How to Use Clay Automation to Run a Smarter RevOps Engine

The bad news: right now, you probably have 15 tabs open, five tools half-working, and a pile of leads that still aren’t enriched. 

The good news: Clay can make your life easier. Instead of juggling a bunch of tools for data, research, messaging, and workflows, you can do it all in one place with smart automations, quality data, and tools that actually connect.

(And you’re not betting on some no-name startup...Clay recently raised $100M in Series C funding, doubling its valuation to $3.1B.)

But before you spin up your first Clay table, let’s walk through what Clay automation actually is and how to use it for RevOps without wasting credits, time, or sanity.

First up: getting your setup right from the start, because a sloppy first build is the fastest way to burn credits before you’ve even launched.

How Do You Set Up Clay Automation Without Burning Credits?

If you’re building your first Clay automation, there’s one golden rule: keep your table turned OFF while you build. That way, you won’t accidentally spend credits while you're still figuring things out.

Start small and test everything on just 10 rows. It’s way easier (and cheaper) to spot and fix mistakes when you're working with a tiny batch.

Here’s what else to watch out for:

• Start by using Table Lookup to filter out current customers, partners, or open deals. No reason to waste money enriching leads you already know, this should be your first step before running any enrichment.
  
  
• If you’re still building or troubleshooting, keep your table turned off so nothing accidentally eats credits. But if something does start running and you realize there’s a mistake, use Stop Run to immediately halt everything in that table before it burns through your credit balance.
  
  
• Use Clay’s Normalize Domain enrichment to clean up domains before you enrich. And don’t stop there...formulas are great for tidying up other fields like names, titles, or formatting quirks. Standardizing your data before (or after) enrichment keeps everything clean before you push it into sequences or your CRM.
  
  
• Deduplicate early using the Dedupe function in your Clay table. Just pick the column you want to dedupe on, whether that’s email, domain, LinkedIn profile, etc., so you’re not enriching the same record twice.

Don’t forget to check the Cell details for your enrichment steps. Just because something looks like it worked doesn’t mean the data underneath is useful.

Set up your enrichment like a waterfall. Meaning, start with cheaper data sources and only move to more expensive ones when needed. Every paid step should have an “Only run if” condition attached to keep things efficient.

The more structure and guardrails you put in now, the smoother, and less expensive, your future automations will be.

Once your foundations are in place, you can start pointing Clay at real opportunities, like the visitors hitting your site right now without filling out a single form.

How Can Clay Sales Automation Turn Anonymous Website Visitors Into Leads?

Most of your website traffic leaves without ever filling out a form. But that doesn’t mean they’re gone forever, or that they’re not interested.

With Clay sales automation, you can connect tools like RB2B or Vector to your site to detect anonymous visitors and push that data into Clay using a webhook. These tools reverse-engineer visitor info based on IP, behavior, or other signals, giving you a starting point, even if the visitor never self-identified.

Once that data hits Clay, your first move is to clean it up. Don’t worry about duplicate domains here, what really matters is deduping at the person level. Use LinkedIn profiles or email addresses to merge duplicates so you’re not chasing the same contact twice. Clean records = better enrichment and smoother outreach.

From there, clean the list before you do anything else. First, filter out any of your existing customers or partners so you’re not chasing people you already know. Next, validate the emails that came with these tools, many will be personal (which aren’t valuable for outreach) or flat-out invalid. Replace or enrich those with verified business emails to avoid bounce issues that tank your campaigns.

Once your list is clean and validated, let Octave score the visitors. Octave uses the playbooks and customer profiles you’ve set up to evaluate both the contact and company profile, then assigns a fit rating (Strong, Moderate, or Low). That way you’re prioritizing leads that actually match your ICP and are more likely to be receptive to your product and message, without wasting credits enriching low-value records.

Now that you’ve got quality data on high-fit visitors, you can actually do something with it:

• Enrich each record using Clay’s waterfall logic.
  
  
• Feed behavioral insights into Octave to write relevant cold emails.
  
  
• Push the best-fit leads into Smartlead sequences designed just for website traffic.

Clay lets your team follow up with high-intent visitors in minutes, not days, and do it without wasting budget on bad leads.

And once you’ve turned anonymous traffic into qualified leads, you can use that intel to go find more companies just like them.

How Does Clay Automation Help You Find More of Your Best Customers?

Once you've identified a solid group of qualified leads, like the ones who clicked around your site or replied to outbound, the next question is: Where can we find more people like this?

Clay automation gives you a clear answer.

Start by pulling the domains of your best-fit customers into a table. These are the companies you want more of (same industry, size, needs, etc.) 

Next, use Ocean.io to generate lookalike companies from the customer list you pulled out of your CRM. Ocean gives you a list of similar accounts, which you then write into a new Clay table to move forward. This process can be automated, so you’re continuously generating lookalikes for prospecting.

Another way to do it: start a table directly in Ocean.io by manually adding up to 10 of your best-fit customers, then let Ocean build a lookalike list from there. Both approaches work, it just depends on whether you want the process automated from your CRM or handled manually inside Ocean.

Once you've got those lookalike accounts, use Find People in Clay to identify relevant contacts at those companies, like job titles that typically convert or decision-makers for your product.

But before pushing anyone into a sequence, run another qualification layer through Octave. That way, you’re reaching out to the right people at the right companies, based on how they actually match your ICP.

Once they’re qualified, drop them into Smartlead or another sequence designed for cold outbound to net-new companies.

This whole setup turns your pipeline into a feedback loop: Find a great customer, clone them, qualify those clones, test and scale the segment.

But customer lookalikes aren’t the only signal worth chasing….hiring activity can be an even stronger indicator that it’s time to reach out.

How Can Clay Sales Automation Spot Companies That Are Hiring?

If you're selling something that helps teams grow, like tools for sales, RevOps, or marketing, then hiring signals are some of the best intent data you can get. When a company’s expanding, they’re also likely investing in new tools and processes to support that growth.

With Clay automation, you can surface those signals automatically.

Instead of jumping straight into Find Jobs, start with a Find Companies step. That way you can immediately filter for your ICP, industry, headcount, funding raised, and location, without burning credits. Once you’ve built a clean company list, then layer in the job postings for those accounts.

From there, use job-specific filters to narrow further: target exact roles and titles (like RevOps, enablement, or demand gen), specify hybrid/remote, and even search postings for key software mentions tied to your solution. This sequence keeps your targeting tight and credit spend low, while still surfacing the hiring signals that actually matter.

Once you find companies that are actively hiring, validate them with Claygent, Clay’s built-in AI assistant. It can scan company websites, press releases, or job descriptions to make sure the signals are legit.

From there, enrich your list with verified contacts. Use Clay to find decision-makers, validate email addresses, and push qualified leads into your outbound sequence.

Instead of cold prospecting, you’re reaching out to companies that are already raising their hand in a different way: by hiring the exact roles your solution supports. It’s faster, more relevant, and way more likely to get a response.

How Does Clay LinkedIn Automation Make Engagement Useful?

LinkedIn is full of buying signals….likes, comments, mentions. But unless you have a system in place, those signals just sit there.

Clay helps you actually do something with them.

Let’s say someone likes your company post or comments on a thought leadership piece from your CEO. That’s a signal, but pulling it into Clay isn’t automatic. You’ll need to grab the post URN for each LinkedIn post you want to track, then import those reactions or comments into a Clay table. From there, filter or enrich to find which of those people actually fit your ICP. Once you’ve narrowed it down, you can start conversations directly with those high-fit contacts.

Clay only pulls from connected profiles, either your company page or personal profile, so you’ll need to link your LinkedIn account to Clay for this to work.

If you want true automation, that’s where tools like Trigify come in. With Trigify + a webhook to Clay, you can monitor any profile or company (not just your own) for likes, comments, or brand mentions. Right now, this deeper brand-monitoring automation isn’t fully available inside Clay since it’s being reworked, but it’s a strong workaround for catching signals outside your direct LinkedIn network.

You're making sure the right people know when to show up, and that’s the difference between robotic and real engagement.

And LinkedIn isn’t the only place buyers are dropping signals, some of the most unfiltered, high-intent chatter is happening on Reddit.

How Can Clay Automation Find Gold in Reddit Conversations?

Reddit might not be the first place you think of for sales research, but it should be. It’s where honest, niche conversations happen, and a goldmine for unfiltered buyer intent.

With Clay, you can track posts across specific subreddits and watch for keywords that relate to your product, industry, or pain points you solve. 

Use the Reddit Signal in Clay to pull relevant posts into your table. From there, let Claygent analyze the thread and qualify whether it’s just chatter or real buying intent. When a post looks promising, send it straight to Slack with a direct link so your team can jump in with something thoughtful and helpful.

But even the smartest play will fall flat if your starting data is messy.

Why Should You Clean Data Before Running Clay Sales Automation?

Because nothing kills a good automation faster than messy data.

Before you hit “Run” on anything in Clay, you need to make sure your inputs aren’t garbage. That starts with filtering for your ideal customer profile. If something feels obviously out of scope, just toss it.

Next, check that the domains are healthy. No sense enriching a record if the company’s website doesn’t even exist. Use formulas (or Claygent) to clean up weird formats, inconsistent capitalization, or missing pieces. And always remove duplicates. If you’re working with a company list, dedupe by domain so you’re not enriching the same account twice. If you’re working with a contact list, dedupe by LinkedIn profile or email so you don’t chase the same person multiple times.

Clean inputs mean smarter outputs. You’ll get better enrichment, more accurate routing, and way less debugging later on, especially with Clay pulling from over 150 data sources for research, enrichment, and intent monitoring.

Once your data’s clean, you can start layering in higher-value triggers, like funding events, without torching your credit balance.

How Does Clay Automation Get Funding Data Without Going Broke?

Funding signals are one of the best timing triggers you can use, but you don’t want to waste credits pulling enrichment on every company in the market. A smarter move is to monitor funding news against your existing TAM or ABM list. With Clay Signals, you can set up monitoring for those companies, and whenever new funding is announced, it will automatically populate in your Clay table.

This way you’re only acting on timely, relevant events for accounts you already care about, keeping costs low while giving your team the perfect moment to reach out.

Now that you know who to target, the next step is figuring out what to say, and testing it at scale without drowning in manual work.

How Can Clay Sales Automation A/B Test Your Messaging at Scale?

With Clay, you can run clean, automated experiments without the mess. Use a Round Robin column to split your contact list between two Octave agents, each with a different style, maybe one focused on pain points, the other on ROI. Each Octave variant should be pushed into its own Smartlead sequence so you can test them side by side.

Instead of tracking opens or clicks (which can hurt deliverability), focus on meaningful outcomes, reply rates, positive responses, and booked meetings. Those are the metrics that tell you which message is actually working.

But Clay’s value doesn’t stop at prospecting as it can also arm your reps with deep insights before they ever hop on a discovery call.

How Does Clay Automation Prep for Discovery Calls Like a Pro?

Clay is one of the easiest ways to walk into a sales call already knowing what matters.

1. Pull meeting contacts from HubSpot.
   You can’t pull raw meeting data directly, but you can create a list in HubSpot of contacts who booked a meeting. Bring that list into Clay, and now you’ve got the right people tied to your upcoming conversations.
2. Clean and enrich your data.
   Normalize domains then enrich each record with job title, seniority, tenure, LinkedIn URLs, and company info like size, tech stack, and industry. 
3. Use Claygent to go deeper.
   Let Claygent generate company summaries, flag pain points, and hypothesize revenue models or go-to-market priorities. It gives reps the kind of insight that usually takes 20 minutes of research….in seconds.
   
   
   
4. Auto-generate prep notes.
   Not every HubSpot instance has a dedicated “Discovery Call Notes” field, so here’s how to set it up: create a rich text contact property where Clay can push all your prep context (and make sure you include proper HTML formatting for line and paragraph breaks). Then, build a HubSpot workflow that uses this property as a trigger and automatically creates a Note on the contact record with the text from that property. This way your notes live directly in HubSpot where your reps already work.
5. Standardize the process.
   Since it's all automated in Clay, everyone on your team gets the same high-quality prep no matter who’s on the call.

How Do You Track Clay Automation Performance and Credit Usage?

There are two sides to measuring Clay automation: one lives in Clay, the other in your CRM.

In Clay, you can track credit usage by date, folder, and even by user to see who’s burning the most. What you can’t do in Clay is measure ROI directly—that payoff only shows up in your CRM once campaigns hit pipeline. Still, monitoring credit spend is useful. If one automation is consistently expensive, see if it can be reworked with cheaper steps or newer Clay features (since upgrades often change how much certain enrichments cost).

Then check what’s happening in HubSpot. Are those discovery notes being created? Are sequences going out? Are leads moving anywhere….or just sitting there?

And yeah, check the dashboards. But also talk to your reps. Are they saving time? Are they qualifying faster? Are they seeing better replies?

Because what really counts isn’t what’s automated, but what’s actually closing deals.

How Do You Keep Clay Sales Automation Human While Staying Efficient?

Clay can do a lot (some teams report saving up to 80% of their reps’ time) but if your outreach feels like a robot wrote it, you're doing it wrong.

Here are a few tips:

1. Personalize Where it Matters
   Automation should get you to the right moment faster, but the words still need to sound like you. Use Clay to surface signals (who engaged, who’s hiring, who mentioned a keyword), then write replies that are thoughtful and specific.
2. Balance Scale with Authority
   Just because you can automate 1,000 emails doesn’t mean you should. Keep your sequences tight and targeted so your outreach feels relevant, not robotic. Let Clay do the heavy lifting on data and timing so you can spend more energy on adding the human touch.
3. Let Clay Surface Signals. You Handle the Conversation
   Clay can tell you who engaged, who’s hiring, or who mentioned a keyword on Reddit. But responding is still your job. Use automation to find the moment and then show up human.

Want Us to Build Your First Clay Workflow for Free?

High-fit buyers are already on your website. The question is: can you see them?

We’ll help you reveal anonymous traffic, enrich the right contacts, and trigger outreach in HubSpot without adding a single rep to your team.

Here’s what you’ll get:

• A ready-to-run GTM system that connects Vector, Clay, and HubSpot.
  
  
• 3,000 free Clay credits so you can enrich and act on real contacts, right away.
  
  
• Automated outreach that’s smart, personalized, and scalable.