The Complete Clay Guide

Your Clay workspace is the central hub. Everything happens in tables — that's where you pull data, enrich it, and push it out to your tools. Clay recently added a workflow view for people who find tables intimidating, but honestly, once you get comfortable with tables you won't use it.

The two buttons you'll use most: Add Enrichment (your best friend — search for the enrichment you need, don't browse categories) and Formula Column (for data manipulation and custom logic). Pro tip: turn off auto-update when building new tables so you don't burn credits while experimenting.

This is where most people get confused. Sources are where you pull data into Clay — LinkedIn companies, LinkedIn people, job postings, Google Maps, CSV imports. Integrations are connections to your other tools — HubSpot, Smartlead, Salesforce — where you push data out or sync bidirectionally.

Company sources let you find businesses by industry, size, location. People sources let you find individuals by title, company, keywords. Job sources — and this is powerful for sales — let you find companies that are hiring for specific roles, which is one of the strongest buying signals you can use.

Setting up integrations is dead simple. Most of the time you're just plugging in an API key — go to your tool, find the API section, copy the key, paste it in Clay. Done.

For tools like HubSpot that use OAuth, Clay handles the redirect flow for you. Click connect, authorize, and you can start syncing data between Clay and your CRM. I always recommend setting up your CRM and email sending tool first, then add enrichment providers as you need them.

LinkedIn is the goldmine for B2B prospecting. Clay's LinkedIn source lets you pull people by title, company, location, industry — basically any filter LinkedIn Sales Nav gives you, but directly into a Clay table where you can immediately start enriching.

The key workflow: pull a list → deduplicate (Clay has auto-dedup built in) → enrich with email finders → score based on your ICP criteria → push to your sequencing tool. In this lesson I walk through exactly how I set up a LinkedIn source to build a targeted list of marketing agency owners.

The jobs source is underrated. When a company posts a job for an SDR or Head of Sales, that's a buying signal — they're scaling their sales team and probably need tools. Same with hiring for a marketing role — they're investing in growth.

You can exclude companies you've already contacted (Clay links to your other tables), search by job title keywords, and write results back into existing tables. I use this constantly for finding companies in "growth mode."

This is where it all comes together. We take the marketing agency owners we found via LinkedIn, find their emails using Clay's enrichment (the built-in provider costs credits — I show cheaper alternatives in Clay MBA), and sync everything to Smartlead for outreach.

The key insight: the list IS the message. If your targeting is tight enough, even a simple email performs well. Agency owners who just posted a job listing? They're actively scaling. That context makes your outreach relevant without needing crazy personalization.