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Use Case 3: Signal-Based Plays
Your CRM has thousands of contacts. At any moment, some are changing jobs, moving into buying roles, or landing at companies matching your ICP. Most teams find out days or weeks too late (if at all).
Clay Audiences continuously monitors every contact for signals, then automatically routes them when something changes.
🔄 The Four-Stage Framework
The same framework applies: Import, Enrich, Action, Export.
Your Salesforce contacts are already synced to Clay Audiences. From there, layer on signal monitoring, build a segment around the results, and configure downstream actions.
💼 Walking Through an Example
Here's how to set up a Signal-based play:
Step 1: Start with an Audience segment
Navigate to the All People page in Audiences. Create a new segment filtered by your target market criteria (location, contact score, job title, industry, etc.).
Step 2: Add a Job Change signal
Click Enrich in the top-right corner, select Signals, then choose Add Job Change. Signal setup works the same way as in the standalone Signals section.
Step 3: Configure the lookback window
Define how far back to search (e.g., 90 days for the last three months) and set how often the signal should recur to monitor for new job changes.
Step 4: Save and run the signal
Click Save and Run. Clay applies this signal to every person in your segment and writes matches to a Job Change column on each record.
Step 5: Understand signal data storage
Signal results are saved to each contact's record and persist across segments. Contacts will appear in any segment filtered for job changes, regardless of where the signal was first run.
Step 6: Use the auto-created signal segment
Clay creates a new segment that copies your original filters and adds a filter for job change results, ensuring you capture new people who trigger the signal.
📖 Run Your Plays
Now that you have a segment of contacts who've changed jobs, you can run enrichments and actions on top of it, just like you would in any other segment.
- You can enrich with their new company name, title, and LinkedIn URL.
- You can route them to the AE who owns the new account.
- You can even feed them into a Clay table for outreach or send a Slack alert.
And any new contact who enters your original segment and then changes jobs will automatically be captured and routed.
🚀 What's Next
Next, we'll look at how to activate this data for outreach.
