High Level Clay Overview

🤔 What is Clay?

We get this question all the time, and that’s why we’re including this overview.

Clay can do a lot of things. Prospecting. Web scraping. Data Enrichment. AI Copywriting. Lead Scoring. CRM Sync. Email Sequencing. The list goes on forever.

We’ve jam packed Clay with a lot of functionality for one core reason:

We’ve built Clay to be your go-to tool for any outbound strategy you want to run

There’s a lot of different tools that make up the different components of outbound. From LinkedIn Sales Nav to ZoomInfo to Outreach.io to Salesforce. We’ve built Clay to integrate with all those tools, and 70+ others. It can even connect to anything we haven’t (yet) built natively using any tools API.

Clay is a lot of things to a lot of people, but above all else, it’s a data orchestration hub you can use to go from idea to execution in minutes instead of days.

Let’s dive in.

☁️ Clay Overview

There are really five core pieces to any outbound or inbound communication strategy that Clay touches:

1. Importing
2. Enriching
3. Researching
4. Copywriting (with AI)
5. Exporting

Let’s touch on each piece below

⬇️ Importing

Importing data happens in a multitude of different ways. You might start with a search of companies or people on LinkedIn. You can import a list from your CRM. You can scrape a website. Start with a google search. The list goes on, but you get the idea.

You can choose any of these options (and more!) from the “New Table” menu in Clay to get started.

✨ Enriching

Once you’ve got your list of companies or people, you need to add data points to help you target, filter, and personalize as efficiently as possible.

For companies, you might want to find industry, headcount, revenue, tech stack, vision, or more.

For people, you might want to find emails, phone numbers, LinkedIn profiles, seniority and more.

Clay utilizes 70+ different data providers + AI to give you access to all those data points, and then some. You can find all the data points available via our enrichment panel:

🔍 Researching

Most people lump enriching and researching into the same bucket, but they’re really often two separate categories. Clay refers to “enrichment” data points as the standard data you often get from traditional providers. Firmographic, Technographic, and Persona level data about your accounts and leads.

But once you know who you’re reaching to and how, you still need to do some research to find the why. 90% of reps are often googling manually to find relevant interview, blog posts, articles, or personal touches to make their copy stand out.

So we decided to automate that part in Clay too. Automate google searches at scale, scrape the web, or use our Claygent (AI Web Scraper) to get data from anywhere on the web, instantly.

✏️ Copywriting (with AI)

Once you’ve got your data foundation in place, you’re ready to start writing copy. Until recently, this was the sort of task that had to be done by a human. Formulas to insert basic variables just don’t perform the same way that a human touch does. You needed BDRs or SDRs to take all the data you had about a prospect and then write at least a few personalized sentences based on the information you had at hand.

In the era of AI, even those personalized sentence snippets can be automated.

Summarize company missions, provide creative ideas, or reference individual’s personal experience all with AI prompting at scale, something we’re proud that Clay is uniquely able to do.

⬆️ Exporting

Finally, once you’ve gotten all the data you need and written some copy, you still need to send that data somewhere. Some people need it to go to an email sequencing tool. Others need it to go to a CRM. Most people need it to go to both.