CRM data enrichment is the lifeblood of any GTM motion. Your sales process is only as good as the data you have on your leads.
At minimum, that data includes basic firmographic and contact data: company info, work emails, and phone numbers.
With accurate, live CRM data enrichment, companies can:
1) Segment leads into the right buckets
2) Craft personalized messaging that resonates
3) Effectively nurture relationships along the sales pipeline.
Unfortunately, that’s harder than it sounds. Most CRMs have low data coverage and subsequently low rates of successful outreach. Let’s look into why—and how Clay routinely helps triple or quadruple CRM data enrichment coverage rates.
The problem with most CRM setups
The problem with most CRM setups starts with getting good data coverage in the first place.
Most CRMs have huge gaps in their data coverage because teams rely on data from one or a few major providers, like Zoominfo or Harmonic.
Even the best providers have gaps in their coverage, and data gets stale quickly. Jacob Tuwiner, founder of outbound agency Sculpted, found that the data providers he relied on at ServiceBell got only 30% mobile coverage on average.
Filling in the gaps—whether through manual research or additional providers—is time-consuming and error-prone. Teams often buy access to additional providers to tape together solutions that can exceed six figures annually across 5-10 platforms. That means immense amounts of money and time spent on just getting the right emails and phone numbers.
How Clay offers superior CRM data enrichment coverage
Clay aggregates every major enrichment provider into one centralized platform. We integrate with over 75 data providers to minimize coverage gaps from expensive individual data platforms.
More importantly, our waterfall feature allows you to search multiple providers at once—and only pay for the results you get. This gets you the best coverage for the lowest price, all in the same place.
We have seen increases from 20% for companies and agencies using Zoominfo to 80% at Clay.
Once you have basic information on your leads, you can move onto to technographic and firmographic details like:
- Company size
- Revenue
- Industry
- Tech stack
- Buying signals like site content access
How Clay helps you automate unstructured research in your CRM
Once companies master their basic data enrichment needs with their CRM, they can dream bigger and integrate better, more creative data points.
For example, language learning software sellers can use contacts’ native languages, languages they’re studying, and countries of residence. Healthcare software companies need access to therapist profiles, specialty areas, patient demographics, and review ratings. Education or government tech companies want to pull information from district annual plans and school strategy plans. All this niche, high-impact data is freely available online—but because it differs so widely by market, no data provider has automated it.
Collecting this unstructured data and storing it in a CRM requires extensive manual effort across disparate sources. And hand-entering personalized details across thousands of prospects isn’t scalable.
Our AI web scraper, Claygent, can collect and synthesize unstructured data from anywhere across the internet. This tool automates the whole manual, impossible process to keep your CRM up to date with highly individualized data that increases the quality of your outreach a hundredfold.
This level of research enables highly personalized segmentation and messaging.
How Clay helps track live signals in your CRM
Converting prospects—or reactivating lost leads—often comes down to reaching out at the right time.
With Clay, you can build powerful workflows that trigger CRM updates based on dynamic details like job changes, social media activity, company news, and location changes.
That includes:
- Major company news (like a new round of funding)
- A contact’s transition into a new job as a decision maker
- A contact’s social media posts using keywords or mentioning relevant pain points
If your CRM is maintained with info on why late-stage opportunities didn’t ultimately convert, you can monitor triggers for re-activation—or ping them when you add upgrades that meet their needs.
You can automatically track all of these signals in Clay and set up data update triggers for consistently fresh and timely data. Then automate the custom email-writing process on Clay with well-prompted AI to send messages referencing these details. Learn how to automatically push data from any Clay into your CRM here in three simple steps.
How Clay maintains great CRM data…using Clay
Even Clay uses Clay to keep our CRMs clean and up-to-date! Here’s how.
Unifying customer data across tools
At Clay, we leverage best-in-class data tools to sync all our first-party customer signals—from product usage to subscriptions—into our CRM.
Our analytics pipeline starts by aggregating data in dbt, which transforms raw event data from tools like our app, Stripe, and Hubspot into clean tables optimized for analysis.
Those tables then load into our Snowflake data warehouse for exploration and reporting. Snowflake provides a centralized hub for all our customer behavioral data alongside third-party signals.
Finally, the Hightouch connector automatically syncs the relevant aggregated metrics from Snowflake back down into our RevOps tools like HubSpot.
By leveraging dbt, Snowflake, and High Touch in conjunction, our RevOps team gets access to both granular and roll-up customer usage and health data in our CRM to inform outreach.
Nurturing leads with call insights
At Clay, we use Attention’s AI call summaries to automatically log insights like pain points, needs, and buying timelines from our sales calls. We also sync key metadata back into our CRM to inform subsequent outreach.
Attention's integration with HubSpot automatically pushes salient call highlights into each contact record, including wants, blockers, next steps and more. We always keep critical context for follow-up emails.
Managing inbound leads
Our inbound lead tracking leverages an integrated stack for smooth handoffs.
Interested prospects are prompted to fill out a Typeform on our website to give us more information.
From there, a Zapier integration instantly funnels submissions into a Clay table built to store inbound prospect data. So our CRM has immediate access to lead info like companies, titles, and use cases to enable prompt follow-up.
After we enrich these inbound leads in Clay, our multi-step Zap sends populated records into HubSpot for assignment based on prospect details and fit.
This end-to-end workflow allows our team to automatically direct new prospects to the right representatives based on CRM intelligence.
Keep your CRM relevant and accurate with Clay
Good CRM data isn’t just helpful—it’s critical for any GTM team. And Clay is the ideal supplement to your CRM platform of choice. With Clay, you’ll never again waste time, energy, and money just to keep your CRM updated and relevant.
With just-in-time, democratized data, powerful workflows with flexible update triggers, and AI and web scraping to automate the most manual research, Clay makes it more seamless and simpler than ever to keep your CRM in great shape. Try it out for yourself free.