Manage & Enrich Inbound Leads Automatically in 2026 - The GTM with Clay Blog
Claygent Builder: The easiest way to build, test, and deploy GTM Agents
Build production-ready Claygents in natural language with Sculptor. Test on real data for free, track versions, and deploy once across every workflow. All inside Clay.
How Clay Uses Clay Ads: From $250 to $25 CPL
See how Clay uses its own Ads feature to cut LinkedIn CPL from $250 to $25 and unlock Meta with enriched CRM audiences. No manual uploads needed.
HG Insights Corporate Hierarchy: GTM Precision in Clay
Use HG Insights corporate hierarchy data in Clay to clean CRMs, map parent-child accounts, and trigger expansion plays. See how it works.
Sales GTM Engineering: How Clay Built the Role From Scratch
Learn what sales GTM engineering is, how it collapses SDR, AE, and SE roles into one, and how Clay built and hires for this high-leverage function. See how it works.
How to Automate Inbound Lead Outreach: The Clay Playbook
Learn how to automate inbound lead outreach with enrichment, scoring, and personalized sequences. See the exact Clay workflow that runs without manual work.
demandDrive Joins Clay’s Partner Ecosystem as an Official Clay Studio Partner
demandDrive joins Clay’s partner ecosystem to help B2B teams turn account intelligence into pipeline and revenue with GTM engineering and automation.
B2B Sales Prospecting: 15 Strategies to Drive More Conversions
Master B2B sales prospecting with 15 proven strategies covering ICP building, multi-channel outreach, and list hygiene. Build a pipeline that converts.
AI Sales Assistants: 11 Ways to Accelerate Your Outbound
Discover 11 ways AI sales assistants automate lead research, enrichment, and email personalization. See how top B2B teams use them to accelerate outbound.
The Three Laws of GTM: How to Win in the AI Era
The three laws of GTM explain why uniqueness, saturation, and iteration speed determine who wins. Learn how AI changes the rules and what to do about it.
Best Work Email Finders by Segment: SMB vs. Enterprise
We tested 12 email finders across 4,700+ contacts to find the best work emails by segment. See accuracy, cost, and coverage winners for SMB and enterprise.
How Clay Converts Trial Users Into Customers With Automated Outreach
See how Clay uses automated outreach to convert trial users into customers, with enrichment, lead scoring, and personalized HubSpot campaigns. Learn how.
Best Mobile Phone Data Providers for B2B Sales Teams
We tested 9,806 numbers across 10 B2B mobile phone data providers. See which wins on accuracy, coverage, and cost for NAMER, EMEA, and APAC.
How to Build a Complete AI Outbound Sales Funnel
Learn how to build a complete AI outbound sales funnel—from account scoring to personalized outreach—using Clay waterfalls and automation. See how it works.
How to Get More Customers Using Outbound Sales: A Complete Guide
Learn how outbound sales works, who it's right for, and how to build a strategy from prospecting to closing. Covers cold calling, email, and more.
How to Automate 6 Cold Email Campaigns in One Clay Workflow
Learn how to automate 6 cold email campaigns from a single Clay table — with enrichment, AI classification, and deduplication built in. See how it works.
How Clay Identifies Tier 1 Accounts: A Three-Score System
See how Clay identifies tier 1 accounts using a three-score system: fit, engagement, and contract value. Learn how sales and marketing align on the same priorities.
Lead Scoring in Clay: A Step-by-Step Formula Guide
Learn how to build lead scoring formulas in Clay to prioritize your ICP leads by employee count, job postings, and more. See how it works.
How to Validate Cold Outbound Offers and Find Message-Market Fit
Learn how to validate cold outbound offers by finding message-market fit — from breaking down your value prop to testing with a phased email approach. See how it works.
Troubleshooting Outbound Sales and Prospecting: A Comprehensive Guide
Fix broken outbound sales campaigns with this guide. Diagnose open and reply rates, reduce no-shows, qualify prospects with MEDDIC, and optimize what's working.
Bulk Enrichment: Enrich Millions of CRM Records in Clay
Bulk enrichment lets Enterprise teams enrich millions of Salesforce records with firmographics, tech stack, and AI research — then write results back automatically.
Clay Templates: Automate, Customize, and Replicate Any GTM Workflow
Clay Templates let you replicate full GTM workflows in hours, not days. Automate prospecting from data scraping to AI messaging, free and fully customizable.
How to Optimize Your Credit Usage in Clay
Learn how to optimize your credit usage in Clay with conditional formulas, Clearbit waterfall lookups, and smarter enrichment workflows. Save credits fast.
AI for sales prospecting
Learn about how to use AI for sales prospecting in this comprehensive guide, including framework for creating AI prompts and examples of cold email templates using AI that real sales teams have used successfully to land clients. AI sales prospecting can save your team thousands of hours—and double or triple your positive response rates.
The Reverse Demo: How Clay Replaced Traditional B2B Sales Demos
A reverse demo lets prospects solve real problems live, guided by your rep. Learn how Clay used 100+ sessions to boost conversion, retention, and product quality.
Data Waterfalls: How to Maximize Contact Coverage with Clay
Data waterfalls query multiple providers in sequence so you only pay for matches. See how Clay pushes coverage from 30% to 80%+ without annual contracts.
How Clay Runs ABM Campaigns: A Step-by-Step Playbook
See how Clay runs ABM campaigns — scoring 300 accounts, personalizing mailers and landing pages, and automating SDR follow-up. Learn how.
How We Built Clay's GTM Engineering Function
See how Clay built its GTM engineering function with sprint-based delivery, founder-level reporting, and full sales automation. A practical inside look.
Best Personal Email Finder Tools: Tested and Ranked
We tested 5 personal email finder tools across 2,354 prospects. See accuracy, coverage, and pricing data — plus the waterfall order that hit 79% coverage.
How to Use OpenAI to Write Cold Emails from Scratch with Clay
Learn how to use OpenAI to write personalized cold emails at scale with Clay. Set up the integration, craft better prompts, and boost deliverability.
How to Run a Personalized Demo Play at Scale with Clay
Learn how to automate a personalized demo play using Clay, Claygent, and AI enrichment to build custom mockups at scale. See how it works.
Automated Slide Deck Creation: How Clay Builds QBRs from Your Data
Clay's automated slide deck creation pulls from Snowflake, Salesforce, and Gong to build QBRs in minutes. Save 90+ hours per quarter. See how it works.
HG Insights + Clay: B2B Technographic and Firmographic Data
HG Insights surfaces deep technographic and firmographic data from billions of documents. Use it in Clay workflows to enrich accounts and power GTM. See how it works.
B2B Cold Email Deliverability: 21 Best Practices
Master B2B cold email deliverability with 21 proven best practices: domain setup, inbox warmup, authentication, and copy tips that keep you out of spam. Learn how.
Basics of Google Search Operators: A Practical Guide
Learn the basics of Google Search Operators and how to use them in Clay for prospecting, list building, and company research. See how it works.
AI Lead Generation: The Complete B2B Guide
Learn how AI lead generation automates list building, enrichment, and personalized outreach for B2B teams. Scale your pipeline without scaling headcount. See how it works.
Clay MCP: Ops-built workflows, consumable by reps
Clay MCP: Ops-built workflows, consumable by reps
How to Manage and Enrich Inbound Leads Automatically
Learn how to manage and enrich inbound leads automatically using a four-phase workflow that scores, segments, and triggers outreach from one email. See how it works.
GTM Alpha: How Winning Teams Build a Competitive Edge
GTM alpha is the edge winning teams build with unique data and signal-based plays. Learn how to find hidden signals, run better plays, and outpace competitors.
Why Good CRM Data Matters and How Clay Helps
Poor CRM data kills outreach. Learn why CRM data coverage fails and how Clay's waterfall enrichment lifts coverage rates from 20% to 80%. See how it works.
How to Use Formulas in Clay: AI Generator and Manual Entry
Learn how to use formulas in Clay with the AI Formula Generator or manual entry. Transform and clean your data faster. See how it works.
GTM Engineering: What It Is, How It Works, and How to Hire
GTM engineering turns ops teams into revenue builders using AI and automation. Learn what GTM engineers do, how to structure the role, and how to hire one.
Formulas in Clay: A Beginner's Intro for Non-Engineers
Learn how to use formulas in Clay without coding. This intro covers conditional statements, combining columns, and auto-qualifying leads. Start in 30 minutes.
How Clay Uses Clay for SEO and AEO: 3 Systems That Scale
See how Clay uses Clay for SEO and AEO: automated content refresh, video-to-page conversion, and a custom AI visibility dashboard. Learn how.
Turn Web Visitors into Leads: A Warm Outbound Play for B2B Sales
Learn how to turn web visitors into leads using a warm outbound play for B2B sales — with RB2B, Clay, and Lemlist. See how it works.
How to Use Web Scraping to Enrich Your Data with Clay
Learn how to use web scraping to enrich your data without code. Clay's Claygent answers deep GTM research questions at scale. See how it works.
How to Create a Sales Prospect List in Minutes
Learn how to create your own sales prospect list in minutes using Clay. Pull from 40+ sources, enrich with ICP data, and export to your CRM. See how it works.
Best B2B Email List Providers: Tested and Ranked (2026)
We tested 8 B2B email list providers head-to-head. See accuracy results, per-email pricing, and how to waterfall providers for maximum coverage.
Outbound Sales Automation: How to 10x Pipeline Without More SDRs
Learn how outbound sales automation replaces manual SDR work, cuts cost per email by 100x, and scales pipeline without growing headcount. See how it works.
The Wake the Dead Play: Reactivate Closed-Lost Deals with Clay
The wake the dead play uses Clay + ChatGPT to send automated, personalized emails to closed-lost prospects. Restart stalled deals in a few steps. Learn how.
Three Tips to Guarantee Email Deliverability for Cold Outbound
Split volume, verify contacts, and personalize copy to guarantee email deliverability for cold outbound. Three actionable tips that keep you out of spam.
How Clay Uses Clay for Customer Support: 3 Real Workflows
See how Clay's customer support team uses Clay to enrich Intercom tickets, automate QA, and draft help articles. Real workflows, real results.
B2B Cold Email Copywriting: The Complete Guide
Master B2B cold email copywriting with proven templates, a research framework, and a checklist used to send 800k+ emails a month. Start writing emails that get replies.
Introducing Clay Functions
Build Your GTM Logic Once, Apply It Everywhere
Clay and Apollo Integration: Enrichment, Sequencing, and More
The Clay and Apollo integration unlocks 5X faster enrichment and direct sequencer API access. See how joint customers go from data to booked meetings.
The Many Lives of Spreadsheets: A History and What Comes Next
Explore the many lives of spreadsheets — from VisiCalc in 1979 to self-filling automation tools today. See how the no-code vision keeps evolving.
AI recruiting strategies
Learn our top AI recruiting workflows to help you identify, research, and reach out to qualified candidates for open roles. AI can eliminate manual work and help you reach out to—and land—better employees for your clients.
How to Hire a GTM Engineer: The Complete Guide
Learn how to hire a GTM engineer: when to make the hire, what skills to screen for, red flags to avoid, and where to find the best candidates. See how it works.
Inside Clay's GTM Engineering Lab: Plays, Principles, and Automation
See how Clay's GTM engineering lab turns internal problems into revenue plays using AI, automation, and data-driven principles. Learn how it works.
How to Build the Most Targeted Account Lists Possible
Generic tools leave bad-fit companies in your account list. Learn how to build targeted account lists using AI enrichment and real workflow examples in Clay.
Personalized Direct Mail at Scale: The Gifting Play with Clay
Learn how to run personalized direct mail campaigns using Clay — validate contacts, generate AI gift copy, and export to email. See how it works.
How to Set Up Your Full Inbound Sales Process on Clay
Learn how to set up your full inbound sales process on Clay — enrich leads, tag MQLs, and automate email campaigns from form to demo. See how it works.
AI-Enabled GTM for Private Equity: The Value Creation Playbook
Learn how AI-enabled GTM for private equity drives value creation across portfolios—from data quality to agentic workflows. See how it works.
Do More With Your Data: Clay's Post-Data-Provider Approach
Clay's post-data-provider approach combines 150+ providers, waterfall enrichment, and AI scraping to maximize data coverage. See how it works.
Google Maps Lead Generation for Niche Local Businesses
Learn how to use Google Maps lead generation to find niche local businesses, enrich owner contacts, and send personalized outreach at scale with Clay.
24 AI Email Personalization Examples for Cold Outreach (With Prompts)
Get 24 AI email personalization examples for cold outreach, with ChatGPT prompts you can run at scale in Clay. Learn how to write emails that actually convert.
How to Ace Your Follow-Ups: A Practical Sales Guide
Learn how to ace your follow-ups with value-driven outreach, personalization tips, multi-channel tactics, and automation tools that keep deals moving. See how it works.
How to Prioritize Your Waitlist with Lead Enrichment
Learn how to prioritize your waitlist using lead enrichment. Turn raw signups into qualified leads by company, title, and role — no long forms needed. See how.
B2B Cold Email Templates: Frameworks That Get Replies
Learn how to write B2B cold email templates that convert with a proven 5-part framework, follow-up strategy, and real examples. See how it works.
Audiences: now in Enterprise beta
Clay Audiences unifies your CRM, product data, and intent signals into one layer — so reps and agents can run precise, personalized GTM plays at scale.
The thinking behind our new pricing: our internal memo
Clay pricing memo: INTERNAL
Introducing Clay’s new pricing
Today, we’re launching a pricing update that reduces data costs, and simplifies and improves the value of our plans. Our goal is to have Clay be your default tool for GTM Engineering.
Clay partners with Lusha and Beauhurst to expand European data coverage
Lusha adds lookalike prospecting, contact enrichment, and signals in EMEA. Beauhurst adds private funding and corporate structure data in the UK and Germany.
Source your precise TAM from lookalikes you can trust with Ocean.io and Clay
Clay + Ocean now enable preview-based B2B lookalike discovery. Preview leads before committing credits and expand your TAM with greater precision.
Clay doubles down on supporting European GTM teams
Clay's waterfall enrichment delivers 2–3x more mobile phone coverage than leading solo providers across Europe. Plus new data partnerships, a London office, and timezone-aligned support.
In Nigeria, she built a life where money wouldn’t decide
Clay blog | In Nigeria, she built a life where money wouldn’t decide
Sculptor Analyst Mode: Turning Context-Rich Data Into Actionable GTM Insights
Gather business intelligence and share documents of this analysis directly from Sculptor
In a place where girls often choose between career or marriage, she carved her own path
Javeria Shah won the Clay Cup 2025 despite being denied a US visa and competing remotely from Pakistan. Learn how she transitioned from electronics engineering into GTM engineering and built her own business.
How we designed Sculpt
Our first conference, Sculpt, is where the analog soul of Clay met the digital mind of Clay.
Clay announces second employee tender offer in nine months at a $5B valuation
A rare repeat employee liquidity event, designed to give builders flexibility as Clay accelerates
Clay is now available as a connector in Claude
Bring Clay's contact databases, enrichment providers, and AI agents into your Claude workflow.
Sellers have a new AI edge: Clay in ChatGPT
Use Clay directly in ChatGPT to find the right buyers, research people and companies, and draft personalized outbound. One conversation, powered by live GTM data.
Clay reaches $100M ARR
Clay has crossed $100M ARR, growing from $1M to $100M in two years after six years of foundational product work. The milestone reflects durable customer adoption, efficient growth, and an ecosystem of GTM builders using Clay to power their business.
Clay Certifications: Turning mastery into credentials that matter
The Clay education team has built a certification program that runs entirely on Clay and gives users credentials that actually matter
Mobile Phone Verification Methodology
Clay has partnered with The Kiln to setup a series of large-scale data test across mobile phone, work email, personal email, email verification, and more. Below, we explain the approach to these tests.
Work Email Verification Methodology
Clay has partnered with The Kiln to setup a series of large-scale data test across mobile phone, work email, personal email, email verification, and more. Below, we explain the approach to these tests.
Stop Guessing, Start Analyzing: How Sculptor Turns Your GTM Data Into Your Competitive Advantage
Analyze your GTM data with Sculptor to turn fragmented information into actionable insight.
Find and outreach local businesses with Openmart and Clay Sequencer
Get the right contacts for local businesses without stitching together multiple tools or wasting valuable time on setup instead of selling.
Announcing Web Intent
Use Website Intent in Clay to see which companies visit your site, track engagement, and trigger personalized GTM plays. Turn website traffic into real buyer intent data.
How Clay Uses Clay: Conversational Data
How we use Clay to mine millions of pages of call transcripts to generate revenue, and how you can use it too.
Sculpting GTM’s future with six major launches
Today at Sculpt, we're launching six major features that will help teams turn any growth idea into reality faster.
Introducing Claygent Navigator
A new Claygent model that can use a browser to take actions and extract information from webpages.
Announcing the Clay Partner Program
The Clay Partner Program is to a partner, what a toolbox is to an artist. It keeps essential resources within reach and grows more sophisticated as your expertise develops. We've designed everything around one simple principle: helping you grow your business as Clay grows.
Introducing GPT-5 in Claygent: sharper research, stronger formulas, better outbound
GPT-5 is now a model option across Clay, bringing the best research and conversational writing we've ever shipped to your GTM workflows.
Clay Series C announcement. The GTM engineering era begins now
We raised a $100M Series C at a $3.1B valuation to power GTM engineering!
Claygent surpasses 1 billion runs
The world's most loved AI research agent in GTM has passes a huge milestone at 1 billion runs.
Announcing Sculpt: Clay’s first annual user conference
Join us for Sculpt, Clay’s first annual user conference on Sept 17 in San Francisco where GTM leaders build AI workflows, share creative tactics, and get early access to new features.
Announcing custom signals at Clay
Clay's new custom signals platform helps sales teams track unique data changes that indicate buying opportunities. Turn any data point into a sales signal, enrich with context, and automate personalized outreach to find GTM alpha your competitors miss.
Clay announces employee tender offer led by Sequoia at $1.5B valuation
Clay allows employees to sell vested shares for immediate liquidity through a $20M tender offer at a $1.5B valuation. With 10x revenue growth in 2022-2023 and serving 8,000+ customers including OpenAI and Hubspot, Clay continues to change how businesses approach go-to-market strategies with their AI agent Claygent.
Create personalized presentations at scale with Clay and Google Slides
Automate personalized sales decks with Clay’s Google Slides integration. Instantly generate tailored presentations for leads, customers, QBRs, and internal updates. Use one template to create hundreds of presentations at scale.
Turn Gong conversations into automated GTM workflows
Clay now integrates with Gong—turn messy call transcripts into powerful automations in Salesforce, HubSpot, Notion, Slack, Google Sheets, and 100+ other integrations.
Product
Use Cases
Solutions
Resources
Company
Pricing
Features
.
Additional
How Clay uses Clay
LinkedIn + Meta Ads on Autopilot
CRM enrichment
Keep your CRM clean with the highest quality data
BY TEAM
BY STAGE
BY CUSTOMERS
Intercom
Link long form description will go in this slot here.
Recharge
Link long form description will go in this slot here.
Legora
Link long form description will go in this slot here.
OpenAI
Link long form description will go in this slot here.
Exit Five
Link long form description will go in this slot here.
Intercom
Grew their outbound-sourced pipeline by +140%
START GROWING
DISCOVER
Community
PARTNER WITH US
Clay Commnity
In Nigeria, she built a life where money wouldn’t decide
OUR COMPANY
GET IN TOUCH
SOCIALS
Article – NY Times
Clay allows employees to sell shares at a $5b valuation.
How to Manage and Enrich Inbound Leads Automatically
Clay's inbound workflow removes that tradeoff. A single field, an email address, is enough to kick off a workflow that builds a complete picture of the prospect before a rep ever reaches out. That means their LinkedIn profile, job title, seniority, and whether they're a decision maker, as well as the company they work for, who that company sells to, how big they are, and what signals indicate fit. And it also means knowing their history with Clay, including every webinar they've attended, every event they've shown up to, every prior touchpoint on record. Conversion rate stays high. Reps show up prepared.
The workflow runs always-on, pulling in leads the moment they come inbound. Clay pulls first-party data from your CRM or data warehouse, aggregates third-party enrichment, scores the lead, and enrolls them in outreach automatically. A rep can engage with a prospect while they're still on the website, and do it with full context. Both things at once.
What makes that context meaningful is the combination of data sources. First-party signals tell you what actions a prospect has taken: which webinars they've attended, which events they've shown up to, what their history with Clay looks like. Third-party enrichment tells you who they are and where they work. Together, those two layers don't just tell you whether to reach out. They tell you how.
A prospect who's brand new to Clay gets a different conversation than one who's already building tables and needs help getting internal buy-in. Without the enrichment, a rep needs to get up to speed on context manually, but with it, that call is shaped before it starts.
TL;DR
- Clay's inbound workflow enriches a lead automatically from a single email address, pulling contact data, firmographics, and first-party history before a rep ever reaches out.
- The workflow runs in four phases: identify the person, identify the company, score and segment, then enroll in automated outreach, all without manual research.
- First-party signals (webinar attendance, event history, prior touchpoints) combine with third-party enrichment to shape how reps approach each conversation, not just whether to reach out.
- Personal Gmail submissions are not dead ends: Clay can recover a work email, locate the LinkedIn profile, and map the buying center using just a name and company.
The problem with managing inbound leads at scale
Inbound leads arrive through all types of entry points with minimal information. An email address, maybe a name, title. To figure out whether someone is worth prioritizing, and how to approach them, a rep would normally spend an hour piecing together their background, their company, and their relevance. Then repeat that for every lead in the queue.
Clay also runs multiple inbound channels simultaneously: demo requests, trial signups, webinar registrations, field events, contact forms. Each one brings in leads at different intent levels. A demo request and a webinar signup require different responses than a field event attendee, but both need to be evaluated quickly.
This is already hard. It gets harder when a prospect submits a personal Gmail address instead of a work email. Most inbound enrichment systems depend on that work email. It's what ties a contact to a company, unlocks firmographic data, and makes qualification possible. Without it, reps are stuck manually hunting for the right information before they can even decide whether the lead is worth pursuing. That kills speed to lead and adds noise to the qualification process. Most teams just skip personal email submissions entirely and move on.
How the automated enrichment workflow actually runs
A submission comes in with a single input: an email address. From there the workflow runs in four phases.
Identify the person. Claygent finds the LinkedIn profile URL. Clay pulls job title, seniority, tenure, social URLs, and whether the contact is a decision maker.
Identify the company. With the contact resolved, Clay enriches the account: size, who they sell to, tech stack, growth signals, and whatever else indicates fit for Clay's product.
Score and segment. Contact and account data together determine fit. High-fit leads get prioritized for immediate outreach. Lower-intent leads get routed to the appropriate teams. Leads below the threshold get flagged for monitoring rather than active outreach.
Act. Qualified leads are enrolled in automated outreach within the same workflow. An email goes out within minutes of submission. If the prospect doesn't book from that first touch, the rep who follows up already has everything loaded: who they are, why they're a fit, and the right angle to take into the conversation.
The whole cycle runs without manual research.
Context is the other half of speed
The goal is to reach prospects faster and give them a better experience when you do.
Take a prospect who signs up for a webinar, then attends a field event two months later, then submits a demo request after getting promoted into a target role. By the time that request comes in, the rep should already know all of it: what they've attended, what they've engaged with, where they are in their Clay journey. That history, combined with third-party enrichment data, shapes the entire approach to the conversation.
A prospect who's brand new to Clay gets pointed toward resources like Clay University or a How Clay Uses Clay session, something that gives them a foundation. A prospect who's already active in their workspace doesn't need the intro. They need help getting internal buy-in, which might mean running a reverse demo and working through their actual build with them. The enrichment is what tells the rep which situation they're walking into before the call starts.
That's also why Clay measures conversion rates across ad spend going back a full year. A lead that converts three months after first contact still counts. The enrichment and touchpoint tracking that happened on day one made that outcome possible.
Speed to lead matters. But so does what you say when you get there.
Handling personal emails
Personal email submissions don't have to be dead ends. With a first name, last name, and company, Clay can locate the LinkedIn profile, run a work email waterfall to recover the professional address, and map the buying center at that account. When several people from the same company submit with personal emails, Clay identifies the pattern, surfaces the decision maker, and routes accordingly.
What this looks like in practice
The demo above runs the full workflow.
A submission comes in. Claygent finds the LinkedIn profile URL. Clay pulls job title, seniority, tenure, social URLs, and decision-maker status. That resolves the person. Then it resolves the company: size, who they sell to, what they care about, what signals indicate fit for Clay.
Once both layers are enriched, the workflow makes a fit determination. If the answer is yes, the lead gets marked, assigned, and enrolled in automated outreach, all in the same table. An email goes out within minutes of submission. If the prospect doesn't book from that first touch, the rep who dials them already has the enrichment data loaded: who they are, why they're a fit, how to sell them.
The whole cycle runs without a manual handoff.
Want to build this yourself? Watch our live workshop where Davide Grieco and Manny Adelstein run through Clay's own outbound management system.
Frequently Asked Questions
What data points are most valuable for B2B contact enrichment?
The most actionable combination is contact-level data (job title, seniority, tenure, decision-maker status, LinkedIn profile) paired with account-level firmographics (company size, who they sell to, tech stack, growth signals). First-party behavioral data, such as webinar attendance, event history, and prior touchpoints, adds the layer that shapes how a rep approaches the conversation, not just whether to reach out.
How do you automatically enrich inbound leads without manual research?
Clay's workflow triggers the moment a form submission arrives. Starting from a single email address, it runs through four automated phases: identifying the person, identifying the company, scoring and segmenting the lead, and enrolling qualified leads in outreach. The entire cycle completes without a rep lifting a finger before the first email goes out.
What happens when an inbound lead submits a personal Gmail address instead of a work email?
Clay can still resolve the lead. Using a first name, last name, and company, Clay locates the LinkedIn profile, runs a work email waterfall to recover the professional address, and maps the buying center at that account. When multiple people from the same company submit with personal emails, Clay surfaces the decision maker and routes accordingly.
How does lead scoring work in this workflow?
Contact and account enrichment data feed into a fit determination together. High-fit leads get prioritized for immediate outreach. Lower-intent leads get routed to the appropriate teams. Leads that fall below the threshold get flagged for monitoring rather than active outreach, so reps focus their time where it matters most.
Clay's inbound workflow removes that tradeoff. A single field, an email address, is enough to kick off a workflow that builds a complete picture of the prospect before a rep ever reaches out. That means their LinkedIn profile, job title, seniority, and whether they're a decision maker, as well as the company they work for, who that company sells to, how big they are, and what signals indicate fit. And it also means knowing their history with Clay, including every webinar they've attended, every event they've shown up to, every prior touchpoint on record. Conversion rate stays high. Reps show up prepared.
The workflow runs always-on, pulling in leads the moment they come inbound. Clay pulls first-party data from your CRM or data warehouse, aggregates third-party enrichment, scores the lead, and enrolls them in outreach automatically. A rep can engage with a prospect while they're still on the website, and do it with full context. Both things at once.
What makes that context meaningful is the combination of data sources. First-party signals tell you what actions a prospect has taken: which webinars they've attended, which events they've shown up to, what their history with Clay looks like. Third-party enrichment tells you who they are and where they work. Together, those two layers don't just tell you whether to reach out. They tell you how.
A prospect who's brand new to Clay gets a different conversation than one who's already building tables and needs help getting internal buy-in. Without the enrichment, a rep needs to get up to speed on context manually, but with it, that call is shaped before it starts.
TL;DR
- Clay's inbound workflow enriches a lead automatically from a single email address, pulling contact data, firmographics, and first-party history before a rep ever reaches out.
- The workflow runs in four phases: identify the person, identify the company, score and segment, then enroll in automated outreach, all without manual research.
- First-party signals (webinar attendance, event history, prior touchpoints) combine with third-party enrichment to shape how reps approach each conversation, not just whether to reach out.
- Personal Gmail submissions are not dead ends: Clay can recover a work email, locate the LinkedIn profile, and map the buying center using just a name and company.
The problem with managing inbound leads at scale
Inbound leads arrive through all types of entry points with minimal information. An email address, maybe a name, title. To figure out whether someone is worth prioritizing, and how to approach them, a rep would normally spend an hour piecing together their background, their company, and their relevance. Then repeat that for every lead in the queue.
Clay also runs multiple inbound channels simultaneously: demo requests, trial signups, webinar registrations, field events, contact forms. Each one brings in leads at different intent levels. A demo request and a webinar signup require different responses than a field event attendee, but both need to be evaluated quickly.
This is already hard. It gets harder when a prospect submits a personal Gmail address instead of a work email. Most inbound enrichment systems depend on that work email. It's what ties a contact to a company, unlocks firmographic data, and makes qualification possible. Without it, reps are stuck manually hunting for the right information before they can even decide whether the lead is worth pursuing. That kills speed to lead and adds noise to the qualification process. Most teams just skip personal email submissions entirely and move on.
How the automated enrichment workflow actually runs
A submission comes in with a single input: an email address. From there the workflow runs in four phases.
Identify the person. Claygent finds the LinkedIn profile URL. Clay pulls job title, seniority, tenure, social URLs, and whether the contact is a decision maker.
Identify the company. With the contact resolved, Clay enriches the account: size, who they sell to, tech stack, growth signals, and whatever else indicates fit for Clay's product.
Score and segment. Contact and account data together determine fit. High-fit leads get prioritized for immediate outreach. Lower-intent leads get routed to the appropriate teams. Leads below the threshold get flagged for monitoring rather than active outreach.
Act. Qualified leads are enrolled in automated outreach within the same workflow. An email goes out within minutes of submission. If the prospect doesn't book from that first touch, the rep who follows up already has everything loaded: who they are, why they're a fit, and the right angle to take into the conversation.
The whole cycle runs without manual research.
Context is the other half of speed
The goal is to reach prospects faster and give them a better experience when you do.
Take a prospect who signs up for a webinar, then attends a field event two months later, then submits a demo request after getting promoted into a target role. By the time that request comes in, the rep should already know all of it: what they've attended, what they've engaged with, where they are in their Clay journey. That history, combined with third-party enrichment data, shapes the entire approach to the conversation.
A prospect who's brand new to Clay gets pointed toward resources like Clay University or a How Clay Uses Clay session, something that gives them a foundation. A prospect who's already active in their workspace doesn't need the intro. They need help getting internal buy-in, which might mean running a reverse demo and working through their actual build with them. The enrichment is what tells the rep which situation they're walking into before the call starts.
That's also why Clay measures conversion rates across ad spend going back a full year. A lead that converts three months after first contact still counts. The enrichment and touchpoint tracking that happened on day one made that outcome possible.
Speed to lead matters. But so does what you say when you get there.
Handling personal emails
Personal email submissions don't have to be dead ends. With a first name, last name, and company, Clay can locate the LinkedIn profile, run a work email waterfall to recover the professional address, and map the buying center at that account. When several people from the same company submit with personal emails, Clay identifies the pattern, surfaces the decision maker, and routes accordingly.
What this looks like in practice
The demo above runs the full workflow.
A submission comes in. Claygent finds the LinkedIn profile URL. Clay pulls job title, seniority, tenure, social URLs, and decision-maker status. That resolves the person. Then it resolves the company: size, who they sell to, what they care about, what signals indicate fit for Clay.
Once both layers are enriched, the workflow makes a fit determination. If the answer is yes, the lead gets marked, assigned, and enrolled in automated outreach, all in the same table. An email goes out within minutes of submission. If the prospect doesn't book from that first touch, the rep who dials them already has the enrichment data loaded: who they are, why they're a fit, how to sell them.
The whole cycle runs without a manual handoff.
Want to build this yourself? Watch our live workshop where Davide Grieco and Manny Adelstein run through Clay's own outbound management system.
Frequently Asked Questions
What data points are most valuable for B2B contact enrichment?
The most actionable combination is contact-level data (job title, seniority, tenure, decision-maker status, LinkedIn profile) paired with account-level firmographics (company size, who they sell to, tech stack, growth signals). First-party behavioral data, such as webinar attendance, event history, and prior touchpoints, adds the layer that shapes how a rep approaches the conversation, not just whether to reach out.
How do you automatically enrich inbound leads without manual research?
Clay's workflow triggers the moment a form submission arrives. Starting from a single email address, it runs through four automated phases: identifying the person, identifying the company, scoring and segmenting the lead, and enrolling qualified leads in outreach. The entire cycle completes without a rep lifting a finger before the first email goes out.
What happens when an inbound lead submits a personal Gmail address instead of a work email?
Clay can still resolve the lead. Using a first name, last name, and company, Clay locates the LinkedIn profile, runs a work email waterfall to recover the professional address, and maps the buying center at that account. When multiple people from the same company submit with personal emails, Clay surfaces the decision maker and routes accordingly.
How does lead scoring work in this workflow?
Contact and account enrichment data feed into a fit determination together. High-fit leads get prioritized for immediate outreach. Lower-intent leads get routed to the appropriate teams. Leads that fall below the threshold get flagged for monitoring rather than active outreach, so reps focus their time where it matters most.