualified
Do not contact
No response

Interested prospects should be moved into the appropriate CRM/workflow for our OFH team.

7. Appointment Booking

Ideally, interested prospects should receive a link to schedule a Zoom meeting with our team.

We currently use tools such as Calendly and are open to recommendations for better integrations.

8. CRM / Data Management

The system should maintain a clean database of prospects and prevent duplicate outreach.

We need to be able to see:

Prospect
Category
Contact information
Verification status
Qualification status
Outreach status
Last contact
Response
Appointment status
Notes
Source of the prospect

We are open to using Clay's native capabilities and/or integrating Clay with another CRM or database.

Ideal Technical Experience

You should have demonstrated experience with:

Clay
Clay Tables
Claygent / Clay AI research
Web research and lead generation
Data enrichment
Email verification
Lead qualification
AI personalization
API integrations
Zapier or Make
CRM integrations
Email sequencing platforms
SMS platforms
Calendly or similar scheduling platforms
Webhooks
Google Maps/business data
Domain/email verification
Automation workflows

Experience with Smartlead, Instantly, Twilio, Telnyx, HubSpot, Zoho, GoHighLevel, or similar platforms is a plus.

Important: We Are NOT Looking for a Basic Lead Scraper

We do not simply want someone to scrape thousands of names and emails.

We want an intelligent vendor recruitment system that can:

Find → Research → Verify → Qualify → Personalize → Contact → Follow Up → Categorize Responses → Book Appointments

The system needs to be designed for scalability.

Initial Goal

We would like to build the system so our team can eventually enter something like:

"Find 500 qualified independent life insurance professionals in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania."

The system should then perform as much of the process as possible automatically:

Prospecting → Enrichment → Verification → Qualification → Campaign Assignment → Personalized Outreach → Follow-Up → CRM

We should also be able to change the search criteria and vendor category without requiring a developer to rebuild the system.

Deliverables

The selected freelancer will be expected to:

Design the overall automation architecture.
Set up our Clay environment.
Build the prospecting workflows.
Build AI research/qualification workflows.
Set up data enrichment and verification.
Create vendor-category qualification criteria.
Create personalized email generation.
Integrate email outreach.
Integrate SMS where appropriate.
Build automated follow-up sequences.
Connect the system to our CRM/workflow.
Create duplicate prevention.
Create response categorization.
Connect appointment scheduling.
Create documentation explaining how the system works.
Train our team on how to operate and modify the system.
Provide recommendations for scaling the system.
Security & Compliance

The system must be designed responsibly and should include appropriate:

Email verification
Opt-out handling
Do-not-contact/suppression lists
Duplicate prevention
Rate limits
Sender reputation protection
Data-quality controls
Applicable email/SMS compliance considerations

We do not want an uncontrolled system that simply sends thousands of unsolicited messages.

What We Want From Applicants

Please do NOT send a generic proposal.

In your proposal, answer these questions:

How many Clay automation projects have you completed?
Please provide examples of Clay systems you have built.
Have you built automated prospecting systems using Clay?
Have you integrated Clay with email sequencing platforms?
Have you integrated SMS into an automated lead-generation system?
What tools would you recommend for email verification?
What tools would you recommend for SMS?
How would you prevent duplicate prospects?
How would you have AI determine whether an insurance agent or professional is actually qualified for our program?
What CRM/database would you recommend for this project?
How would you structure the system so we can add new vendor categories later?
What would you estimate the initial development cost to be?
What would you estimate the monthly software/API costs to be?
How long would you expect the initial build to take?
Preferred Candidate

We are looking for someone who can think beyond individual automations and build a complete scalable AI prospecting and vendor-recruitment infrastructure.

If you have experience building Clay-based systems that find, research, enrich, qualify, personalize, and automatically contact prospects, please apply.

Potential for ongoing work after the initial system is successfully completed.