🚀 Data Activation: Sending Intelligence to Your Tool Stack

Welcome to the final lesson of in Inbound Automation: Exporting!

All the data you’ve collected, enriched, transformed, scored, and routed is only valuable if it ends up in the tools you team uses every day.

Today, we're covering that last crucial step: exporting your enriched lead intelligence to all the systems where your revenue team actually works: your CRM, email sequences, Slack channels, and any other tools that drive your sales process.

By the end of this lesson, you’ll know how to:

• Push cleaned, enriched, and scored leads into your CRM, Slack, or other outbound tools
• Understand how Clay keeps your systems up-to-date with real-time, ongoing data syncs

Here are just a few examples of what your team can do with your data once it’s ready to export:

• Push to CRM: Create or update records in HubSpot, Salesforce, whatever your source of truth is for customer information
• Send Automated Digests: Create a Slack or email summary to make sure your team is in the know about important new leads
• Automated Outreach: Trigger sequences to reach leads automatically with tools like Instantly or Smartlead minimizing speed to lead

📩 Sending data to your CRM

Exporting to CRM isn’t just about just dumping data in and hoping for the best. You want to make sure that:

• No duplicates get created
• Your CRM fields stay clean, consistent, and accurate
• Your data is regularly refreshed to make sure it’s up-to-date and actionable

Here’s how to handle that in Clay:

1. First, we want to check to see if contacts already exist in our CRM
   • Before you push a record into your CRM, always run the Lookup action using key identifiers like email address
   • Always run in batches to avoid any bulk processing errors.
   • If your CRM isn't well-maintained, you can also try looking up contacts by full name, though this is less reliable since different leads could have the same name.
   To address this, you can use an AI formula to compare the email domain of existing contacts with the domain of the company you're enriching to make sure that the contact truly belongs to the target organization.
2. Then, add net-new contacts using conditional logic
   • If a record doesn’t exist yet in your CRM, you can use Create Record or Object to add it as a new contact, and utilize conditional logic to only do so if no matching contact was found in the lookup step (when the contact ID is blank)
   • Next, decide what Clay data to map to your CRM fields, such as name, email, Linkedin URL, job title
   • Make sure the data in your Clay columns matches the field types and formats in your CRM. We went over how to clean and normalize data in Lesson 4 so feel free to revisit as needed, but just a reminder to double-check so your exports run smoothly.
   • Now, when you run the first 10 rows, a contact will only be created if they don’t already exist in your CRM

🔄 Setting up ongoing CRM update

We utilize a custom contact property called “Last Enrichment Date” to maintain an intelligent, up-to-date system. Here’s how it works:

1. We set the Last Enrichment Date custom property in our CRM to be more than 30 days ago, which means that we want our contact data to be updated every month
2. Clay automatically updates the Last Enrichment Date for each contact to reflect the latest refresh
3. In your Clay table, create a column that changes the Last Enrichment Date property to match the format in your CRM
4. Then, in the Create or Update Contact enrichment, you want to add Last Enrichment Date as an input, making sure that we’re only catching leads when Last Enrichment Date moves outside of the specified time range

This feature ensures that as new inbound leads keep flowing into your CRM, your records get updated with the latest enrichments. Keeping your CRM alive and dynamic ensures that your team is acting on the best and most current data.

👏🏻 That’s a wrap!

In this course, you’ve learned how to:

• Collect data
• Enrich and transform it
• And now pipe it into the places where it creates real value for your reps

This powerful inbound engine you’ve just built with Clay allows your team to move faster, work strategically, stay informed, and close more deals.

Remember, the tools and techniques we've shared are just the beginning. As you apply these concepts in your own work, you'll undoubtedly discover new ways to refine and improve the process. Keep experimenting, keep learning, and most importantly, keep engaging with your leads in creative, meaningful ways.

Here's to your success in inbound enrichment and beyond!