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Set Up Clay MCP and Account Research
By the end of this lesson you'll be able to connect Clay to your AI chat tool and research an account using both live market data and your own company's first-party context. Real prospecting starts with the account, so that's where we start too, right after we get you connected.
🔌 Getting Connected
Connecting takes about fifteen to thirty seconds, and it's the first thing you do.
- In Claude: go to claude.com/connectors, find Clay, and connect. You can also reach it from Customize → Connectors or from your Settings. You'll get 500 free credits to start.
- In ChatGPT: it's even simpler. Type @clay in any prompt to authenticate, or go to Settings → Connectors, browse, and connect Clay there. Same 500 free credits.
- For Microsoft 360 Copilot: follow these directions.
- Clay MCP also works in Codex, Claude Code, and Glean, so if that's where you work, you're covered.
Depending on the AI tools you choose, the UI/UX look a little different, but the flow is mostly the same.
🏢 Start With the Account
Before you go looking for people to reach out to, you scope the company. You want to understand what the account cares about first, because that's what tells you who to contact and what to say.
And if you don't have your target accounts yet, you can build that list right in the chat:
"Find tech companies in New York with 200 to 500 employees."
You still get all the filters you know from Clay:
- Industry
- Company size
- Location
- Annual revenue
- Funding stage
- Tech stack
- and more
That hands you a list of accounts that fit your criteria. You can narrow it further right in the widget. Filtering this list to revenue between 10 million and 100 million surfaces CloudHire, Arcana, Quora, and CB Insights. Pick one, and now you research it. We'll use CB Insights.
🔎 Research the Account
When you research a company in Clay, you're not just getting the chat tool's training data. Clay uses live data providers, so the results are grounded in verified, up-to-date sources, which makes them more reliable for company and contact data than any generic web search.
"Research CB Insights' recent product launches, hiring trends, and expansion signals. What are their top priorities this year?"
One useful habit: a chat tool will sometimes fall back to plain web scraping instead of calling Clay. If you want to be sure it pulls from Clay's grounded data, just add "use Clay" to the prompt to invoke it directly. Clay comes back with recent product launches, hiring trends, expansion and leadership signals, and the organized priorities, in plain English you can act on.
(Note: even when a result doesn't fully populate the on-screen widget, the synthesis still comes back to you in the chat.)
⚔️ Competitive Research
You can run competitive research the same way. Use a structured prompt to get scannable, reliable results:
"Research CB Insights' products. Who are their main competitors, and what are they doing differently? Give me 3 bullets on their priorities and 3 bullets on the risks from those competitors."
Clay returns the competitive landscape, in this case AlphaSense, PitchBook, and CrunchBase, with the priorities and risks for each. It also surfaces context the market view alone wouldn't: the Clay data makes clear that CB Insights is defending, not expanding, 265 employees and shrinking, a 43% decrease over four years.
🗂️ Bring In Your Own Data
When your ops team has connected Clay Audiences, you can query your own first-party data in the same conversation:
"What do we already know about CB Insights? Show me open opportunities, past touches, and any signals Clay has flagged."
Clay blends first-party records from Salesforce, your Audiences, and Gong with the market research above: the audience score, open opportunities, deal history, engagement touches, and key contacts with their activity.
That turns account research from "what does the market know about this company" into "what do we know about this company." If your team hasn't set Audiences up yet, that's the operator side of things, and you can dig into it in the Audiences course in Clay University.
🚀 What's Next
You can now connect Clay in under a minute and research an account end to end: build a target list, research priorities and signals, map the competitive landscape, and blend in your own CRM history, all in one conversation.
Next, we take this research and go find the right people inside the account.
