What is Clay?

Clay is a data enrichment and research platform for go-to-market teams that pulls company and contact data from many providers into one table, then lets you score, filter and personalize that list before it goes into outreach or the CRM.

At a glance

• What Clay is: software, sold as a subscription by Clay (clay.com), used mostly by outbound, growth and RevOps teams.
• Clay says it connects to more than 150 data providers, with “waterfalls” that try one provider after another until a field is found.
• Pricing is based on credits: data credits pay for the data and AI calls from vendors, and paid plans started at $185 a month when we checked in October 2026. There’s a free plan.
• Claygent is its AI research agent, which reads websites and answers a question about each row.
• For pricing and alternatives in more detail, see Clay in the tools directory.

How Clay works

A Clay table looks like a spreadsheet. Each row is a company or a person, and each column is either data you brought in or an action Clay runs on that row: find the work email, look up employee count, check the tech stack, read the careers page, write a first line.

The waterfall is the part most teams buy it for. Instead of paying one provider and accepting its gaps, a waterfall asks provider A for an email, then provider B if A has nothing, and so on. You pay for the lookups that run, so the order of providers changes both coverage and cost. Teams call this waterfall enrichment.

Example (illustrative): a team starts with 3,000 accounts that fit its ICP. A Clay table adds technographics, flags accounts that posted a sales job in the last 30 days, finds the head of sales at each, and runs an email waterfall. The 600 accounts with a hiring signal and a verified email go to the sequencer; the rest wait.

Common Clay mistakes

• Enriching everything. Credits go fastest on rows you’d never contact. Filter on cheap fields first.
• Personalization nobody checks. AI-written first lines need a human read before they go out at scale.
• Tables that live outside the CRM. If the enriched data never lands in the CRM, sales can’t see it and the next list starts from zero.
• No owner. A table one person built and nobody else understands breaks when that person moves on.

How Clay shows up in a revenue system

Clay is one of the tools our GTM engineers use to build lists inside partners’ systems, alongside the CRM and the sequencer. The work that matters is upstream of the tool: which accounts belong on the list, which signals count, and which fields get written back to the CRM for data enrichment. Building and maintaining that account and contact data is part of our datasets work. See our datasets.

Terms that sit next to Clay

Clay is often how teams run signal-based selling: a signal flags the account, Clay finds the right person and the context, and the outreach goes out while the signal is still fresh.