How Clay uses Clay: Social listening

The problem: Marketing can't prove ROI so sales teams don’t trust the leads.

Your team invests heavily in LinkedIn content. You're paying creators, producing videos, running influencer programs. But you have no idea if the engagement actually matters.

Marketing measures engagement volume but sales wants qualified leads. (Poor ops is stuck in the middle, unable to translate "vibes into action.") The disconnect is expensive. Marketing keeps spending on content that might not reach target accounts; sales ignores LinkedIn signals because they don't know which engagements come from qualified prospects.

The solution: Track LinkedIn engagement and route qualified leads automatically

Clay's native LinkedIn integration pulls every reaction and comment on your company's posts, enriches the engagers using firmographic data, updates your CRM, and automatically tiers and routes qualified leads to sales.

Here's what the workflow does:

1. Pull all LinkedIn engagement data

• Track every post mentioning your company
• Capture all reactors and commenters with their LinkedIn profiles, headlines, and company information
• See exactly what people said in comments

2. Enrich and qualify the engagers

• Match LinkedIn profiles to accounts in your CRM
• Check against your named account list or tier definitions
• Identify which engagements come from tier 1 target accounts vs. noise

3. Take action on qualified leads

• Send automated, personalized emails to people who commented or requested information
• Route qualified engagements back to LinkedIn via tools like HeyReach
• Alert sales reps when target accounts engage with content

The impact: From cost-per-engagement to cost-per-qualified-engagement

Clay shifted from measuring "cost per engagement" (influencer gets 100 reactions = $100) to "cost per qualified engagement" (influencer generates 20 reactions from tier 1 accounts = $5 per qualified lead).

This bridges the gap between marketing and sales. Marketing can prove their LinkedIn investment reaches target accounts. Sales gets actionable signals about which prospects are already engaging with the brand.

As Spencer Chemtob, Clay GTME, put it: "The sales team actually wants us to do more of these things now."

How it works in Clay

The foundation:

• Use Clay's LinkedIn source integration to pull post data
• Set up one-to-many relationships: one post → many reactions and comments
• Write all engagement data to a separate table for enrichment

The enrichment:

• Match LinkedIn URLs to your CRM account records
• Look up named account status or tier definitions
• Enrich with work emails using waterfall enrichment

The activation:

• Draft personalized emails using AI based on what people commented
• Queue emails in Clay's Sequencer
• Or route back to LinkedIn using integrations like HeyReach

What you need to build this

• CRM with LinkedIn URL fields on account records (Salesforce, HubSpot, etc.)
• Named account list or tier definitions in your CRM
• Optional: Email sequencing tool or Clay Sequencer
• Optional: LinkedIn outreach tool like HeyReach

Getting started

Start with one high-performing post. Pull the engagement data, enrich it, and see how many reactions came from target accounts versus everyone else. That hit rate tells you whether your LinkedIn strategy is actually reaching the people you want to sell to.

Then expand to track all posts mentioning your company. Build the automated workflows that route qualified engagement to sales. Close the loop between content investment and pipeline generation.

Want to know more?

Spencer and Clay head of growth Davide Grieco hosted a live webinar and workshop where they go through the complete implementation. Watch the whole thing here.