2026 Playbook: Convert Competitors’ Fans Into Hot Leads

Ever wonder what’s one of the simplest ways to build a list of high-quality prospects?

Here’s a little secret: look at who’s already following your competitors.

Think about it…these people already know they have the problem you solve. They’re out there searching for answers, paying attention to others in your space. Some of them might even be trying those solutions right now…but still looking for something better.

That’s why reaching out to them doesn’t feel so “cold.” 

They’re warm = already aware, already interested. And when you approach them the right way, you can easily see 2x–5x better reply rates than if you were just pulling a list based on basic filters like industry or company size.

In this quick guide, I’ll show you exactly how to:

1. Find the right competitors and surface their followers
2. Turn those followers into a list of quality prospects
3. Write outreach messages that actually get replies
4. Run the whole playbook step-by-step with the right tools

Before we dive in, let’s get your tools ready. Don’t worry! You won’t need much. 

Just a few essentials to run this play smoothly.

What you’ll need

To run this play, here’s what you’ll need:

1. scrapeli.io → to extract your competitors’ followers from LinkedIn
2. Email finder → tools like Findymail to get emails right from Clay
3. Clay → for fast list building, cleaning, normalizing, and personalizing data
4. LLM (AI model) → like ChatGPT or Claude to process data at scale
5. Reply.io → for automating your outreach sequences

Got your tools? Great. 

Now I’ll walk you through the exact steps to find and convert your competitors’ fans into leads. Just follow along, it’s easier than you think.

The process (step-by-step)

Now let’s break down exactly how to do it.

Step 1: Identify your competitors

Start by listing your top 5 competitors.

These should be the companies you get compared to most, either on review sites, Google, or in sales calls.

(If you’re not sure, you can easily figure this out from review platforms like G2 or Clutch, Google searches, or even by listening to what comes up on your sales calls.)

Example: If you’re a recruiting SaaS, maybe you often hear your prospects mention “Greenhouse” or “Lever” = perfect, add those.

Step 2. Scrape their followers

Next, you’ll want to pull a list of your competitors’ followers.

Here’s the easiest way: Go to scrapeli.io (this tool does the hard part for you).

The process is super simple:

1. Grab the link to your competitor’s LinkedIn page.

2. Paste that link into scrapeli.io.

3. Enter the total number of followers the page has (you’ll see this right on their LinkedIn profile).

4. Scroll to the bottom of the page and choose your plan, they offer several options.

5. After purchase, they’ll email you when the data is ready, usually very fast.

A quick note on pricing plans:

• The Basic and Growth plans won’t give you emails, but that’s fine!
• You’ll get all the key data you need: names, job titles, companies, LinkedIn URLs, etc.
• That’s more than enough to import into Clay and enrich later with email finder tools.

That’s it! Just paste, click, and wait for the email with your list.

Step 3: Clean and standardize the data

Once you’ve got your list from scrapeli.io, it’s time to clean it up, because not every contact on that list will be a good fit.

Start by uploading your list into Clay. This is where you’ll turn a basic list of followers into a high-quality, targeted prospect list.

Step 3.1: Standardize job titles

First, we want to standardize all the job titles, because people write their titles in so many ways:  “Business Development Specialist,” “BDR,” “Sales Executive,” “Head of Revenue,” “VP of Sales” = it’s a mess.

Here’s how to fix that:

Inside Clay, add a “Use AI” column, and actually use an LLM (like GPT) with this exact prompt:

Why do this? You want to group everyone into clear persona buckets, so you can:

• Focus your outreach on personas that match your ICP
• Personalize messaging by persona
• Easily cut out irrelevant contacts

Step 3.2: Filter out unknowns

When you run the prompt, some job titles will come back as “unknown.”

That’s on purpose,  because if you can’t confidently categorize a prospect into a useful persona, they’re probably not worth pursuing.

In this step:

• Filter out all contacts where Persona = “unknown”
• This can shrink your list by another 2–3x; again, this is good! You only want quality prospects.]

Step 3.3: Clean and standardize city & country fields

Before you move into outreach, it’s worth taking one more quick step: clean up your City and Country fields.

Why? Because scraped LinkedIn locations are messy:

• Sometimes they include regions or suburbs
• Sometimes the country is missing
• Sometimes the city is inconsistent

When you clean this up, you’ll:

✅ Personalize your outreach better (e.g., “I noticed you’re based in {{City}}…”)

✅ Avoid weird or broken location lines in your emails

✅ Have more accurate geo-segmentation in your list

How to do it:

In Clay, add a new enrichment column using this exact prompt:

Prompt:

Extract only the city and country name from the following address line: {{Location}}, ignoring suburbs, districts, state, region, or additional details. If the input is a suburb or smaller locality, return the name of the primary city it belongs to.

Output nothing else but the name of the city & country in the following format: {City}, {Country}.

Examples:

• San Francisco Bay Area, USA → San Francisco, USA
• Charlotte, North Carolina, USA → Charlotte, USA
• Mumbai, Maharashtra, India → Mumbai, India
• Brooklyn, New York, USA → New York, USA
• France → Paris, France
• Not Found, Germany → Berlin, Germany

Additional Instructions:

1. Output nothing else but the City & Country
2. If the location line is Not Found, use: New York, USA
3. If only a country is given, return the capital city + country
4. If only a city is given, always add the country

Why this helps? Now your City, Country column is standardized, ready for:

✅ Personalization in outreach messages

✅ Geo-filtering if needed (US-only campaign? EMEA-only? Now it’s easy)

✅ Cleaner reports and tracking

Quick tip: If you want to use just the City part (without the country) for message personalization, you can easily ask Clay to split this field at the comma (use the Formula field), and keep only the first part (city).

This is a great way to add lines like: “I noticed you’re based in {{City}}…” And the same for the {{Country}}.

Once this step is done, you’re ready to build your outreach sequence 🚀.

Step 3.4: Additional cleanup

Now, run a few more filters in Clay to further narrow the list:

• Company location (target markets only)
• Company size
• Industry

At this point, you’ll have a super-clean, highly targeted list of competitors’ followers who:

✅ Fit your ICP

✅ Have standardized personas

✅ Are ready for the next step = finding emails and outreach

Tip: It’s normal for your list to shrink by 2–3x at this stage. That’s a good thing! Now you have a focused, high-quality list.

Step 4: Find their emails

Now that you’ve got a clean, high-quality list of prospects, it’s time to find their emails.

Since you already have LinkedIn Profile URLs (from the scrapeli.io export), this part is simple; no need to jump between tools.

Here’s how:

1. Stay inside Clay; no need to export.
2. Add a new column for enrichment using Findymail (Clay has a native integration).
3. Use the LinkedIn Profile URL field to trigger the Findymail enrichment. This way you’ll find verified work emails, automatically populated into your table.

That’s it! 

No manual steps, no copying LinkedIn URLs back and forth.

Why this works so well:

✅ The list already fits your ICP

✅ Job titles are standardized

✅ You’re finding emails for exactly the right people

✅ You can use one tool (Clay) to manage the entire process. It’s fast, scalable, and easy to repeat

But what if Findymail doesn’t find an email?

No problem! Don’t throw those contacts away. You can still reach them!

Here’s what to do:

• If an email is found → Include the contact in your full multichannel outreach sequence (email + LinkedIn).
• If no email is found → Tag those contacts as “LinkedIn-only” and include them in LinkedIn outreach steps only (connection requests, DMs, comments).

This way:

✅ You still make use of the entire scraped list

✅ No good contacts are wasted

✅ You can run true multichannel campaigns (email + LinkedIn), not just email-only

Step 5: Build your outreach sequence

Now you’re ready to start your outreach.

Import your final list into a multichannel tool like Reply.

You’ll want to set up sequences that hit multiple channels:

• LinkedIn messages
• Cold emails
• Follow-up touches

Finding the right people is only half the battle. Now let’s make sure your messages actually get responses. 

Here’s how to write outreach that works.

How to write outreach that gets replies

Now that you’ve got your list ready, it’s time to launch your outreach.

Reply.io is one of the best tools out there for this, because it makes multichannel outreach simple, scalable, and automated.

Here’s a quick guide on how to build your sequences the right way:

Why multichannel outreach matters

When you build lists from competitors’ followers, you’ll always have LinkedIn URLs.

You’ll often have verified emails (after enrichment).

But… you won’t always have both for every contact.

That’s why multichannel outreach is key.

If you only send emails, you’ll miss opportunities to connect with prospects who didn’t have emails on file.

If you only do LinkedIn, you’ll limit your reach.

That’s where Conditional Sequences come in, and they’re a game-changer.

Using conditional sequences (highly recommended!)

Conditional Sequences let you automatically adjust your outreach path based on what data you have for each prospect.

For example:

• If a prospect has an email → they go down your email flow
• If a prospect doesn’t have an email, but has LinkedIn → they go down your LinkedIn flow
• If they have only a phone number → you can create a path for SMS, WhatsApp, or calls

How does it work?

In Reply.io, you can add:

• Condition steps → these split your sequence into “Yes/No” branches based on your condition
• Action steps → move contacts into another sequence automatically

Example:

Start with a Condition step: “Does contact have a valid email?”

→ Yes → Send Email Step 1 → Email Follow-up Steps

→ No → Send LinkedIn Connection Request → LinkedIn DM → Task

Why does it matters?

✅ You reach every contact, based on what info you have

✅ You don’t waste time manually segmenting the list

✅ You get higher engagement rates (because LinkedIn-only contacts still hear from you!)

Common conditions you can use:

• Email is valid
• LinkedIn URL is set
• LinkedIn connection status is Connected
• Prospect opened email
• Prospect replied
• Prospect booked a meeting
• Prospect viewed your LinkedIn profile
• And more

Pro tip: when you import your list from Clay → Reply.io, make sure:

• You’ve mapped email field
• You’ve mapped LinkedIn URL
• You’ve mapped First Name, Company, Persona, and City (for personalizing your messages)

Templates that work

Let’s walk through some message templates that work especially well when you’re targeting competitors’ followers:

A) Message templates = with competitor mention

B) Message templates = without mentioning the competitor

Sometimes, it’s smarter not to mention the competitor, for example:

• You don’t want to seem like you’re “spying” on who they follow
• You’re not 100% sure they’re a paying customer of that competitor
• You’d rather focus on solving their pain

These templates work great in that case:

Want to really stand out? There’s one simple shift that makes your outreach even stronger: talk about the pain your prospects feel, not just what your product does. 

Let’s break that down.

Bonus tip = focus on the pain, not just features

One thing we’ve learned running this play: You don’t have to mention the competitor, and often you shouldn’t.

Instead, speak directly to the pain points that follow that competitor’s signals:

• What problem are they trying to solve?
• What outcome are they hoping for?
• Where might they be frustrated with the current solution?

If your message resonates with those core pains, you’ll get replies, even if you never mention the competitor.

And that’s the playbook! You’ve got everything you need to start turning competitors’ followers into hot leads. Go put it into action and watch what happens.

Final thoughts

If you’re tired of generic cold outreach lists (and you want leads that convert), this playbook is for you.

Here’s why:

✅ You’re targeting people already aware of the problem

✅ They’re interested enough to follow your competitors

✅ You can speak directly to their pains and needs

And once you set up this process, it’s easy to repeat and scale.

So go ahead:

1. Identify your competitors
2. Pull their followers
3. Clean the list
4. Find the emails
5. Write highly relevant outreach
6. Launch it with Reply.io

Soon, you’ll be having conversations with exactly the right prospects and seeing reply rates that make the usual spray-and-pray tactics look outdated.

Ready to put this playbook to work?

You’ve got the steps. You know the process. Now it’s time to make it happen, fast.

And the easiest way to do that? Run it all through Reply.io.

It handles the outreach, follow-ups, and tracking for you, so you can focus on having real conversations (and closing deals).

Don’t overthink it. 

Just start.

Load up your list, hit send, and watch the replies roll in.