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Set Up Clay Audiences for MCP
By the end of this lesson, you'll have an Audience connected and field-mapped so your reps' natural-language questions come back with real, first-party data instead of an empty result.
🔁 The Three Moves: Segment, Enrich, Act
If you've taken the full Audiences course, this is a quick refresher. An Audience runs on three moves:
- Segment. Define the set of accounts or people you care about, for example by industry for companies or by role for people.
- Enrich. Add the data you need to that set, like phone number and email.
- Act. Do something with the list, like sending it to a sequencer for outreach.
The piece that matters most for MCP happens one step earlier, when you connect the source.
🗺️ The Step That Decides Everything: Field Mapping
When you connect a source like Salesforce to an Audience, you choose which fields come into the Audience. That's field mapping, and it's the step that decides whether MCP works for your reps or not.
To set it up:
- Go to Settings, then Audiences.
- Open the connected source (for example, the Salesforce account object).
- Map the fields you want reps to be able to reach, then save and sync.
The rule to remember: MCP can only return fields you've synced to the Audience.
If a field isn't synced, it doesn't exist as far as your reps are concerned. Their query won't be able to pull from it, and they won't get that first-party data back.
For example, let’s say a field lives in Salesforce, but it never gets synced to the Audience. A rep goes into Claude or ChatGPT, asks about it, and the query comes back empty. The rep assumes the tool broke, when that field never made it into the Audience.
You don't have to map every field from Salesforce. Map the fields that show up in your reps' actual questions: email, phone number, account owner, last contacted date, recent activity, and the like.
Aim for close to a one-to-one mapping with the CRM fields reps care about.
🤖 What a Rep Sees
Once your fields are mapped and synced, a rep can ask something real, like: "What are the top accounts I should prioritize this week, and who should I reach out to at each one?"
Here's what came back from Claude in the demo:
- It pulled the 50 accounts synced from Salesforce into the Audience, along with a fit and intent score, and prioritized by that score.
- For the top account, scored 89.4, it flagged that the realistic entry point isn't the CEO. It named Mark Dorsey, the CRO, and Jim Lenahan, the partner sales director, as the people to contact.
- For a HubSpot account, it recommended targeting Dharmesh Shah, reasoning that he's an AI-forward voice and the warmest thematic fit for an AI-education pitch.
That recommendation comes from your first-party data: the scores, the org context, and the fit reasoning all trace back to the fields you synced.
From here, a rep can keep going right inside Claude, asking for emails and phone numbers, or calling a Function to compose outreach. We'll cover Functions in the next lesson.
📚 Go Deeper
If you want to go deeper on Audience setup, the full Audiences course in Clay University walks through every source and every mapping option.
🚀 What's Next
You now have an Audience connected and field-mapped for MCP, and you understand the one rule that makes or breaks it: reps can only get back the fields you've synced.
Next, we'll build the Functions your reps can call by name, so they can go from asking questions to running real prospecting work without leaving their AI tool.



