Clay is quickly becoming a must-have tool for modern GTM teams, sales pros, and growth marketers thanks to its powerful data enrichment capabilities. Imagine combining the ease of a spreadsheet with access to dozens of data sources and AI enrichment tools—that’s Clay. In this article, we explore why everyone’s talking about it, how to use it across your entire pipeline, and how to automate its power using tools like Zapier. From finding new leads to preventing churn, 3minread.com is here to help you master Clay for growth and productivity.

What Is Clay and Why It Matters

Clay is a dynamic enrichment platform that centralizes and supercharges your data with AI and automation.

Clay looks and feels like a smart spreadsheet but functions more like a data command center. It allows you to import people or company records and then enrich them with information from hundreds of sources like LinkedIn, Crunchbase, or even your own APIs. You can filter, sort, and structure this data to find high-value prospects, optimize sales outreach, and streamline marketing.

What makes Clay unique is its "waterfall enrichment" technique—if one source doesn’t have the data, it moves to the next until it finds a match, ensuring high data accuracy. It also uses a built-in AI agent called Claygent to extract information like podcast appearances, Yelp ratings, or even company summaries from 10-Ks. This gives users highly personalized data without manual effort.

The Benefits of Using Clay for Enrichment

Clay brings affordability, centralization, and accuracy together in a single, intuitive platform.

Clay’s pricing is structured with a base platform fee and usage-based enrichment credits. Unlike buying licenses for Apollo, ZoomInfo, and Clearbit separately, Clay consolidates these features under one roof. This makes it a cost-effective solution, especially for startups or lean teams.

But price isn’t its only appeal. Clay’s interface—resembling Airtable—allows users to manipulate data in a grid format, making it familiar and accessible. Everything stays in one place, so users don’t need to cobble together multiple tools for lead scoring, CRM cleaning, or ICP filtering.

It also excels in enrichment accuracy. The waterfall model checks multiple data providers sequentially, validating results along the way. If it can’t find the data, you won’t be charged—making every credit count. For advanced use cases, Claygent lets you customize enrichment even further using natural language queries.

6 Powerful Ways to Use Clay’s Data Enrichment Tools

From finding new verticals to reducing churn, Clay can transform every step of your revenue funnel.

1. Explore Untapped Markets
   Clay helps identify new industries, demographics, and customer segments you may not be targeting yet.

Use Clay to research unexplored verticals by enriching company data with unique traits. For example, find B2C brands targeting Gen Z and offering promotions. You can filter out bad-fit accounts and existing customers, so your efforts focus only on new opportunities. Marketing teams can then craft personalized outreach campaigns based on these enriched insights.

Startups with limited budgets can use Clay quarterly, pause their account (which saves your tables), and come back when ready. It’s a scalable solution for growing your TAM without overspending.

2. Clean and Enrich Your CRM Automatically
   A clean CRM means more accurate outreach, better targeting, and fewer missed opportunities.

Outdated or messy CRM data is a common pain point. With Clay, you can sync your CRM and automate bulk enrichment—adding missing emails, roles, company updates, and more. Build workflows to qualify leads or update sales reps when a prospect changes jobs.

Some users also integrate lead scoring models, so only high-quality leads are surfaced for sales outreach. Tools like Ocean.io can even identify lookalike accounts based on recent customer wins, feeding your sales pipeline with similar, high-converting prospects.

3. Discover Partners and Influencers at Scale
   Partnership and influencer discovery becomes a science with Clay's filtering and enrichment capabilities.

Looking to build your partner ecosystem? Clay allows you to filter companies or people based on detailed criteria like industry overlap, tech stack, and engagement history. Integrations with Crossbeam, Upfluence, and Modash allow you to find influencer partners based on keywords, follower count, and more.

Use Clay to source podcast guests, co-marketing partners, or potential collaborators. Then, automate outreach directly from the platform—or refine your list with Claygent to find warm connections through LinkedIn. This isn’t just useful for partnerships—it’s also a goldmine for freelancers looking for clients or collaborators.

4. Prioritize High-Value Free Trial Signups
   Turn free users into power users by enriching records to match your ideal customer profile.

Not every trial signup deserves equal attention. Clay lets you enrich new users in real-time with behavioral and demographic data—like their job role, domain, academic level, or geographic location. Then, based on how they interact with your product during the first 48 hours, you can trigger onboarding flows tailored to power users.

This method helped one SaaS company improve their 30-day user retention by 21%. With Clay, enrichment isn’t just about knowing more—it’s about acting faster and smarter.

5. Prevent Churn Before It Happens
   Clay helps customer success teams stay ahead of renewal surprises through proactive enrichment.

Customer success managers can use Clay to monitor brand sentiment, new hires, or fundraising events. A sudden leadership change or a lack of brand engagement could signal a churn risk. With these insights, your team can step in before a renewal conversation turns sour.

Clay can alert teams when a champion leaves or when a company gets acquired, giving your team a chance to pivot strategy. This kind of foresight turns reactive customer management into proactive retention.

6. Find Your Next Freelance Client
   Clay enables freelancers to find, qualify, and connect with leads—without hours of manual research.

Freelancers can use Clay to build lists based on their ideal client profile—filtering by industry, headcount, recent content activity, or website behavior. For example, a content strategist might enrich company data to find brands publishing regularly but lacking SME-driven content.

With Claygent, freelancers can dig even deeper: when was their last blog post? Do they publish expert-led pieces? Are they hiring for marketing roles? All these signals can shape cold outreach into something relevant and value-driven.

You can even upload your LinkedIn connections, enrich them, and find “lookalike” contacts for warm introductions—perfect for referrals or expanding your network.

The Results: Does Clay Actually Work?

The results speak for themselves—Clay turns months of research into hours and fuels revenue generation at scale.

For sales teams, Clay can collapse the lead research process from weeks to hours. One fintech sales leader reduced their account research timeline from 5 weeks to just 5 hours with Clay’s automations and Salesforce integration. And SDRs on Reddit report sourcing the majority of their deals through Clay, booking dozens of meetings each month.

However, the platform does have a learning curve. Many users note that Clay works best when a GTM engineer—or at least someone tech-savvy—can design and maintain enrichment workflows. Some teams even hire specialized agencies (affectionately called “Claygencies”) to manage the platform.

But for those willing to invest the time, Clay becomes an indispensable tool for finding leads, closing deals, and personalizing outreach like never before.

Automate Enrichment and Sync with Your Tech Stack Using Zapier

Clay integrates with major platforms like Salesforce, HubSpot, and Gong—but for everything else, there's Zapier.

Zapier’s AI-powered automation lets you connect Clay to thousands of apps, making your enriched data more actionable. For example, you can:

• Push enriched leads from Clay into your CRM
• Send new influencer contacts to your email outreach tool
• Trigger Slack alerts when job changes or fundraising updates occur
• Add enriched records to project tools like Notion or Trello

These automations ensure that every data point collected in Clay drives action across your organization—no manual updates required.