Many users new to sales consider Clay to have a steep learning curve, and while that might be true to some extent, it can be a massively useful tool once you learn how to use it.
After all, the platform integrates with over 75 data enrichment sources and uses AI to automate research for you.
In this guide, I’ll walk you through how to build a lead list in Clay, step-by-step, to help you get started with the platform. I’ll also be providing you with a few bonus tips along the way.
TL;DR
- Build your lead list in Clay by starting with the “Find People” tool, filtering by company attributes, job titles, and seniority levels to align with your ICP. Then enrich your list with key data such as LinkedIn summaries and work emails.
- Use Clay’s AI enrichment and signals to automatically generate bios, detect hiring or intent signals, and keep your data fresh before exporting to your outreach tool or CRM.
- Work in small batches (for example, 50 leads per pull) to reduce enrichment costs, QA results, and easily test different outreach messages.
- Warmly’s Marketing Ops Agent is a strong alternative to Clay’s list building as it automates lead list building entirely, offering continuously syncing in real-time, and AI-curated account and contact data across your CRM, ads, and outbound tools.
💡 At the end of this guide, I’ll introduce you to an alternative to the traditional lead list building model to reduce your time to do list building to practically nothing.
Building a lead list in Clay (Step-By-Step)
In a nutshell, building a lead list in Clay consists of:
- Building the search by which you’ll get your first table with prospects.
- Selecting your initial lead enrichment.
- Enriching the table with AI.
- Adding signals.
- Exporting and sending the data to your outreach tool.
Here’s how to do all of that in detail: 👇
Step #1: Build the search (find the people)
You want to start by opening Clay’s ‘’Find people’’ search on the left.
After that, you want to:
- Set Company attributes: I’d begin here by selecting the industry, such as ‘’accounting’’.
- Set the Job title: What you want the job title to include, so I’ll go with ‘’engineer’’ here.
- Include levels: Not all job titles are equal in the decision-making process, so I’ll go with VP, Director, and Head.
💡Pro Tip: You can use the Preview to spot unwanted profiles (e.g., contractor titles) and adjust keywords and filters before you run the full pull.
Before clicking on ‘’Next’’ I also like to use the ‘’Limit results’’ functionality at the bottom and limit the results to 50 per search (although the tool was only able to find me 48).
This is because smaller batches reduce enrichment costs, let me QA results, and make A/B tests of outreach messaging easier.
➡️ Do not worry if you spend too much time on this. Clay lets you browse your past searches and save your search criteria. You can spend as much time as you need here to make sure that it aligns with your ICP.
Step #2: Select the initial enrichment
So far, we’ve identified 48 prospects we can go after, and we’ve got their company name, first and last names, job titles, location, domain, and LinkedIn profiles, but that’s not really enough to send them a personalized message.
This is why the next step is to enrich them.
After you click on ‘’Next’’ in the previous step, the tool will lead you to select the enrichment for the table.
Here I like to select ‘’Summarize LinkedIn profile’’, and ‘’work email’’.
The goal here is to pick only the fields you need immediately (e.g., work email) to save credits. You can add more later as you refine your lead list.
What I like about Clay here is that it’ll use its waterfall approach with multiple data vendors of tools like Hunter, LeadMagic, DropContact, and Prospeo to return the best validated result available.
➡️ Clay will show emojis or icons indicating enrichment status: a ✅ (tick) for successful finds or a ❌ for failures or unknown data, which is why you can use these to filter out bad rows before export.
To delete a row, you can select the tick box on the left of the prospect’s name and then select ‘’Actions’’ and click on ‘’Delete 1 Row.’’
Step #3: Further enrich the table with AI
While the analysis is running in the background, we want to click on ‘’Actions’’ in the top right corner, select ‘’Enrichments’’ and click on ‘’Use AI’’, which uses various LLMs and its Claygent tool to further enrich data.
If you’re not sure of what you’d like AI to do here (e.g., research, generate, or analyze the data sets), you can click on ‘’Templates’’ in the right corner and select from one of the pre-built AI templates.
Here, I like to use ‘’Write a professional bio’’ so I can then send this list to my sales team with each prospect’s info so that they can reach out to them with a more personalized message.
Finally, you click on ‘’Save’’ and select on which rows you want the Claygent to analyze.
Naturally, you don’t want to run on every prospect, that would make you run out of credits quickly, but instead work on the ones that you found a good ICP-fit.
Step #4: Add signals
You can refine your lead list further by adding signals. Click on ‘’Actions’’ and then select ‘’Signals’’.
From here on, you can choose from 6 signals, including Job change, Job posting, Promotion, New hire, News & fundraising, and LinkedIn post brand mentions.
I’ll proceed with ‘’New hire’’ as a signal since I believe that it’s one of the best ways to target a line manager to sell software to be used by juniors:
➡️ Similar to choosing which prospects to use AI’s research capabilities on, we want to spend credits only on prospects we’re sure of.
The first step is to select the table, and then the view, which I like to add ‘’Fully enriched rows’’ so that I know I’ve got all of the information I need on each prospect.
Each signal can be filtered down differently, such as the hiring signal, including new hires within the last 3 months with a job title of Assistant or Entry.
The tool also lets you configure a frequency for the signal, such as quarterly, monthly, biweekly, weekly, and daily, but it’ll cost more credits.
Lastly, the tool will ask you to configure your optional enrichments, such as sending a message to a Slack channel or enriching the company.
Here, I like to select the ‘’Send message to Slack channel’’ for my sales team, but you’ll have to set up Clay’s integration with Slack.
The signal will be running in the background, and it’ll be enabled.
Step #5: Export and send to your outreach tool
Now that the professional bios are ready and the recent hire signal did not find anything (although I’ll check next month), it’s time to export the data and send it to an outreach tool.
You want to click on ‘’Actions’’ and then ‘’Exports’’ to download as a CSV, send the table data, export to your CRM directly, or send to a sequencer.
💡Pro Tip: Before you export, remove duplicates and rows with ❌ for critical fields (like missing validated work email).
(Optional) Integrate with Warmly to automate lead enrichment, segmentation, and outreach workflows
You can integrate Clay with Warmly’s webhook to automate lead enrichment, segmentation, and outreach workflows.
While Clay’s strengths lie in processing volume and managing orchestrations, Warmly provides the contextual intelligence needed for account-based marketing (ABM).
Here’s how it works:
- Warmly picks up the signal: a website visit, a social engagement, a research spike.
- Warmly sends it straight to Clay in real-time.
- Clay enriches the data, cleans it up, and preps it for action.
- Your outbound motion starts instantly.
You can learn more about the setup between Warmly and Clay here.
An alternative to the traditional lead list building model
Are you tired of building lead lists only for them to be outdated by Friday?
We noticed how GTM teams spend enormous time building, cleaning, and syncing target lists across CRMs, ad platforms, and outbound tools.
In fact, industry research shows that sales reps spend only ~28–33% of their time on actual selling, and administrative and non-selling work consumes most of their time.
Warmly’s new AI Marketing Ops Agent transforms how GTM teams manage and activate audiences.
Instead of manually exporting lists, cleaning data, or waiting for new leads, you’ll get an always-fresh, AI-curated list of best-fit accounts and contacts synced across every system.
The Marketing Ops Agent automates that, acting as your real-time sales intelligence layer between your data sources and your marketing & sales systems.
The tool automatically builds and maintains real-time, up-to-date lists of your best-fit accounts and contacts, so your team can focus on strategy and creativity instead of spreadsheets.
Here's how it works:
The Marketing Ops Agent connects directly to your CRM, ad platforms, outbound tools, and intent sources to automate key targeting workflows:
- AI-powered lead scoring and enrichment to create dynamic lists ranked by fit and buying intent.
- Buying committee identification using insights from past closed-won deals.
- Instant audience syncing with HubSpot, Marketo, LinkedIn, Meta, Outreach, and more. No more manual CSV uploads.
- Automatic list updates as new intent signals or engagement changes occur.
➡️ This will help you catch up on in-market prospects doing research, as 96% of prospects research companies before engaging sales, according to research from HubSpot.
- Unified buying intent scores that stay synced across every sales and marketing channel.
Book a demo with Warmly’s team to learn more about our Marketing Ops Agent.
Warmly’s Pricing
Warmly’s pricing is modular and component-based and comes with a free plan that lets you identify up to 500 website visitors per month.
You can choose the components that best match the needs of your business, as components are priced by output and not just by a monthly fee.
There are 4 paid product plans that you can choose from:
- Signals Agent: Custom pricing, which gives you access to 10,000 monthly credits, Person-Level Intent Signals (1st, 2nd, & 3rd Party), website de-anonymization capabilities, Warm lead alerts, and access to a contact database.
- Inbound Agent - Engage: Starts at $20,000/year, and adds AI Chat, native outbound email and LinkedIn automation, intent-powered pop-ups, lead routing with custom CRM fields, and the ability to push leads to sales sequencers.
- Inbound Agent - Scale: Starts at $30,000/year, and adds unlimited AI Chat agents, and the ability to push leads to Ad Audiences.
- Marketing Ops Agent: Custom pricing, which adds AI-powered account scoring, AI enrichments and custom signals, buying committee identification, real-time buying intent signal tracking, and automatic updates across all enrichments, signals, account and lead lists.
Monthly credits on Warmly are used to track and engage with potential leads.
For example, each interaction or engagement with a lead will use up one credit, such as when you engage with a lead through email or LinkedIn.
➡️ Warmly’s pricing is ideal for larger SMB and MM companies with a growing or mature GTM motion with SDR, sales, and marketing functions.
How do Warmly’s credits work?
💡 Warmly provides you with a certain amount of credits every month, depending on your monthly web visits and the amount you want to de-anonymize.
Once someone visits your website, the tool captures their first and last name, job title and company they work at, LinkedIn profile and business or personal email. This information takes 1 credit.
For example, each interaction or engagement with a lead will use up one credit, such as when you engage with a lead through email or LinkedIn.
How is Warmly’s Marketing Ops Agent different from Clay?
Clay is a flexible data-enrichment and automation platform that gives you access to many external data sources and lets teams build prospecting workflows and enriched contact tables.
Warmly, on the other hand, offers a Marketing Ops Agent that continuously detects in-market signals (including de-anonymized site visitors), AI scores, accounts & contacts, and then builds and syncs always-fresh audience lists across your CRMs, advertising and outbound systems.
➡️ Warmly’s Marketing Ops Agent is built to remove spreadsheet work and keep fit and intent scores synced everywhere for SDRs tired of manual list building, stale audiences, and missed in-market signals.
Here’s a side-by-side comparison:
| Category | Warmly | Clay |
|---|
| Core Functionality | Signal-based revenue orchestration: de-anonymizes visitors, unifies first-, second-, and third-party intent signals, and runs AI agents that automatically build and refresh best-fit account and contact lists. | Data and automation workspace: access 100+ premium data sources, enrich contact and account records, and build no-code prospecting workflows and tables. Strong for custom data transforms and enrichment pipelines. |
| Data Enrichment & Intent Signals | Combines multi-source enrichment with persistent buying-intent signals, real-time scoring and buying-committee identification. Lists are continuously re-scored as engagement or intent changes. | Heavy on enrichment from multiple external sources (emails, firmographics, technographics). Focused on building accurate profiles and tables rather than real-time intent or visitor-based intelligence. |
| Audience Building & List Maintenance | The AI Marketing Ops Agent automatically creates and maintains always-fresh dynamic audiences that update when intent or engagement changes (no CSV uploads or manual maintenance). | Enables powerful, flexible list building and enrichment workflows, but lists are typically static until refreshed through custom automations or triggers built by the user. |
| Automation & Outreach | Deep GTM activation: instant audience syncing to HubSpot, Marketo, LinkedIn, Meta, Outreach, and optional AI SDRs for personalized, automated outreach. | Strong automation for data enrichment and pushing contacts into engagement tools via integrations or webhooks. Primarily used for custom prospecting pipeline automation. |
| Integrations & Syncing | Built for real-time audience syncing across CRMs, ad platforms, and outbound tools to ensure fit and intent data stay aligned across systems. | Integrates with hundreds of data and engagement tools, offering flexible API and webhook connections for custom automations. |
| Best For | GTM teams that need to identify in-market accounts, automatically maintain dynamic target lists, and activate audiences instantly across channels. | Sales teams that want a flexible data enrichment and workflow automation platform to build tailored prospecting pipelines. |
Automate list building and enrichment with the Marketing Ops Agent
Warmly goes beyond Clay’s enrichment and automation: the platform acts as a signal orchestration hub that unifies intent signals, CRM data, and automated workflows under one logic layer.
Our tool warms up your Total Addressable Market (TAM) & segments your leads into cold, warm & hot using an Intent Signal Data Agent.
The Marketing Ops Agent then ranks and enriches contacts, identifying buying committees based on past closed won deals.
Finally, Warmly uses Outbound & Inbound Agents to engage your hottest prospects in different channels (e.g., on chat, email, or on LinkedIn) so you can book meetings while you sleep.
If your organization is serious about capturing demand the moment it surfaces, Warmly is one of the most intent-driven platforms available today.
Here’s what else you’ll get by signing up for Warmly:
- The ability to identify potential buyers by tracking their interactions with your website and getting insights into their interest level.
- A wide range of accurate prospect contact details, directly from the Coldly database, helping you reach the right people.
- Simplify your meeting process with automatic meeting scheduling that removes the back-and-forth, ensuring a frictionless booking experience.
- Automatically send leads to the right salesperson and notify them via Slack if a high-intent lead is active on your website.
- A Bombora integration that helps you proactively reach out to your warm leads and track who’s researching terms relevant to your product and brand, and get in front of them before your competitors do.
- Automate the search for high-potential prospects using AI technology, ensuring your sales team focuses on the right opportunities.
Book a live demo to see it in action.
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