Clay FAQ

Clay helps go-to-market teams up level their data enrichment and automate personalized outreach. You can start with a list of leads, either prospected through Clay or from your own CRM, and follow the steps below.

Step 1: Basic Data Enrichment & Cleaning

Clay combines 75+ data enrichment tools into one marketplace, resulting in superior data coverage and quality—on anything from contact information to company firmographics. Our customers have tripled data coverage vs. providers like Zoominfo while cutting costs by a magnitude of ten or twenty.

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Step 2: AI Data Enrichment

We enable you to use AI to do research that previously required manual SDR work, including reading and analyzing webpages, PDFs, and Google searches for specific information.

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Step 3: Automated Outreach

Once you’ve nailed your data enrichment, you can use AI to craft relevant, compelling messaging based on that data. Everything syncs back to your CRM, allowing your team to go from campaign idea to execution in seconds.

We serve GTM teams of all sizes, ranging from large enterprise companies to SMBs, startups, solo founders, outbound agencies, and more. We have thousands of users and hundreds of paying customers, including Ramp, Pave, Verkada, and more.

Here are a few typically successful team setups we’ve seen with Clay.

At enterprise companies:

• GTM leaders decide the criteria for lead enrichment, segmentation, and outreach
• A GTM operations team member implements the above criteria into Clay. (Clay is the team’s “enrichment layer,” which syncs to the CRM to keep data live and accurate).
• SDRs do not interface directly with Clay. Instead, they benefit from already-curated leads, enriched data, personalizations in their CRMs.
  • For example, one client’s SDRs simply click a button in Salesforce to fetch enriched data from Clay, including relevant a company summary, relevant contacts, and a draft message.

At startups, a growth lead often implements Clay and runs all of the company’s outreach single-handedly. Once the company reaches some level of volume, these startups hire a sales team member to help with live conversations.

At outbound agencies, one founder often sets up and runs Clay campaigns on behalf of many clients.

Clay can replace your prospecting, data enrichment, and AI message drafting tools. We don’t replace email sending tools or CRMs (we integrate with them!)

Many people run successful campaigns using just Clay, an email sending tool, and a CRM.

You can continue to use any tools you have subscriptions to in Clay.

Build lists from CSVs or 10+ prospecting sources including free access to companies, people, and open jobs data.

Enrich data with 100+ enrichment tools for superior data quality and coverage as compared to relying on just one tool.

Use AI to scrape websites, do unstructured research that previously required SDRs, and draft messages.

Teams commonly also use Clay to automate outbound lead generation campaigns, CRM enrichment, inbound lead scoring and outreach, and more.

Traditional outbound sales meant people spending a lot of manual effort on bad research and generic, spammy emails that don’t land new customers.

By enabling new levels of deep research, targeting, and messaging, Clay helps businesses quickly find and message their ideal customers. We save teams immense amounts of time and money in the service of helping them grow.

There are more APIs and data enrichment tools than ever before and more SaaS companies selling to other SaaS companies as well. This means outbound email is becoming harder, spam filters are getting better, and the need to be ultra-specific and personalized is now super important otherwise you will get banned.

Clay helps companies find the right customers and message them at the right time, which means sending a smaller number of highly targeted emails rather than large blasts of generic, spammy messages.

Clay helps companies avoid spam filters by actually sending relevant, compelling emails. This is better for companies and better for customers.

We have different beliefs than people who are building enrichment tools

1. No data set will be complete
2. You should be able to clean the data and get the data in the same place to simplify the workflow
3. We believe that by opening up different ways of prospecting, there will be creative techniques to find companies rather than one prescribed approach.

We launched on Product Hunt in August 2023 and scaled from $500k to $5M in revenue last year, with a team of under twenty. We crossed $8M in March 2024 and have a team approaching 40. We have over 100 integrations and tens of thousands of users, from tiny growth agencies to huge startups.

Our paid plans start at $149/mo. Our free trial that gives you access to our Pro Plan ($800/mo value) for 14 days, with 1000 credits. We also have a free plan. See more details on our pricing page.

No. Clay reduces the amount of manual grunt work that SDRs have to do and allows them to focus on nurturing and closing deals through cold calls, personal follow-ups, real sales conversations, and more.

Nope! You can build lists from LinkedIn, Google Maps, Github, CRMs, websites, and more for free on Clay. You only pay credits for data enrichment (e.g. finding contact information, firmographic data, etc.)

If a provider charges us for an API call, we will also charge Clay credits for that call. However, if a provider refunds us due to the inability to deliver valid data, we will correspondingly refund those credits back to you. Click here to view a list of actions that will refund if invalid data is returned.

For prospecting, we integrate with 10+ sources, including LinkedIn, Google Maps, Github, and more.

For data enrichment, we integrate with 75+ of the market’s top tools, including Hunter, Harmonic, etc. You can also our AI web scraper and enrichment tools, to read and summarize information on websites, PDFs, and more.

For CRMs, we integrate with Hubspot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Close, Loxo, and more.

You’re never limited by our native integrations: you can also use webhooks and Clay’s HTTP API feature to connect to any tool that you have API access to.

For a full list, check out https://www.clay.com/integrations.

• How can Clay give me better data coverage and pricing than Zoominfo or other data providers?
• We often double or triple data coverage rates at a 1/5th or less of the cost of Zoominfo. A recent enterprise client, seeking to enrich inbound leads with basic company/contact info, had 30% coverage rates with Zoominfo at about ~25 cents per enrichment. They increased their coverage rates to 80% while cutting costs to less than ~1 cent per enrichment with Clay.
• The reason why we have better data coverage is simple: we have multiple providers and waterfall them.
• The reason we have lower costs…Large data providers like Zoominfo buy and whitelabel  small  providers, then  charging  a massive  premium  for subscriptions. Clay, on the other hand,  is  very  transparent.  We  tell  you  exactly  which individual providers your  data comes  from, and  we give  you  access  to  wholesale  rates from them.  The price of Clay depends entirely on the enrichment tools you choose to use. In most cases, even with higher-cost tools in your Clay stack, Clay will be more effective and affordable than Zoominfo.

Clay doesn’t have any native data. Instead, we allow you to get data directly from 100+ external enrichment tools in our central, credit-based marketplace. You can choose the providers you like most on Clay, including Hunter, Apollo, SalesNavigator, and more, and get their data directly into your workflows.

Customers often skyrocket their data quality and coverage using our waterfall feature, which lets you search multiple enrichment tools in order for any given field of information—and only pay once a result is found.

We also enable AI-based enrichment to scrape and summarize websites, PDFs, and more.

Yes. You can use our HTTP API feature to connect to any tool that you have API access to. That includes 6Sense enrichment & intent data, G2 intent data, Cognism enrich, Wappalyzer technographics, Zapier workflows, etc.

You don’t need any outside accounts to use Clay. You can pay with Clay credits to access most of our data enrichment tools. Most people find that Clay, an email sending tool, and a CRM are all they need to get started sending campaigns.

If you do already have active subscriptions with other data enrichment tools, you can use them in Clay for free by using your API keys.

Yes! We have various sources that you can use to kick off your list building. That includes scraping Google Maps to find local business leads, Github for engineering contributors, and more. You can also scrape any website with our Chrome Extension to kickstart your list building online.

Yes. We consolidate 75+ different enrichment tools, some with better global or regional coverage than others—you can choose which work best for your situation! If you ever find any gaps, let us know at support@clay.run and we’ll add a provider or help find you a solution.

Yes! You can assign your leads scores based on any criteria you’d like in Clay. See this video for more information.

An example of a trigger you can use in Clay is Finding Jobs from LinkedIn. There are other providers that can help you find news, headcount changes, etc. You can use our AI web scraper to monitor websites for changes as well. We’re actively working on expanding our list of trackable triggers.

Clay has two Chrome extensions. One of them can help you scrape any website for any list. Another connects to any website to help you pull leads into Clay, automatically enrich them, and send them to your CRM—in one click.

You can’t currently schedule enrichments, but we’re actively working on a solution. If you’re using a table with a CRM source, it’ll be live and updated in a two-way sync every 24 hours. (Just a reminder, you can simply click a button to re-enrich up to 50k records in a single table, even if it’s manual).

If a provider charges us for an API call, we will also charge Clay credits for that call. However, if a provider refunds us due to the inability to deliver valid data, we will correspondingly refund those credits back to you. Click here to view a list of actions that will refund if invalid data is returned.

For prospecting, we integrate with 10+ sources, including LinkedIn, Google Maps, Github, and more.

For data enrichment, we integrate with 75+ of the market’s top tools, including Hunter, Harmonic, etc. You can also our AI web scraper and enrichment tools, to read and summarize information on websites, PDFs, and more.

For CRMs, we integrate with Hubspot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Close, Loxo, and more.

You’re never limited by our native integrations: you can also use webhooks and Clay’s HTTP API feature to connect to any tool that you have API access to.

For a full list, check out https://www.clay.com/integrations.

• How can Clay give me better data coverage and pricing than Zoominfo or other data providers?
• We often double or triple data coverage rates at a 1/5th or less of the cost of Zoominfo. A recent enterprise client, seeking to enrich inbound leads with basic company/contact info, had 30% coverage rates with Zoominfo at about ~25 cents per enrichment. They increased their coverage rates to 80% while cutting costs to less than ~1 cent per enrichment with Clay.
• The reason why we have better data coverage is simple: we have multiple providers and waterfall them.
• The reason we have lower costs…Large data providers like Zoominfo buy and whitelabel  small  providers, then  charging  a massive  premium  for subscriptions. Clay, on the other hand,  is  very  transparent.  We  tell  you  exactly  which individual providers your  data comes  from, and  we give  you  access  to  wholesale  rates from them.  The price of Clay depends entirely on the enrichment tools you choose to use. In most cases, even with higher-cost tools in your Clay stack, Clay will be more effective and affordable than Zoominfo.

Clay doesn’t have any native data. Instead, we allow you to get data directly from 100+ external enrichment tools in our central, credit-based marketplace. You can choose the providers you like most on Clay, including Hunter, Apollo, SalesNavigator, and more, and get their data directly into your workflows.

Customers often skyrocket their data quality and coverage using our waterfall feature, which lets you search multiple enrichment tools in order for any given field of information—and only pay once a result is found.

We also enable AI-based enrichment to scrape and summarize websites, PDFs, and more.

Yes. You can use our HTTP API feature to connect to any tool that you have API access to. That includes 6Sense enrichment & intent data, G2 intent data, Cognism enrich, Wappalyzer technographics, Zapier workflows, etc.

You don’t need any outside accounts to use Clay. You can pay with Clay credits to access most of our data enrichment tools. Most people find that Clay, an email sending tool, and a CRM are all they need to get started sending campaigns.

If you do already have active subscriptions with other data enrichment tools, you can use them in Clay for free by using your API keys.

Yes! We have various sources that you can use to kick off your list building. That includes scraping Google Maps to find local business leads, Github for engineering contributors, and more. You can also scrape any website with our Chrome Extension to kickstart your list building online.

Yes. We consolidate 75+ different enrichment tools, some with better global or regional coverage than others—you can choose which work best for your situation! If you ever find any gaps, let us know at support@clay.run and we’ll add a provider or help find you a solution.

Yes! You can assign your leads scores based on any criteria you’d like in Clay. See this video for more information.

An example of a trigger you can use in Clay is Finding Jobs from LinkedIn. There are other providers that can help you find news, headcount changes, etc. You can use our AI web scraper to monitor websites for changes as well. We’re actively working on expanding our list of trackable triggers.

Clay has two Chrome extensions. One of them can help you scrape any website for any list. Another connects to any website to help you pull leads into Clay, automatically enrich them, and send them to your CRM—in one click.

You can’t currently schedule enrichments, but we’re actively working on a solution. If you’re using a table with a CRM source, it’ll be live and updated in a two-way sync every 24 hours. (Just a reminder, you can simply click a button to re-enrich up to 50k records in a single table, even if it’s manual).

Clay doesn’t replace your email sequencer. Instead, we integrate with them so you can push finalized outreach from Clay to your sequencer and live campaigns.

You can use our AI integration to draft personalized lines of emails based on the research in your tables. Once you have a set of messages, you can connect them to an email sending tool of your choice.

We integrate natively with Smartlead, Instantly, Salesloft, Outreach, Hubspot and others. You can connect to any tool you want with HTTP API. You can also send messages directly to your CRM and use your CRM’s automations to send emails from there.

We integrate with Hubspot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Close, Loxo, and more.

Clay is the enrichment layer that exists in a 2-way sync with your CRM to keep it always up-to-date. Your marketing operations team can set up all the enrichments you need in Clay. Because these will auto-sync to your CRM, your SDRs can operate simply in your CRM as usual.

For example, SDRs can find a relevant company and click a box to trigger Clay enrichments in the background. Within a few seconds, all the relevant enrichments will be added to your CRM as fields for them to reference.

Clay credits are the currency you use to purchase different data points and actions in Clay. The vast majority of actions in Clay are either free, or cost 1-2 credits, but the average cost of a data point or action varies depending on the provider.

For example, finding an email costs 2 Clay credits if you use Prospeo, DropContact, Datagma, or Hunter.io. However, finding an email from People Data Labs costs 5 credits—simply because we pay more money to get the same data from People Data Labs vs. others.

Some data points, like mobile numbers, are harder to find and are more expensive as a result. Finding a mobile number starts at 2 credits, but it can cost 5 (People Data Labs), 13 (Selligence), 15 (ContactOut), or even 25 (Datagma) depending on the provider you use.

List building/prospecting and data cleaning is free on Clay. Integrations with CRMs or email sending tools are also free on our Pro plan.

We charge credits for data enrichment, because we have to pay data providers to access lead or account research. That includes things like fundraising data, LinkedIn profiles, contact information, AI web scraping, etc.

If you have existing subscriptions to any data enrichment tools, however, you can use them free of cost in Clay by connecting your own API keys.

Nope! If you have existing subscriptions to any data enrichment tools, you can use them free of cost in Clay. To add your own API key, click on workspace settings and find the integration you’d like to update.

If you have a monthly subscription, unused credits will roll over and accumulate in your account up to 2x the credit limit according to your plan. If you buy an annual plan, you get all your credits upfront, and you can use them however and whenever you’d like.

If you only need more credits for a particular month, you can purchase credit top-ups directly from your billing modal. New credits will be added to your balance instantly and there will be no changes to your plan or billing cycle. If you foresee an ongoing increase in credit usage, you can upgrade to the next tier in your pricing plan. This will reset your billing cycle and you will receive the new credit allotment from the new plan instantly.

Nope! You can add as many people as you’d like to your workspace, completely free.

Check out this credits explainer document and forecasting calculator (in beta) to better understand your credit needs. Email us at support@clay.run if you need more help.

You can change your plan in your billing section at any time. If you downgrade, you can enjoy your plan’s current features until the next payment due date. If you upgrade, your cycle will reset immediately, and the new credit allotment is added on top of your current credit balance so that you can use them and available features right away.

If you upgrade, the new credit allotment is added on top of your current credit balance, and your cycle will reset immediately to provide you a new month to use them.

You can find the option to cancel in the Billing section at any time. You’ll enjoy your plan’s features until the next payment due date; at that point, you’ll be moved to the free plan. You can subscribe to a new plan whenever you’d like by clicking on the Upgrade Plan button that would then replace Billing.

We have a 10% discount if you sign up for an annual plan—and you get all your credits upfront! We also have a non-profit discount of 25%. If you qualify, please send your 501c3 documents to support@clay.run.

By moving to enterprise you unlock features that:

1. Make your team more efficient at using Clay (credit use reporting, custom internal templates)
2. Enrich more leads (larger credit packs, unlimited LinkedIn)
3. Unlock new use cases (Continuous CRM Enrichment, 1st Party Data from Snowflake).

You get access to the features from our Pro Plan and 1000 credits to test Clay out. We highly recommend going through our learning resources, like Clay University, and running just 20 to 30 rows at a time as you get more familiar with Clay.

This quick demo video answers most of the questions we see from customers going 0 to 1. You can also access our learning library at Clay University or reference our Docs to learn about the basics of Clay’s UI and integrations.

Your team members can make their own trial accounts, or you can invite them to work with you in a your central workspace: just go to “Workspace Settings” in the top left corner of your Clay app to invite them.

This quick demo video answers most of the questions we see from customers going from 0 to 1. You can also access our learning library at Clay University.

If you still feel uncertain feel free to reach out to us at support@clay.com!

Clay is primarily self-serve outside of Enterprise plans. The best places to learn about us are by going through Clay University, messaging us on Slack, or emailing us at support@clay.run!

Please fill out this form with a few details about yourself and we’ll be in touch shortly.

We don’t use it for anything and never will. Only you or anyone you invite to your workspace can see your data. Visit https://www.clay.com/privacy for more information.

We  are highly selective about which providers we integrate with and only  work  with  companies who are GDPR  compliant. You also have full control of what integrations you use in your Clay workflows, so you can also reference any integration provider’s individual  privacy documents to decide whether to use them for your company’s GTM use cases.

API-savvy, creative GTM professionals

We start off by publishing you to our website, support docs, and product search.

Yes! Submit your API template and we will review + publish it.

On your invoice, sales tax is calculated based on Clay’s determination of the taxability of the product(s) you purchased, the address information provided by you, and the tax rate of the applicable jurisdiction where you are located. If you need to update your address information please contact support@clay.com.

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For customers located in the United States, Clay is required to charge and collect taxes on sales in certain jurisdictions that have laws requiring the taxation of our products AND Clay has either a physical presence or has met certain economic thresholds within that jurisdiction. These taxes vary by jurisdiction but include sales taxes and excise or privilege taxes.

For customers located in the United States where Clay’s products are taxable but Clay does not have a physical presence or has not yet met the economic thresholds, no sales tax will be charged. This however may change in the future due to changes in law or Clay meeting any of the requirements for charging and collecting tax in that jurisdiction.

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The entire amount charged to a customer for sales tax is remitted to the required

jurisdiction and no amounts are retained by Clay.

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Certain businesses such as non-profit organizations, educational institutions and other organizations may have tax exemptions in various jurisdictions. If your business has an exemption certificate please contact support@clay.com and provide a copy of the exemption certificate to us.

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