Setting up Clay for data enrichment requires connecting your data providers, configuring your enrichment columns, and building the workflows that populate your prospect tables with the specific data your outreach strategy requires. A well-configured Clay workspace significantly reduces the manual research work required before outreach while improving the quality and relevance of the data your team uses to personalize its messaging.
Connecting Your Data Providers
Start by connecting the data providers you want to use for enrichment in Clay‘s integrations settings. Clay’s native integrations include most major B2B data providers. If you already have subscriptions to specific providers, connect those accounts first to leverage your existing data investments. Clay’s waterfall enrichment feature then queries your connected providers in a sequence you define, using each provider’s result only when the previous provider did not find a match — maximizing hit rate while minimizing cost.
Building Your Enrichment Table
Create a Clay table and add the starting data for your enrichment — typically a list of company names, domains, or LinkedIn URLs for the prospects you want to research. Add enrichment columns for each data point you need: contact finder columns that identify the right person at each company, email finder columns that find verified email addresses, company data columns that pull firmographic information, and AI research columns that generate custom insights for each prospect.
Configuring AI Columns
Clay’s AI columns are configured with a prompt that describes what you want the AI to research or generate for each row. Write specific, concrete prompts that produce the exact output your outreach sequences need. A prompt like “Based on the company description and recent news, write one sentence describing the most likely operational challenge this company is facing that our RevOps consulting services could address” produces more useful output than a generic prompt. Test your AI column prompts on a sample of ten to twenty rows before running them across your full table to ensure the output quality meets your standard.
Exporting Enriched Data
Once your enrichment is complete, export the enriched data to your outreach tool, your CRM, or both. Clay integrates directly with sending platforms like Instantly and Smartlead, allowing you to push enriched prospect data directly into outreach sequences. It also integrates with CRMs like HubSpot to create or enrich contact records with the data Clay has gathered.
