‍Enriching Companies Using Waterfalls

Once you’ve imported your base list of companies into Clay, it’s time to enrich them with key firmographic and technographic details. 

At the company level, that data could include recent news, tech stack, funding, revenue, headcount, job openings, and more—virtually any technographic or firmographic data that helps you better qualify your leads or better personalize your messaging.

In this lesson, we’ll show you how to enrich companies with their funding stage using Clay’s waterfall enrichment. 

Prerequisites

Before proceeding, ensure you have:

• A company list with domain names and LinkedIn profile URLs. If you haven’t imported companies yet, go back to the previous lesson: Finding Companies in Clay.
• An understanding of the Jigsaw framework, which helps you determine when your data is ready for enrichment.

Understanding Waterfalls

A waterfall is a data enrichment method that pulls data from multiple providers in a specific order, eliminating the need for multiple manual uploads and lookups across different providers. 

Traditionally, revenue teams had to manage costly subscriptions to multiple data providers and manually filter results through spreadsheets. Waterfalls automate this process by sequentially querying providers—starting with the most cost-effective—until the required data is found, ensuring efficiency, accuracy, and cost savings. If one provider returns a valid data point, Clay stops further enrichments, saving you credits.

Where Do Waterfall Providers Originate?

Clay comes pre-integrated with hundreds of data providers to fetch company enrichment. For example, for funding stage, our providers include:

• IntelliSense (1 credit) 
• PitchBook (3 credits) 
• DealRoom (4 credits) 
• Harmonic (4 credits) 
• Outlet (10 credits) 

Your Clay subscription includes access to these data sources—no additional subscriptions needed. And Clay automatically fetches data based on its pre-negotiated agreements.

Running A Waterfall: Funding Stage

Good news: we created a guided demo that walks you through each step of the waterfall enrichment process, using “funding stage” as our example firmographics.

How it works:

1. Open the Enrichment Panel:
   
   • Click on the “Add enrichment” button.
   • Search for “Funding Stage” in the list of available enrichments.
2. Configure Your Waterfall:
   
   • You will see a pre-arranged order of providers, optimized for cost and coverage.
   • If you have specific preferences (e.g., if you know a certain provider has better coverage for your ICP), you can reorder the providers accordingly.
3. Select the Input Column:
   
   • The only required input for this enrichment is Company Domain.
   • If Clay hasn’t automatically detected the correct column, manually select it from the dropdown list.
4. Run a Test on 10 Rows:
   
   • Always test 10 rows first to monitor how the integration works before scaling.
   • Click Save & Run (10 Rows) to start the enrichment process.

Once the enrichment process starts, Clay will move through the waterfall sequence dynamically:

• If IntelliSense finds funding stage data, it stops there.
• If IntelliSense fails, Clay moves to DealRoom and continues down the waterfall.
• If a provider does not return data, Clay moves to the next provider until it finds a valid result.
• The process stops once a data point is found or all providers are exhausted.

Congrats!

That’s a wrap on waterfall enrichment for companies. 

Use waterfalls to ensure your lists have the best available data without excessive credit use.

Next, we’ll explore how to find people from your enriched company list to further refine your targeting and outreach strategy.

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