Champion Tracking: How to Turn Customer Job Changes Into New Opportunities

Taimoor Tariq, lead at Clay Club Berlin, recently demonstrated a powerful workflow that transforms customer job changes into revenue opportunities. If you're using Clay and HubSpot, this champion tracking strategy is something you can implement today.

Why Champion Tracking Matters

While Clay offers countless use cases—CRM enrichment, TAM sourcing, inbound lead enrichment, and intent-based outreach—champion tracking stands out as one of the most immediately valuable applications. Rather than starting with cold prospecting, this approach begins with your existing customers, the people who already know and trust your product.

The logic is simple: when a customer moves to a new company, they bring their positive experience with your product along with them. They're your best advocates, already familiar with your value proposition and potentially positioned to champion your solution at their new organization.

The Champion Tracking Workflow

Taimoor walked through a workflow built for Blinkist, a company known for its B2C offering but which also serves B2B customers. Here's how the system works:

Step 1: Build Your Customer List in HubSpot

Start by creating a list of all customers in HubSpot. For this workflow, Taimoor focused specifically on customers without LinkedIn profiles already in the system—essentially, contacts that need enrichment.

Step 2: Enrich LinkedIn Profiles

The first critical step in any person enrichment is getting to their LinkedIn profile. Taimoor uses a waterfall approach with three different models:

• OpenAI's GPT-4o mini (first attempt)
• OpenAI's GPT-4o (second attempt)
• LinkedIn's own model (final attempt)

By bringing your own API keys, you avoid using Clay credits while building your own enrichment system. The result? A very high hit rate with built-in verification to confirm the person worked at the same company.

Once you have the LinkedIn profile, you have access to an enriched JSON file with comprehensive profile data.

Step 3: Classify and Analyze Profiles

Rather than relying solely on job titles—which can be broad and inconsistent—Taimoor uses an AI agent to analyze the entire LinkedIn profile and classify contacts into specific personas. For Blinkist, these include:

• Learning and development professionals
• HR leaders
• Program managers
• Strategic leaders

This classification helps marketing and sales teams target their outreach more effectively.

Step 4: Detect Job Changes

The system monitors for two key changes:

• Title changes: Has the person's role evolved?
• Company changes: Has the person moved to a new organization?

When a change is detected, the new information is automatically enriched and sent back to HubSpot. Because this runs on a schedule, Clay continuously monitors your customer base for job changes without manual intervention.

Step 5: Qualify the New Company

Not every job change represents an opportunity. For Blinkist, the system checks if the new company has more than 100 employees—their minimum threshold for outreach. If the company doesn't meet the criteria, the workflow stops. If it does, the system moves forward with enrichment.

Step 6: Gather Internal Context

Here's where the workflow gets sophisticated. Before reaching out, the system:

• Looks up the old company in HubSpot to access historical data
• Retrieves all deals associated with that account
• Uses AI to analyze deal history and extract relationship details

The goal is to answer key questions:

• What was the relationship like when they worked with you?
• Which products did they use?
• How long were they a customer?
• Were they the main point of contact?
• If not, who was the primary contact? (This person becomes valuable for name-dropping in outreach)

This context transforms a generic message into something personal and relevant.

Step 7: Research the New Company and Role

The system uses Perplexity AI agents to gather:

• Recent news and developments about the new company
• Details about the contact's new role and responsibilities

This research ensures your outreach is timely and demonstrates genuine interest in their new position.

Step 8: Generate Personalized Copy

Using Claude AI, the system generates multiple pieces of outreach content:

• First email copy
• Email subject line
• LinkedIn connection message
• Follow-up messages

All of this content pulls from the enriched data and context gathered in previous steps, creating highly personalized messages that reference specific details about the past relationship and the new opportunity.

Step 9: Human-in-the-Loop Approval

One of the biggest concerns with AI-generated outreach is quality control, especially when reaching out to existing customers. Taimoor's workflow addresses this with a human-in-the-loop approval process using Clay's newer features.

The system sends the generated message to Slack, where a salesperson can:

• Review the message and all enriched context
• Edit the copy directly in Slack if needed
• Approve or reject the message

Once approved, the final message flows back into the Clay table.

Step 10: Multi-Channel Outreach

After approval, the system executes outreach across multiple channels:

• HubSpot email: The approved copy and subject line are added as fields in HubSpot, triggering a workflow that enrolls the contact in a sequence
• LinkedIn outreach via HeyReach: A connection request is sent simultaneously

A connection between HubSpot and HeyReach keeps both channels in sync. If the contact responds on either platform, they're automatically removed from both sequences to prevent duplicate outreach.

Key Takeaways

Taimoor's champion tracking workflow demonstrates several best practices:

• Start with customers, not prospects: Your existing customers are your best source of warm leads
• Use AI for enrichment, not replacement: AI handles data gathering and draft creation, but humans make the final call
• Prioritize context over volume: The more relevant information you gather internally, the more personalized and effective your outreach becomes
• Schedule and automate: Once built, this workflow runs continuously without manual intervention
• Sync your tools: Keeping HubSpot and your outreach tools connected prevents duplicate messaging and provides a unified view

This approach to champion tracking shows how Clay and HubSpot can work together to turn passive customer data into active revenue opportunities—all while maintaining the personal touch that makes B2B relationships successful.