Learn and master Clay with Clay university

By the end of this lesson you'll be able to find and enrich the right contacts inside an account you've already researched.

You're already connected from the last lesson, so we jump straight into the search. Normally you'd stay in the same chat too, so the tool keeps full context on the work you've done.

We recommend running your whole prospecting motion in one continuous chat window, unless the context fills up.

🔎 Finding People

The most common thing you'll do is find people at a specific company you're targeting. Two quick tips to get better results:

1. Be specific about role, seniority, and location. The more specific your input, the more specific your output.
2. Decide how wide to search. Search one company at a time for a deeper, more accurate pass, or name several at once to cover more ground quickly. We'll do both.

Start broad, one company at a time:

"Find sales leaders at CB Insights."

It's fine to start broad here, because you're not running any enrichments yet. In the demo, this surfaced the sales and account team, and flagged honestly that there were no true sales leadership titles among them. That's still useful signal about the account.

🎯 Search, Filter, Then Enrich

Here's where you save credits. You've got 500 to start, so don't enrich everything. Filter first, then enrich only the people who matter.

So we searched broad. Now we narrow:

"Narrow to director level and above, US-based, who joined in the last year."

That returned a tight list of six director-and-above leaders, all US-based, all having started within the last twelve months, plus a note that this confirmed the earlier read: no net-new dedicated sales leaders at a company this size. That's fine. It's a real constraint of the account you chose, and you can see it clearly. Now, and only now, do you enrich:

"Enrich these six contacts with email, work history, and recent thought leadership."

The enrichments run in the background and populate in the widget: emails, work history, and thought leadership across all six. That three-step sequence, search, filter, enrich, is how you keep your costs down and your results relevant and targeted.

🌐 Going Wider

When you want to cover more ground, search across several accounts in one shot:

"Find sales leaders at Stripe, Ramp, and Figma."

It's basically the same query, but now you're covering more companies faster. You still filter and enrich the exact same way, so you're only ever spending credits on the people who matter.

One note on the UX: results come back twenty at a time and you can load more when you need them. Clay MCP is built for targeted searches, not big bulk operations. If you need to run people searches at real volume, hundreds or thousands of results at a time, that's when you move into the Clay app, and your ops team can help you there.

🗂️ Check Your Own History

If you're connected to Clay Audiences, your first-party data is right here too. Before you reach out, find out who you already know:

"Of these people, how many have we already talked to? Flag anyone with past activity in our CRM."

In the demo this ran a thorough check, a direct contact query, a deep account-level check across all the accounts, and a scan of 90 Gong calls, and came back with zero matches in the sample data. Either way, that's the point: you now know who's genuinely net-new versus who your team already has a relationship with, before you send a single message. That completely changes how you'd frame the outreach. If your team hasn't connected Audiences yet, the Audiences course in Clay University covers that side.

🚀 What's Next

You can now find the right people inside an account, filter down to a targeted list, enrich only who matters, and check them against your own CRM history, all without leaving the chat.

Next, we we'll cover how Clay functions work in these tools.