“Clay gives me the flexibility to build any GTM workflow at scale, the visibility to understand how it runs, and the feedback needed to build a self-improving revenue engine.” – Josh Whitfield
Content Marketing Media (CMM) is a GTM agency that uses Clay to build and manage outbound, lead qualification, and data enrichment workflows across client environments.
GTM Services
Phoenix, AZ
Executive summary
Content Marketing Media’s clients wanted more than outbound campaigns. They needed their product signals, account research, and CRM data turned into sales action. Founder Josh Whitfield uses Clay to build that for them. As a result, CMM increased its own meetings booked by 179%, helped a client lift sales-assisted conversion by 200%, and increased another client’s priority CRM field coverage by 300%. Clay serves as CMM’s infrastructure layer, connecting each client’s data, tools, and qualification rules into workflows that drive measurable business results.
Connecting product signals, research, and CRM data to sales decisions
Josh Whitfield discovered an opportunity while building outbound campaigns for his own business. CMM started out selling press releases. The outbound Josh built to sell them turned out to be the thing clients wanted.
Josh found Clay while building those campaigns. With a background in data science, he wanted the flexibility to combine data sources and apply qualification logic specific to each client’s market.
As CMM grew, its clients’ needs expanded beyond outbound. Companies wanted to connect product activity, account research, and CRM data to the decisions their sales teams made. Many already had the tools and data. The gap was turning them into a coordinated process.
Clay became Josh’s platform of choice for connecting those systems. He could work within each client’s environment, build around its existing tools, and adapt the logic to its business. As Clay introduced agent-powered building and Workflows, he could bring more of the research, qualification, and execution into the same platform.
Using coding agents through Clay’s CLI, Josh now describes the workflow he wants, builds custom logic, and runs it in Clay. He can inspect individual runs to understand what happened at each step and use that visibility to improve the process.
That approach supports CMM’s own prospecting and client workflows across three use cases.
Turning account signals into relevant outbound campaigns
For CMM’s own prospecting, an industry or headcount match is only a starting point. Josh needs to identify a development that makes outreach relevant and connect it to a specific business need.
“We want to find companies with a reason to talk to us. That means understanding what’s happening in the business and connecting it to something we can help with,” Josh says.
Josh built a connected workflow inside Clay, using Audiences to organize target accounts and Claygent agents to move from research to campaign preparation:
- Research accounts and identify relevant signals. A research agent examines each company for developments that connect to CMM’s offer. In one example, it identified a company using agents to assemble internal morning briefs and recognized an opportunity to supply account research and source-backed signals.
- Turn research into tailored outreach. A copywriting agent uses the finding and CMM’s offer context to draft a message. For the morning-brief example, it proposed running five accounts through Clay so the prospect could compare the research with its existing output.
- Evaluate the campaign before launch. A third agent reviews the research and proposed campaign to assess whether the outreach is worth pursuing, creating a decision point before moving toward launch.
“Generating a message isn’t enough. I want the system to evaluate whether there’s a strong enough reason to launch the campaign,” Josh says.
The workflow carries account research into a draft in Clay Sequencer. Reusable skills define how the agents perform their jobs, while Josh sets the methods and reviews the work.
With the connected workflow, CMM increased meetings booked 179%, and its meeting-booking rate rose +50%.
Qualifying trial users before they reach sales
One CMM client had more free-trial signups than its sales team could work. The challenge was identifying which users warranted a conversation.
Josh focused the workflow on a specific behavior: users reaching the end of a two-week trial and requesting another week. That request showed continued interest, but the team still needed to establish who the user was and whether their company was a fit.
CMM built a qualification process in Clay around that event. Some users signed up through GitHub without a company email, so the workflow needed to resolve their company identity. It also needed to identify and exclude competitors before delivering leads to SDRs.
“An extension request tells us someone is still interested. Clay helps us add the company context and qualification so sales can decide whether to engage,” Josh says.
The client’s sales team defines what makes a lead worth pursuing, what context reps need, and where they want to receive it. Josh also builds feedback mechanisms into the process so the team can evaluate whether those leads are creating legitimate pipeline and adjust the qualification rules.
By connecting trial activity with company research, the client reduced rep research time by 20 hours per week and increased sales-assisted conversion +25%. The workflow delivered 50% more qualified opportunities, giving sales a more focused set of users to engage.
Enriching CRM records within an enterprise workflow
A manufacturing ERP company engaged CMM to connect Clay to Salesforce for a large data enrichment and cleanup project.
Clay connected the enrichment work to the CRM records the client’s teams relied on. The workflow processed 500,000 records, adding or updating technographic, phone, email, parent company, and revenue, using waterfall enrichment across 200+ data sources available in Clay’s data marketplace.
The project increased coverage of priority fields from 50% to 90% and saved 100+ hours of manual enrichment. With more complete records in Salesforce, the client’s GTM team had confidence in reaching out to qualified leads and further support reengagement campaigns.
More capacity to build and improve GTM systems
CMM’s work has evolved from preparing outbound campaigns to connecting the research, data, and qualification steps behind client GTM processes.
Today, the agency reports sending 12 million emails per month across client campaigns.
Through Clay’s CLI, Josh uses coding agents to implement custom logic for lead scoring, data cleaning, and record distribution. He describes the behavior he needs, reducing the number of individual formulas and configuration steps he has to manage.
“I spend less time configuring individual steps and more time looking at how to improve the campaign,” Josh says.
The ability to inspect execution is equally valuable. One workflow runs approximately 24 nodes across an existing data cache, multiple enrichment providers, additional verification APIs, and several output destinations, and Clay lets Josh see which nodes each run passed through, inspect inputs and outputs, and review the code behind custom steps.
That visibility helps him check quality, trace unexpected results, and explain the workflow to a client. CMM has fully shifted to building using Clay Workflows and Audiences, reducing build time by 75%, freeing 60-80 hours per week for campaign analysis and improvement.
“Building the workflow is only part of the job. I need to understand what it’s doing, check the results, and keep improving it. Clay gives me that visibility,” Josh says.
For CMM, every client workflow ships with the data to make the next version better. Josh can adapt workflows to each client’s qualification rules and existing tools, then use the results to refine how those systems support sales.
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