Welcome to our lesson on CRM integration! This might be the most important export lesson for sales and marketing teams because your CRM is where leads turn into revenue.

Proper CRM export isn't just about moving data. It's about maintaining data hygiene, preventing duplicates, and ensuring your sales team has clean, actionable information.

In this lesson, we'll show you how to export to your CRM while maintaining data integrity and following best practices that keep your sales pipeline clean.

Clay supports HubSpot, Salesforce, PipeDrive, Close, Copper, and many others. If your CRM isn't directly supported, you can use HTTP API connections, which we cover in Clay 201.

🧹 Understanding CRM Hygiene

First, let's talk about CRM hygiene. CRM Hygiene is about more than just organization. It directly impacts your sales team's success.

Preventing duplicate records ensures your team isn't calling the same prospect multiple times or getting confused about previous interactions.

Maintaining data integrity means your sales team can trust the information in front of them, leading to more effective conversations and better conversion rates.

Only adding net new contacts prevents your CRM from becoming cluttered with outdated or redundant information that slows down your team.

The impact on sales efficiency is enormous. Clean CRM data means faster prospecting, better targeting, and more closed deals.

🔍 Checking for Existing Contacts

INSERT ARCADE

So before adding any new contacts to your CRM, always check if they already exist. Here's how:

• Open the Enrichment Panel and navigate to the CRM integrations section. Select the "Lookup Contact" action for your CRM—we'll use HubSpot as our example.
• Use email as the unique identifier since contact IDs aren't available when importing new data. Email addresses provide the most reliable way to identify existing contacts.
• Run a test lookup on 10 rows first to verify the process is working correctly. This prevents any bulk processing errors.
• Pro tip: If your CRM isn't well-maintained, you can also try looking up contacts by full name, though this is less reliable due to potential duplicate names across different companies.

For improved accuracy, you can use an AI formula to compare the email domain of existing contacts with the domain of the company you're enriching. This helps confirm that the contact truly belongs to the target organization.

➕ Adding Net New Contacts Conditionally

Once you've identified which contacts don't exist in your CRM, you can conditionally add only the net new contacts:

• Set up a "Create or Update Contact" action in your CRM integration. Map the Clay data fields to the appropriate CRM fields—this might include name, email, company, job title, and any custom fields you've created.
• Configure conditional runs based on your lookup results. Set the action to only run if no matching contact ID was found from the CRM lookup step.
• Test with a small batch first—run 10 rows to confirm that only net new contacts are being added and that the data mapping is correct.
• This conditional approach prevents you from clogging up your CRM with duplicate data while ensuring all legitimate new contacts get added properly.

Review the results carefully before scaling to your full dataset. Make sure contact information is mapping correctly and that no duplicates are being created.

🎯 Best Practices for CRM Integration

Here are some best practices for using your CRM integration:

Always check for duplicates before adding new contacts—this single step prevents most CRM hygiene issues.

Use conditional logic to prevent data pollution. Set up your workflows so that actions only run when specific conditions are met.

Test with small batches first, especially when setting up new integration workflows. It's much easier to fix issues with 10 contacts than with 1,000.

Monitor and verify successful exports by checking your CRM after running integrations. Make sure data appears correctly and completely.

Finally, use regular cleanup and maintenance procedures. Even when you have a perfect process in place, you should be periodically reviewing and cleaning up your CRM.

🚀 Advanced CRM Integration Techniques

As you get more sophisticated with CRM integration, there are more advanced techniques you can use:

• You can use AI formulas for data validation, cleaning and formatting data before it enters your CRM.
• Handle different CRM field requirements by mapping Clay data to the specific field types and formats your CRM expects.
• Set up ongoing synchronization for contacts that change frequently, keeping your CRM current with the latest information from Clay.

We'll cover these advanced techniques in greater detail in future courses, but for now, just know you're scratching the surface with how Clay and your CRM can work together.

✅ Conclusion

That's a wrap on CRM export! You now know how to maintain data hygiene while efficiently moving your prospects from Clay into your CRM.

Proper CRM integration improves sales efficiency by ensuring your team has clean, accurate, and complete prospect information when they need it.

You've now completed the full FETE framework journey—from finding data to enriching it, transforming it for quality, and finally exporting it to where it creates value.

Well done! In the next lesson, we’ll talk about what you can do next in your GTM journey.

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