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Use Case 1: CRM Enrichment
Your CRM data degrades faster than your team can fix it. Reps work from stale contacts, missing emails, and duplicate records. No manual enrichment workflow can keep up at scale.
This lesson covers building a continuous enrichment loop into your CRM workflow. By the end, you’ll set-up a CRM that can fill in its own gaps.
🔄 The Four-Stage Framework
The framework has four stages:
- Import brings records into Clay Audiences
- Enrich fills the gaps
- Action puts the enriched data to work
- Export writes everything back to Salesforce
Once configured, the loop runs on its own.
📥 Step One: Import Your CRM Records
Connect Salesforce Contacts and Accounts to Clay Audiences. Clay imports all your contacts and accounts, then you map your fields.
Your full CRM becomes available as an audience in Clay, visible via People and Companies.
🎯 Step Two: Create Your Audience
Build an audience to target specific records you want to enrich. Define your criteria; for example:
- All Contacts where Account Type equals Prospect and Email is blank
- All Accounts where Annual Revenue is missing
Segments keep enrichment focused on records that need work and credit usage efficient. Every enrichment action consumes credits, so enrich only records with data gaps to prevent waste.
⚡ Step Three: Add Enrichments to Your Audience
When you create an enrichment on your segment, Clay opens a bulk enrichment table: the same interface as a Clay table, but operating on over 50,000 rows at once.
Start with an enrichment like Enrich Person. Choose which fields you want to pull; for example: name, title, organization, and number of followers. Run it on a test batch first to verify output before scaling.
Mapping Enriched Fields Back to Audiences
Once the enrichment runs, map those enriched fields back to Audiences. You'll see a field mapping interface where you choose which enriched columns map to which Audience fields.
If the field doesn't exist in Audiences, create one on the spot. For example, if there's no "Organization" field, add it here. Clay writes every organization value from your enrichment back to this new field.
Click Start Run. When enrichment completes, that new field appears as a column in Audiences. The enriched data writes back to every record in "All People" that was part of your segment.
Layering Enrichments
Create new segments based on enriched data. For example, filter for "Organization is not empty" to build a segment of everyone who has company data. Any field you enrich and map back becomes available for segmentation, letting you layer enrichments on top of each other.
Continuous and Scheduled Enrichments
From Enrichment, go to Run Settings and toggle on Continuous Enrichment to enrich new records anytime they're added to the source.
You can use Scheduled Enrichments to enrich the audience and update records on a schedule.
📤 Step Four: Write Back to Salesforce
Data syncs back to Salesforce based on your export configuration. You can export contacts data every 24 hours and update only based on your field mapping rules.
You control which fields write back. Not every enriched field needs to go to Salesforce. Some data might be useful for segmentation inside Clay but doesn't belong in your CRM.
⚙️ The Missing Step (Action)
Between enrichment and export, there's an action layer that makes enriched data operational. Build a segment of enriched contacts; for example, all contacts where work email was filled and confidence score is above your threshold. That segment triggers downstream actions:
- Alerting the owning AE in Slack
- Feeding records into a Clay Table for outreach sequencing
- Updating a Salesforce field that signals the record is ready to work
The enriched data routes to whoever needs to act on it.
The result? Data gaps close as records enter the audience. Reps have the contact information they need inside Salesforce; no separate tools or RevOps data pulls required. Attribution stays intact because enrichment happens on the CRM record itself, not in a side table. The Salesforce record is the record of truth, and Clay keeps it current.
🔮 What's Next
In the next lesson, we'll look at TAM sourcing.
