“Clay gives sales and marketing a shared data foundation, so we can reach the right buyers and put new ideas into practice faster.” – Christy Roach, CMO
AirOps helps marketing leaders build the strategy, systems, and channel presence to turn AI search into a growth advantage.
AI Discoverability
San Fransisco, CA
Executive summary
AirOps was preparing to double its sales team over the following year to support its enterprise focus. Ben Staveley, its sole RevOps leader, owned the tooling, integrations, and CRM that would support that growth. With Clay, AirOps standardized enrichment across HubSpot, built tiered audiences for paid campaigns, and connected reusable enrichment functions to an internal AI agent. Now, marketing and sales work from a unified set of accounts and contacts. Marketers can reach new audiences and enrich event lists independently, while reps receive relevant contacts and follow account rules built into their tools. The team now converts 4.6x more target accounts to open opportunities, scaled Meta 37x into a meaningful pipeline source, and continues to lower cost per qualified demo 28% QoQ, alongside broader marketing and RevOps improvements.
GTM infrastructure struggled to keep pace with headcount and revenue growth
AirOps was preparing to double its sales team over the following year and expand further into mid-market and enterprise accounts. Ben Staveley, its sole RevOps operator, owned the tooling, integrations, and CRM that would support that growth.
But the data underneath those systems was inconsistent. Employees enriched contacts through different tools, returning information in different formats. HubSpot contained duplicate fields, incomplete LinkedIn URLs, and missing contact details. Reps spent time researching people and filling gaps themselves, while account assignments and deal updates created a steady stream of requests for Ben.
The same data inaccuracies constrained marketing. Head of Growth Marketing Jim Tan needed paid acquisition to scale with the business, but on Meta, he had limited spending to retargeting because he trusted that audience’s relevance. Growth depended on the pool of people who had already engaged with AirOps. Increasing spend against that audience risked showing the same people more ads.
Sales needed reliable contacts and clear account rules. Marketing needed accurate audiences that reflected the same account definitions and customer status. Both depended on fixing the data.
A shared data foundation for sales and marketing
Ben used Clay to standardize enrichment in HubSpot and make it reusable across the business. Contact and company enrichment, ICP analysis, and account tiering give sales and marketing consistent information for deciding which accounts to pursue.
Clay Functions define the enrichment inputs, outputs, and field mappings. AirOps’ internal AI agent calls those functions and handles additional normalization, including name formatting, country codes, and LinkedIn URL cleanup. When a contact’s email address or LinkedIn URL changes, the agent calls Clay to recheck information such as job title.
The same contact details support rep outreach and audience matching. Corrected LinkedIn URLs and complete contact information help sales reach the right people and give advertising platforms more information to match against. Shared employee counts, company classifications, and ICP tiers also give both teams consistent definitions for targeting and reporting.
Ben can then build custom tools around that foundation, giving employees access to the same data sources through Slack and a Chrome extension while keeping enrichment logic consistent.
Reaching new B2B buyers through Meta Ads
Jim wanted to grow Meta beyond its existing retargeting pool, but needed confidence that the platform could reach AirOps’ intended B2B buyers.
Through Clay Ads, Jim saw a Meta audience match rate above 80% thanks to the CRM enrichment work done previously. Knowing Meta could match such a large share of the audience gave Jim greater confidence to invest in reaching new B2B buyers.
Jim began running those campaigns using enriched audiences and lookalikes to expand the channel. Most of Meta’s ad budget went toward reaching new prospects, with a smaller share allocated to retargeting to manage frequency.
“Retargeting has a cap depending on the size of our mid-funnel audience and how many people visit our website,” Jim says. “Clay has allowed us to unlock the top funnel, improving the impact of advertising on Meta significantly.”
AirOps saw Meta pipeline grow 37× from the previous quarter, alongside a 28% quarter-over-quarter reduction in cost per qualified demo.
Reaching new buyers expanded the pool of potential customers AirOps could later retarget. Jim says the expansion helped the team meet its quarterly pipeline target and gave him evidence to support further investment in paid acquisition.
Coordinating tiered audiences across paid channels
Expanding paid acquisition also required Jim to decide which audiences belonged in each channel and when accounts should stop receiving acquisition ads. Previously, updating those audiences depended on manual work across platforms, making it difficult to keep campaigns aligned with the CRM.
AirOps organizes accounts into four ICP tiers and uses that shared Audience segmentation in Clay Ads across channels. Meta focuses on tiers one and two for conversion, with broader tiers being explored for additional scale. LinkedIn combines account targeting with native job-title targeting. Vibe connected TV uses all four tiers for brand awareness, while Google Search audiences support AirOps’ move toward mid-market and enterprise buyers.
Audience size is a deliberate part of the strategy. Dividing every tier by seniority or department could make segments too small to reach efficiently. Jim keeps audiences broad enough to manage cost and frequency while staying within AirOps’ target accounts.
Suppression rules are part of the same audience logic. Do-not-contact statuses are filtered out, and customers or open opportunities are removed from acquisition audiences as their CRM status changes. An account’s progress with sales informs its advertising treatment across channels, so no campaign depends on a separate manual list.
Coordinating campaigns across channels delivers a 12.9x pipeline-to-spend ratio and raised target account to opportunity conversion 4.6x QoQ.
The shared audience process also makes changes easier to execute. Once leadership and sales agree on a revised target account list, Jim says AirOps can prepare and activate audiences across channels in a few days.
Giving sales reps self-service enrichment through an internal AI agent
Sales reps kept sending RevOps ad hoc data requests, but he needed a way to scale himself while also ensuring standardization in data quality and formatting.
He built an internal AI agent sales reps could call through Slack. It began with administrative tasks such as account assignments and deal updates, then expanded as Ben identified recurring work he could automate.
Ben extended the agent to event-list enrichment. Sales reps needed complete attendee and registration information for follow-up, but spreadsheets often lacked phone numbers, LinkedIn profiles, or job titles.
Ben connected the agent to Clay Functions for person and company enrichment, ICP analysis, and company research. The agent knows the inputs and outputs of each function, allowing it to select the appropriate function for missing fields.
When a sales rep submits a spreadsheet, the agent checks HubSpot first. If the CRM already has the information, it reuses it. For gaps, it calls the relevant functions, writes the enriched data back to HubSpot, and returns a completed file.
Ben maintains the enrichment logic and field mappings centrally. Sales reps can prepare lists through Slack without waiting for RevOps or learning how to run the enrichment themselves. The agent also manages real-time CRM cleanup, as it re-runs contact enrichment any time an email or LinkedIn URL changes.
Clay’s provider coverage makes that system practical for a team of one. Ben’s phone-number enrichment checks 15 providers through Clay, giving employees broad coverage through a single request.
“I always say to people if Clay can’t give you the phone number, don’t bother looking for it. You’re not going to find it since we’ve tried everything,” Ben says.
He estimates that consolidating those data sources saves him weeks of work annually.
Building account rules into sales prospecting
Ben applied the same approach to sales: make information easy to access, with the company’s rules built into the process.
“The CRM should be the only thing that reps need to look at to prospect,” he says.
When an account executive takes ownership of a target account, AirOps uses Clay to discover relevant contacts, such as a CMO, VP of Marketing, or marketing director. Within about five minutes, the rep receives a Slack notification with contacts added to the company’s HubSpot record, including their contact details and LinkedIn profiles.
Clay Signals feeds account activity into HubSpot and alerts SDRs and account owners to relevant changes, such as hiring, job postings, fundraising, and job changes. Reps receive information that can help them decide when and why to reach out.
For reps prospecting on LinkedIn, Ben built a Chrome extension with their internal AI agent to replace their legacy tool. The extension calls a function to enrich a contact and add them to HubSpot. Before adding a contact to a Lemlist sequence, the function checks ICP fit, territory, and account ownership so reps can’t prospect into the wrong accounts or someone else’s.
Clay gives Ben reusable enrichment to build around, while the agent applies the account rules. He can create the experience his team needs without separately connecting and maintaining every data provider.
“Just because you can build it in AI doesn’t mean you should. If I spend 2 days building something and then need to maintain it myself in perpetuity, that costs the company a lot more than spending on a tool that solves my problem,” Ben says.
His decision was to build the interfaces and controls specific to AirOps while relying on Clay for enrichment. That lets him focus on how the team works without maintaining separate connections to every data provider. Reps get an experience designed around their workflow, with consistent data and account checks behind their actions.
Connecting sales and marketing through shared data
At AirOps, the information marketing uses to build audiences is also the information sales relies on to research accounts and contact buyers. Clay gives both teams consistent enrichment and account definitions, while Ben’s tools make that data available where employees already work.
“I can build the workflow once in Clay and put the data in everyone’s hands. Sales gets the contacts they need, marketing gets audiences they can trust, and I don’t have to sit in the middle of every request,” Ben says.
“As a company that is helping marketing teams navigate the AI-driven buyer journey, we have to hold ourselves to the highest standard of how we operate, the quality of our data, and the speed of our systems. With Clay, we’ve built a data foundation that lets us reach the right audiences, no matter how fast the industry and our buyers evolve”, says Christy Roach, CMO at AirOps.
As the sales team grows, Ben can extend the functions and tools already in place. Sales and marketing work from the same foundation and move in lock step.
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