Your CRM was supposed to be the source of truth. But a record starts decaying the moment it lands, and the rest of your data sits scattered across a warehouse, a dozen tools, and exports nobody trusts. Audiences fixes that.
You hold one living profile per person and company, segment across millions of records, and sync the results back to your CRM. This guide explains what Audiences is, how it works, and what teams use it for. (Audiences is currently in Enterprise beta.)
What Clay Audiences actually is
Audiences turns data management from maintaining snapshots into activating a database that scales. Most GTM data work is fighting decay: a rep cleans a list, it goes stale, someone re-exports it, and the cycle repeats in a dozen tables. Audiences replaces that with two global lists, All People and All Companies, that hold every record you have imported, each as one persistent profile combining CRM fields, warehouse data, and enrichments. You do not rebuild the list; you query it. An "audience" is a dynamic segment on top of that database, and because the profiles update in real time, the segment is always current.
Auto-plays five partial source records merging into one live profile. Click a source to see what it adds.
One persistent, real-time profile per contact and account
Audiences collapses the scattered, partial copies of a record across your CRM, warehouse, and tools into one persistent profile that updates in real time. Five partial copies become one live profile.
How Audiences works: Import, Enrich, Action, Export
Every Audiences use case runs the same four-step loop. It is the framework underneath CRM enrichment, TAM building, signal plays, and AI outbound alike: Import brings records in (connect Salesforce or Snowflake, pull from a CSV or Clay Table, or source net-new records from Clay's CPJ database). Enrich runs bulk enrichment and AI research that writes permanently back to each profile. Action monitors for signals and routes records, or hands enriched contacts to a sequencer. Export syncs the enriched data and the segment membership back to Salesforce.
Auto-plays the Import → Enrich → Action → Export loop. Click a node to hold it and read what happens there.
Import
Pull records in from Salesforce, Snowflake, a CSV, a Clay Table, or net-new from Clay's CPJ (Company, People, Job) database.
Audiences runs one continuous loop, Import, Enrich, Action, Export, that powers every use case from CRM enrichment to signal-based outbound. Four steps, run continuously, not once.
Building an audience: a segment, not a static list
An audience is a live query over your whole database, so it never goes stale. Everything imported lands in All People or All Companies. From there you build an audience by filtering on anything in the profile: firmographics, CRM fields, enrichment results, and signal flags. Because the underlying profiles update in real time, records flow into and out of the audience on their own as they start or stop matching. A "contacts at fintech companies who just raised a round" audience adds the company that closed funding this morning without anyone touching the list.
Auto-narrows 2M profiles to a target audience as filters stack, then hands you the controls. Toggle a chip to recompute.
Records join and leave this audience on their own as profiles change.
An audience is a dynamic segment over your full database, not a saved list: filters narrow millions of live profiles to a target set that updates itself as records change.
What teams use Audiences for
The same database powers four different motions. Because every play runs the Import-Enrich-Action-Export loop, one Audiences setup covers what used to be four separate tools and table sprawl:
- CRM enrichment: A continuous loop that fills the gaps in your CRM faster than reps can create them, then writes back.
- TAM sourcing: Build the market that should be in your CRM but is not, sourcing net-new companies from the CPJ database and keeping the list current.
- Signal-based plays: Monitor every contact for job changes, buying-role moves, and ICP fit, and route them the moment something changes instead of finding out weeks late.
- AI outbound: Combine signals with automated personalization and hand the enriched, triggered contacts straight to your sequencer.
Auto-plays signals firing across your database and routing automatically. Click a lit contact to see its signal and route.
Without Audiences: found out weeks late
With Audiences: routed the same day
Audiences monitors every contact in your database continuously, so a job change or buying-role move routes to a rep the day it happens instead of weeks late.
Where to start
Pick one of the four motions and run it on a real slice of your database, then let it run continuously. The most common starting point is the CRM enrichment loop: import your Salesforce contacts, enrich the gaps, and turn on the export sync so the cleaned data writes back on a schedule (the sync runs every 24 hours and scales to millions of records). Once one loop is keeping a slice of your CRM current on its own, layer on a signal play or a net-new TAM build using the same database. The shift Audiences asks for is the one that matters: stop maintaining lists, and start querying a database that maintains itself.
“Clay has become the orchestration layer for everything GTM. Salesforce for record-keeping, Snowflake for product data, and Clay for turning it all into automated action.”
When the data lives in one place and updates itself, the team stops re-exporting and starts acting.
data enrichment coverage Anthropic reached after consolidating its GTM stack on Clay
Read the full storyCommon questions teams get wrong
A few misconceptions trip teams up when they first adopt Audiences.
- Treating an audience like a saved list: An audience is a live query, not a frozen export. Build it on filters and let records flow in and out as profiles change, instead of re-pulling it.
- Enriching in scattered tables: Running enrichment in a dozen separate tables recreates the decay problem. Centralize the records as profiles first, then enrich once at the database level.
- Skipping the export sync: Enriching in Audiences without syncing back leaves the CRM stale. Turn on Export so the cleaned data and segment membership reach the tools reps use.
- Importing everything at once: Pulling your entire CRM before you have a use case burns credits on data nobody acts on. Start with the records one motion needs, then expand.