Whether you’re looking to prioritize inbound leads or you want to filter down a large list of prospects for outbound campaigns, this guide is for you.
In this guide, I’m going to show you how you can segment your lead list into different categories of prioritization by assigning them a score in Clay.
💡 At the end of this guide, I’ll introduce you to an alternative to the traditional lead scoring model to reduce your time to do list building to practically nothing.
TL;DR
- Start off by figuring out your lead scoring criteria and then adding it to the Clay table, such as adding fields for company headcount, company industry, and individual seniority.
- Add a field for lead scoring and then configure your selection criteria to get the result.
- Warmly’s Marketing Ops Agent is a strong alternative to Clay’s traditional list building as it automates lead list building entirely with continuous syncing in real-time, and AI-curated account and contact data across your CRM, ads, and outbound tools.
Scoring leads in Clay (Step-By-Step)
In a nutshell, lead scoring in Clay consists of:
- Building the search by which you’ll get your first table with prospects or importing your inbound prospects (e.g., from a form).
- Figuring out your lead scoring criteria that would best fit your ICP.
- Enriching the Clay table with the fields that will matter for your lead scoring efforts (e.g., company headcount).
- Adding a field for lead scoring and inserting the relevant fields in there.
- Assigning a score to different factors so that the engine can properly score each prospect.
Here’s how to do all of that in detail: 👇
#1: Set up the starter table with prospects#
💡 This is going to be the process for lead scoring for outbound from scratch. If you’ve already got a lead list of inbounds, you can skip this step by importing them into Clay.
As I already covered in our comprehensive ‘’how to build a lead list in Clay for cold outreach’’ guide, 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.
➡️ Pro Tip: If you’re dealing with inbound forms, you’ll need to enrich the leads to validate if the profiles are right and then increase coverage with Claygent with web scraping to find LinkedIn URLs.
#2: Figure out your lead scoring criteria
If your team does not have a defined lead scoring criterion so far, you want to sit down and figure out how you want leads to be scored.
For this guide, we’re going to use 3 criteria to prioritize our leads:
- Company headcount: I’m going to give a higher score to leads from enterprises.
- Company industry: I’ll include accounting and VC.
- Individual seniority, such as seniors and juniors.
#3: Add your lead scoring criteria as enrichments on the Clay table
Next up, before we can configure the lead scoring model, we’ll have to add the different fields that will be used for lead scoring.
Start by clicking on ‘’Add column’’ and then Enrichments:
- Add employee count and run on all of the rows (or the ones you shortlisted).
- Add company industry, and run on all of the rows (or the ones you shortlisted).
Now, for the job titles, we’ll have to use AI to analyze their enriched profiles to create our own seniority buckets using a prompt.
For use cases like this, we need to click on ‘’Add column’’ and then ‘’Use AI’’ to see the Claygent and insert our prompt in there.
It might take some time to load, but in the end, you should be able to see the 3 fields next to each other.
#4: Configure the lead scoring model
Now that we’ve got the 3 fields ready to go for lead scoring, the next step is to click on Action > Enrichments > View all enrichments > search for lead score > select Score Row in Clay.
➡️ From this point on, you can either take the shortcut with a tool like MadKudu that will get a company lead score from email, or use our own formula for lead scoring in Clay.
The next step is to select your scoring criteria one by one. It might be confusing on setting up at first, but here’s how it’s done:
- Start with ‘’# of Scoring Criteria’’ and select the number of criteria fields (e.g., 3).
- Then, go to ‘’Values to Score’’ and use ‘’/’’ to select your column.
- From that point on, go to ‘’Comparison Type’’ and select the one that makes sense (e.g., Between).
- Go to Keywords and insert the numbers or keywords you want the tool to look for (e.g., 0-500).
- Go to Scores and assign for each one a score (e.g., 1, 2, 3, 4) that would be just under the keyword.
You then want to repeat that for each scoring criterion.
And then, voila: you’ve got your lead scores after you hit ‘’Run’’ on the whole operation.
(Optional) Integrate with Warmly to automate lead enrichment, segmentation, and outreach workflows
It’s possible to 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 also add lead scoring to the equation and only reach out to leads that fit within a certain lead score.
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 with advanced lead scores only for them to be outdated by Friday?
We know that GTM teams spend enormous time building, cleaning, and syncing target lists across CRMs, ad platforms, and outbound tools.
In fact, 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 platform 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 with lead scoring.
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, enrichment, and lead scoring with the Marketing Ops Agent
Warmly goes beyond Clay’s enrichment and lead scoring: the platform acts as a signal orchestration hub that unifies intent signals, prospecting scoring, 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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