Automate Account Research with Clay

Four capabilities matter for GTM work: lead research (ask Claude to research a company and find the right contacts using live Clay data), company enrichment (pull technographics, funding, and headcount), contact discovery (find decision-makers with verified emails and recent job changes), and list building (assemble targeted prospect lists against ICP criteria). The key distinction from the GTM MCP Server: Clay returns real, current data — the MCP server's tools return research frameworks and checklists for you to fill in manually.

Sign up at clay.com. The free tier is enough to follow this tutorial and test the workflows below before deciding whether to upgrade for volume.

https://clay.com

Clay's interactive tools are available for Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise Claude users. Open your connected apps settings in Claude and enable Clay — once connected, Claude uses it automatically whenever a request needs live data enrichment, without you needing to name the tool explicitly.

Give Claude a target company and what you're selling. It will use Clay to pull a company overview, find contacts in the department you specify, surface recent trigger events, and identify pain points to use in outreach.

Research Stripe using Clay. I need:
1. Company overview (size, funding, tech stack)
2. Key contacts in engineering leadership
3. Recent news or trigger events
4. Pain points I can use for outreach

I'm selling developer tools.

Have a raw list of names and companies — from a conference, a webinar, or a CSV export? Hand it to Claude directly. Clay enriches each one with a verified email, current title, and LinkedIn, and Claude can draft a personalized follow-up for each contact in the same pass.

I have these prospects from a conference:
- John Smith, Acme Corp
- Sarah Chen, TechStartup Inc
- Mike Johnson, Enterprise Co

Use Clay to enrich these contacts. Get their emails, current titles, and company info. Then draft a personalized follow-up for each.

Starting from zero? Describe your ideal customer profile and let Clay search and filter companies against it, then find and enrich the best contact at each match.

Build a prospect list using Clay:

ICP: Series B-C SaaS companies, 100-500 employees, using AWS
Target persona: VP of Engineering or CTO
Location: San Francisco Bay Area

Find 25 companies matching this criteria, then get the best contact at each.

Clay and the GTM MCP Server (previous tutorial) are complementary, not competing. Use Clay when you need live, verified data at volume — real-time enrichment, automated prospecting, verified emails. Use the MCP Server when you need outreach drafting, objection handling, discovery questions, or a full multi-step sales workflow — none of which require paid data access. Running both, Clay finds and verifies who to talk to; the MCP Server (or OpenClaw's Writer and Rep agents) turns that into outreach.

Once Clay has enriched a list, feed the results straight into whichever execution layer you've set up: ask the GTM MCP Server's `draft_cold_email` tool to write against the enriched contact data, or hand the briefing to OpenClaw's Scout → Writer → Rep handoff chain if you're running the full agent fleet from the first tutorial.