⚡ Real-Time Lead Capture: Connecting All Your Inbound Sources with Clay

Now that you understand the problems with inbound that Clay is helping to solve, let’s dive into the first step, which is taking in leads from a variety of sources and feeding them into Clay so that you can enrich and act on them automatically.

Leads can trickle in from anywhere. Website visitors, chatbots, webinars, newsletter signups, even Linkedin DMs. Inbound leads are some of your highest-intent signals so it’s crucial to engage quickly.

In this lesson, we’ll cover some of the most common inbound lead automations our customers use. Keep in mind that your approach might vary slightly based on your inbound lead sources.

📄 🧺 Collecting leads from Typeform

Typeform is a popular tool for capturing inbound leads. Forms can be easily embedded in websites, newsletters, or surfaced on social media.

Clay has a native integration that allows you to import directly from Typeform when creating a new table. All you do is go to “Import” under the Actions tab, click on “Import Typeform form responses,” link up with your org’s Typeform account, and the table will automatically populate with Typeform responses as they come in.

🔗 Introduction to Webhooks

While Clay is natively integrated with platforms like Typeform, we know that leads can come in from anywhere and we want to make sure you can capture all of them. That’s where Webhooks come in. You can think of them as little messengers that can seamlessly transmit info from one source to another, in real time.

To get started in Clay, select “Import” then “Pull in data from a Webhook.” Copy the Webhook URL and then go over to the tool you’re looking to collect inbound leads from. There, you can add a new Webhook and paste the Clay URL. This will instantly send data from that source to the Clay table.

Webhooks open up nearly limitless possibilities for collecting and consolidating inbound leads. For example, if you’re running Zoom webinars, you could set up a webhook to automatically send attendee or registrant data into Clay as soon as someone signs up instead of manually exporting and importing CSVs.

Webhooks are also perfect for capturing high-intent signals like trial signups. Multiple signups coming from the same company could indicate strong team interest that’s definitely worth acting on quickly.

Do note that Webhook sources are limited to 50,000 submissions; you’ll need to create new tables if you’d like to process more.

🌊 Opening the Data Floodgates

To spark your creativity, here are a few more examples of sources that Clay users link up:

• Conversations via Intercom, Zendesk, or Drift chats: We feed all our support tickets from Intercom into Clay tables to help us analyze responses with AI, improve our documentation, and suggest new docs to be created
• Content Engagement: You can capture new blog subscribers or track website interactions like downloading a whitepaper or clicking on certain CTAs (Segment Session Integration)

Many companies are used to sending inbound signals directly into their CRM. However, routing signals straight into your CRM first can actually compromise your speed-to-lead due to synchronization delays and processing bottlenecks. By bringing signals into Clay first, you can instantly enrich lead data, prioritize, and decide what truly belongs in your CRM - ensuring faster, more targeted outreach.

Inbound is a huge web of signals. Clay lets you weave together all those threads into one intelligent, actionable system.

🤔 What’s next?

By establishing these lead source connections, you're creating the critical foundation that enables everything else in your inbound automation system. This real-time data transfer is just scratching the surface of what Clay can do for inbound automation.

In our upcoming lessons, we'll explore how to leverage Clay's powerful enrichment capabilities to instantly gather deep company and contact data, implement intelligent scoring mechanisms that prioritize your highest-value prospects, and build sophisticated routing systems that ensure every lead receives the context-rich attention they deserve as quickly as possible.

Effective inbound automation starts with reliable data capture but its true power emerges when you strategically enrich and efficiently act on that information. You've now laid the groundwork for building an inbound engine that consistently delivers qualified, well-researched prospects to your sales team. Happy importing!