Master Clay with our step-by-step tutorial, detailed feature walkthrough, and expert tips.
Sign up for a free Clay account — no credit card required, and unlimited seats are included on every plan so your whole team can explore together. Build your first enrichment table by importing a prospect list via CSV, connecting a data source like LinkedIn Sales Navigator, or pulling contacts directly from your CRM. Configure a waterfall enrichment column to find verified work emails across multiple providers — Clay automatically queries each source in sequence until it finds a match. Add Claygent columns to research custom data points like tech stack, recent funding rounds, company headcount growth, or executive leadership changes using AI web research. Set up signal tracking to monitor target accounts for real
time buying triggers such as job changes, funding announcements, new executive hires, and technology adoption. Connect Clay to your CRM (Salesforce, HubSpot, or Pipedrive) and email platform (Outreach, Salesloft) to push enriched contacts directly into your existing workflows. Start with the free plan to learn the interface, then upgrade to Starter ($149/mo) when you need higher credit volumes and phone number enrichment for scaled outbound.
💡 Quick Start: Follow these 2 steps in order to get up and running with Clay quickly.
Explore the key features that make Clay powerful for crm & sales workflows.
Clay's signature capability — sequential querying of multiple data providers for each contact or company field. When searching for a work email, Clay queries Provider A first; if no result is found, it falls back to Provider B, then C, and so on through 150+ sources. This approach achieves 70–85% match rates compared to 40–60% from single providers. Users only pay credits for successful matches, eliminating waste from failed lookups.
A sales team targeting mid-market CFOs configures a three-step email waterfall: first Clearbit, then Hunter, then Lusha. Clay finds verified emails for 82% of their 2,000-contact list compared to 55% from their previous single-provider setup, resulting in 50% more prospects entering their outbound sequence.
Clay's built-in AI agent that performs live web research to generate custom, unstructured data points about prospects and companies. Unlike database lookups, Claygent browses websites, reads news articles, and analyzes public content to answer natural-language questions. Results are returned as structured data in Clay's spreadsheet columns, enabling research at scale that previously required manual SDR work.
A SaaS company selling to e-commerce brands uses Claygent to research each prospect's online store, identify their payment processor, estimate their product catalog size, and summarize recent press coverage — generating four custom data columns that enable hyper-personalized outbound messaging.
Automated monitoring of target accounts for buying intent signals. Tracks job changes (new decision-makers joining target companies), funding announcements, executive hires, technology adoption, and company news. Signals are surfaced in real-time and can trigger automated enrichment workflows and outreach sequences when a buying trigger is detected.
An enterprise software company monitors 5,000 target accounts for CTO and VP Engineering job changes. When a new CTO joins a target account, Clay automatically enriches their profile, researches their background with Claygent, and pushes the enriched contact to Outreach with a personalized sequence referencing their career history.
Spreadsheet-style interface where each column represents an enrichment step, formula, or action. Users build multi-step data pipelines by adding columns — no code required. Supports conditional logic, data transformations, deduplication, and scoring. Templates and community Blueprints provide pre-built workflows for common use cases like email waterfall, ICP scoring, and lead routing.
A recruiting agency builds a workflow that imports companies from a CSV, enriches each with headcount and industry data, filters for companies with 50–500 employees in SaaS, finds VP Engineering contacts with waterfall email enrichment, and pushes qualified leads to their Pipedrive CRM — all configured as columns in a single Clay table.
Direct bidirectional integration with Salesforce, HubSpot, and Pipedrive that automatically syncs enriched data between Clay and the CRM. Supports pulling existing contacts into Clay for re-enrichment, pushing newly enriched prospects into the CRM, and keeping records updated as new data becomes available. Mapping rules control which fields sync and how duplicates are handled.
A B2B company connects Clay to HubSpot and sets up automatic enrichment for every new inbound lead. When a prospect fills out a form, Clay enriches the record with company size, industry, tech stack, and decision-maker contacts within minutes, then pushes the data back to HubSpot where it feeds lead scoring and routing workflows.
Built-in email campaign tool (Clay Sequencer) available on all plans, supporting multi-step cold email sequences with personalization variables pulled from enrichment columns. Additionally, Clay can push enriched prospect lists as custom audiences to LinkedIn Ads and Meta Ads, enabling coordinated multi-channel account-based campaigns from a single workspace without manual CSV exports.
A marketing team runs an account-based campaign: Clay enriches a target account list with decision-maker contacts and company data, sends personalized cold email sequences via Clay Sequencer, and simultaneously pushes the same contact list to LinkedIn Ads for sponsored content retargeting — coordinating email and paid channels from one table.
Waterfall enrichment queries multiple data providers in sequence for each data point. When you create an enrichment column (e.g., work email), Clay first queries Provider A. If no result is found, it automatically queries Provider B, then Provider C, and so on. This sequential fallback approach typically achieves 70–85% match rates compared to 40–60% from any single vendor. You only pay credits for the provider that returns a successful match, so there's no double-charging. Clay supports over 150 providers in its waterfall, including Clearbit, Hunter, Lusha, Apollo, and dozens of others.
Claygent is Clay's AI research agent that performs live web research rather than querying structured databases. You give it a natural-language prompt — for example, 'Find this company's primary technology stack' or 'Summarize their latest funding round' — and it browses the web, reads pages, and returns structured answers directly into your Clay table. Unlike traditional enrichment which pulls from fixed databases, Claygent can answer open-ended questions and find information that no single data provider tracks, such as specific product features, customer case studies, or leadership bios.
Clay separates platform usage (Actions) from data consumption (Data Credits). Actions cover operations like running formulas, filtering rows, and executing workflow steps — these are unlimited on paid plans. Data Credits are consumed when you query external data providers for enrichment. Each provider has a different credit cost: basic email lookups might cost 1 credit, while phone number enrichment costs more, and Claygent research tasks consume AI credits separately. This separation means you can build complex workflows without worrying about platform costs, only paying for the external data you actually consume.
Clay integrates natively with Salesforce, HubSpot, and Pipedrive for bidirectional CRM sync — you can pull contacts into Clay for enrichment and push enriched data back automatically. For sales engagement, it connects with Outreach and Salesloft. It supports Slack for notifications, Snowflake and BigQuery for data warehouse connections, and Zapier and Make for connecting to hundreds of additional tools. Clay also pushes enriched audiences directly to LinkedIn Ads and Meta Ads for account-based advertising campaigns. An HTTP API and webhook support enable custom integrations for developer teams.
The free plan supports unlimited seats and is genuinely useful for learning the platform and running small enrichment jobs with 100 credits per month. Solo salespeople and small teams can get meaningful value from the Starter plan at $149/month, which provides 5,000 credits and access to all core features including waterfall enrichment and the email sequencer. The spreadsheet interface is approachable, though there is a learning curve for building complex workflows. For teams doing fewer than a few hundred enrichments per month, the free tier may be sufficient on an ongoing basis.
Clay holds SOC 2 Type II certification, is GDPR and CCPA compliant, and maintains a dedicated security page at clay.com/security with detailed documentation. Data is encrypted both at rest and in transit. Enterprise plans include SSO/SAML authentication, role-based access controls, and audit logging. Clay does not sell user data and processes enrichment data according to each provider's terms of service. The platform supports data retention controls and provides a DPA (Data Processing Agreement) for organizations that require one.
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Tutorial updated March 2026