CLAY
Clay was founded in 2017 to make programming more accessible, but in 2021, pivoted to the pressing use-cases of automating sales prospecting and go-to-market workflows. Clay’s flagship AI Agent ‘Claygent’ which streamlines daily sales operations surpassed 1 billion users in 2025. Industry observers predict that by 2030, AI-driven sales agents will be a standard part of sales teams, acting as virtual assistants that streamline lead generation, enhance customer interactions, and provide real-time insights to representatives.
Product Overview
Case Study: Clay Sales AI Agents
Multi-Source Data EnrichmentAggregates data from 75+ (and up to 130+) external sources to enrich lead info with emails, phone numbers, firmographics, technographics, and more. Clay uses a “waterfall” approach: trying multiple providers and only keeping the best results to maximize coverage and accuracy. This significantly increases data completeness. (Example: OpenAI’s sales team more than doubled their lead enrichment coverage, from ~40% to ~80%, by switching from a single data vendor to Clay’s multi-source model)
This breadth + depth strategy means users get data points that a single source might miss, giving sales reps a richer picture of each prospect.
AI Research Agent or “Claygent”: This agent uses GPT-4 and other models to visit websites and documents, find specific information, and summarize it automatically. In essence, Claygent replicates what a human researcher or SDR would do by checking a prospect’s website for key details, reading news articles, scanning LinkedIn profiles, etc. It can be given custom instructions (prompts) to gather insights, and it returns results in seconds. This uncovers unique, real-time data (e.g., recent blog mentions, press releases, job postings) that static databases often lack.
AI-Powered Message Writing: The built-in AI writing assistant uses GPT-4 to draft personalized outreach content. For example, it can generate a cold email intro that references a prospect’s recent product launch (information Claygent found), or create a tailored sales pitch based on the prospect’s industry and pain points. This saves reps significant time in writing and ensures outreach is highly personalized to each lead. Many users find this boosts reply rates, as the messages crafted are more relevant and engaging than generic templates.
Automated Workflows & Integration: Clay provides a no-code workflow builder that lets users chain together data enrichment steps, AI actions, and conditional logic. You can set up branching rules (even using AI for decisions). For e.g., “if no email found via source A, then try source B; if title contains ‘VP’, flag this lead for AE review” .
The platform integrates with major CRMs (Salesforce, HubSpot) and other tools, so enriched data flows directly into your existing system.
It can trigger external actions too (e.g., post a Slack alert when a hot lead is identified). This effectively makes Clay the central hub of a sales stack, orchestrating tasks that used to require multiple tools or manual effort. Users can even schedule automations (e.g., refresh all leads nightly). The result is a seamless, integrated workflow where much of the grunt work happens behind the scenes.
Real-Time Intent Signals: Clay can monitor and react to buying signals and trigger events in real-time. Users can set up agents to watch for things like a prospect changing jobs, a target company raising a funding round, posting a new job opening, or getting mentioned in the news. When a signal is detected, Clay can automatically update the lead info, create a task, or notify the sales rep to reach out at the perfect moment. This helps sales teams capitalize on timing – contacting prospects right when there’s a spike in interest or a change that makes them more likely to buy. For instance, one Clay customer set up alerts for funding events and added over 200 new demo meetings a month, achieving a 5× increase in outbound productivity by being first to reach out
A typical Clay workflow might be: import a list of target accounts (or pull from CRM), enrich each with multiple data providers (getting verified contacts, tech stack info, recent news), have Claygent summarize a recent press article for each company, use the AI writer to draft a custom intro email, and then push those into an outreach sequence in your email tool.
What worked
A Sales Dev Rep can feed a list of names or companies into Clay and get back verified contact info, social profiles, recent insights, and even suggested email text, all in one place. This means they can increase the number of prospects they personalize outreach for, without working longer hours. Instead of juggling a dozen browser tabs and tools, an SDR using Clay has a single dashboard that updates with fresh info continuously.
Clay is attractive to Sales & Revenue Ops because it offers an automated, repeatable process for data enrichment and signal tracking, without requiring coding or multiple tools. For example, instead of periodically exporting the CRM and cleaning data in Excel, RevOps can set up Clay to continuously enrich and update records in Salesforce.
Account Executives often complain about lead quality: they might get a list of accounts that look promising but have scant information on why they are a fit or how to approach them. Prior to a big sales call, an AE might spend an hour Googling the company to avoid going in cold. Clay addresses this by delivering rich profiles and talking points for each account . For instance, an AE can use Claygent on an as-needed basis: one click to get the latest news, company background, and any tech stack info on a prospect right before a meeting. This kind of instant briefing resolves the pain of being underprepared.
Sales Managers care about overall pipeline and conversion rates. With Clay increasing the volume and personalization of outreach, managers see more opportunities being created and often an uptick in response rates. It also helps onboarding new reps – a new AE using Clay can quickly get up to speed on their territory without extensive tribal knowledge transfer.
Growth Marketing & Demand Generation teams: These users run outbound campaigns and account-based marketing programs that often feed the sales pipeline. They need to build targeted lists (for webinars, content marketing follow-ups, etc.) and struggle with stale data and segmentation. Often marketing ops have to ask an analyst or use a basic list service to get, say, “all fintech companies in Europe with >500 employees” and then that list might lack personalization details. Clay empowers marketers to do this themselves and include rich signals. For example, a demand gen manager could use Clay to pull “all companies in our CRM tagged as fintech that have raised funding in the last 6 months” and automatically get their CEO’s LinkedIn bio and company news, which can inform tailored messaging. This level of targeting was previously very hard without multiple tools. The pain of not knowing enough about the audience is eased; marketers can craft more relevant campaigns. Additionally, because Clay can push data back into marketing automation platforms, it keeps marketing and sales in sync.
What didn’t work
Clay does not completely replace every tool in the sales stack. For example, Clay doesn’t send emails natively via sequences (as mentioned, you still need to push data to Outreach, Salesloft, or a CRM to send the emails and track responses). Some users hoped Clay could be a one-stop solution for both finding leads and engaging them. The reality is Clay is more about the data and intelligence; it expects you to have an email tool for the last mile or to export lists for ads.