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Clay

Score9.3 out of 10

148 Reviews and Ratings

What is Clay?

Clay is a GTM enrichment product that combines access to 100+ data sources and AI agents with automated workflows to build any growth use case. Companies use it for tasks like recurring CRM enrichment to targeted outreach.

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Categories & Use Cases

Clay Key Features

Learn about the best (and worst!) features Clay has to offer, as determined by TrustRadius' reviewers.
Based on 148 ratings of Clay's features
View all Clay features

Top Performing Features

  • List upload/download

    Lists can be easily and quickly uploaded or downloaded from the platform.

    Category average: 7.9

  • Company information

    Information about companies/accounts is available and high quality.

    Category average: 8.4

  • Lead qualification process

    Helps sales reps focus on the most promising leads (likely to convert) by ranking leads according to various rules and criteria. SI tools may take a semi-automatic, automatic, or self-scoring approach.

    Category average: 7.7

Areas for Improvement

  • Sales email templates

    Users can create and share templates for emailing leads. May also include template testing capabilities, or other analytics that will recommend a template for a particular lead.

    Category average: 7.1

  • Load time/data access

    Provides fast and consistent access to lists and leads.

    Category average: 8

  • Automatic data refresh

    Contact and company data are automatically kept up to date.

    Category average: 7.7

Who Buys & Uses Clay

Clay Reviews

What users are saying about Clay.
View all Clay reviews

Pros

  • Comprehensive B2B data enrichment and validation
  • Integrated AI features for advanced research and personalization
  • Robust automation for custom workflow building and streamlining processes

Cons

  • Complex user interface and steep learning curve for new users
  • Limited native CRM integrations and API flexibility
  • High cost and unpredictable credit consumption model

Incentivized
Srikrishna SwaminathanView profile
Co-Founder and CEO in Corporate at Factors.AI (51-200 employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Primarily, what Factors.AI does is map the entire buyer journey using third-party, second-party, and first-party data. We are able to identify which accounts are most likely to convert, and when we see that, we act on it immediately. Once I know which prospects from my website, LinkedIn ads, and other channels are showing intent to convert, I want to receive an alert with additional details—such as their contact information, email IDs, and account research (including what the company does and the number of employees). That’s something I extract from Clay tables and send to myself as an alert. In addition, I create a draft email so I know what message to send via email or LinkedIn. I then copy, paste, and send it, which helps accelerate my day-to-day work and allows me to reach out to customers or prospects immediately.

Pros

  • One thing is, in terms of extraction of data and handling multiple data points like contact information and others, Clay does very, very well. However, it also needs a certain level of engineering configuration to make it better.
  • So there are pros, but if you’re an engineer, you’ll really enjoy working with Clay.

Cons

  • You should be an engineer, or someone who is conversant with code conversion and prompts, and also comfortable working with multiple Excel sheets at a certain level.
  • It’s a place like an Excel table, but with AI powers and detailed GTM capabilities. So you have to work with those things.

Return on Investment

  • At a very simple level, I see it as saving me close to six to seven hours of weekly work. So in a sense, it gives me an extra day in terms of effort, and this is also effort that I didn’t want to do otherwise. So it basically automates that for me.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Apollo.io

Other Software Used

HubSpot Sales Hub

My experience with Clay software.

Incentivized
Fattu Razione
Sales Manager in Sales at Romani e Rindori s.r.l. (11-50 employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Clay for sales management. The software provides us with real-time data about our business prospects and plays a critical of identifying high quality leads thus closing more deals. Clay is well suited in analytics and reporting. It is an easy to use tool and good for contact data management. The software artificial intelligence capabilites helps us in ensuring actionable insights effective lead scoring.

Pros

  • The software is incredibly ease to use due to its user friendly interface.
  • Data accuracy and general intuitiveness.
  • Effectiveness of the software in analytics and reporting.

Cons

  • Pricing of the product is a challenge to many users especially small organisations and businesses.
  • Limited customization.
  • The product supports only one language which is English.

Return on Investment

  • Clay software enables us to find the best connect to build more qualified leads and ensure personalised outreach.
  • Use of the software in our organisation has promoted email marketing and content monetization.
  • The product has enhanced lead management enabling a full pipeline visibility from first contact to conversion.

Usability

Other Software Used

POPLITE by Populix, Bombora, Lusha

Clay Review

Incentivized
Justin Ashby
VP of Marketing in Marketing at Glyphic (11-50 employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Enrich CRM Data, build out Go to Market motions, identify target 100 lists, the best ICP candidates that we should go after. Also better understand individuals and how we should reach out to them. Personally, I run a lot of LinkedIn automation, so I try to learn as much about people's current connections as possible before we run a messaging campaign to them.

Pros

  • I mean it's a spreadsheet with every column is an integration, so whatever you want to do. If you want to understand a tech stack of a company, if you want to understand what an individual is doing their background at other companies, it's just so easy. Identify all those things and there's a lot of new things coming out, but those are the main use cases for me right now.

Cons

  • A max column limit. I run into the column limit all the time and kind of have to figure out using multiple tables. Just bugs really. I mean if you start getting too crazy on it, I feel like takes a long time. You can't really identify that it's working or if it's not. So that kind of slows things down a little bit.

Return on Investment

  • It helped immensely, organize everything using those, integrating open AI into it, all these other systems so that we don't have to use as many Clay credits, but Clay is still the engine behind. All of it has been.

Usability

Clay Review

Incentivized
Jorge Macias
Founder in Corporate at The GTM Engineering Company (1-10 employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

In my organization I use Clay to enrich data to clean my CRM. I use Clay to for inbound leads and I also do a lot of outbound through Clay. I have a few workflows that go back and forth between the data from my social media and how that ties back to some campaigns and outbound work. I think Clay addresses a lot of business problems. I think the main one is having the opportunity to use different data providers without having to pay for all of them. For example, in email you can use 10 different email providers for personal emails. You can use other 10 different data providers and you're not married to one specific provider. You can use them all and only pay for them once you find the right data that's useful for you. I think the other way it addresses all my business problems is that each business has their particular point of data that's important for their GTM motion and I think with Clay I can find those very specific data points. Some are structured data and some are unstructured data.

Pros

  • Pros, I think there are a lot of pros, so I mentioned a couple of them already, so being able to use different data providers. I think being able to massage the data, I call it a data orchestration where I can get different points of inputs of data. I can throw everything in Clay and then I can make all the changes before I use them for campaigns, for email, for LinkedIn, for whatever reason I'm going to use my data, but it's really easy to enrich, it's really easy to do research. It's really easy to build agents that tie to each row in your dataset, like there are a lot of things that you could use it for that are huge pros.

Cons

  • I think one of the concepts, being able to replicate something that you've already done. It's hard when you have a table and another client is asking you for the same thing and you want to replicate what you already did. It takes so much time to kind of meet everything together to be able to reuse something that you've already done. So that's something that needs a little bit of improvement.
  • It's sort of a pro, but it's a con, which is that there's so many providers and so many things that you can use in Clay. It's hard to even grasp what's possible and as a builder I'm always experimenting with new features and new things and it's even for me that I use the product every day. It's hard to keep up with everything that they're coming up with.

Usability

Clay Review

Incentivized
Marilyn Hahn
Co-Founder in Sales at Lerian (11-50 employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

So in our market, our decision makers are the C levels, so basically the CTOs and the CEOs. So we use Clay to try to reach this specific persona. It's a very huge market with a huge total addressable market, but we try not to reach the persona, but the best time that this company is in to buy our product. For example, if they are in a certain stage of funding rounds or applying for a license in the central bank, et cetera. So we use all these variables together and try to reach the best company by that time. Basically trying to reach our ICP and not to lose the buyin window that this customer has to buy our product. So we try to be a sniper inside of this.

Pros

  • I think that's one thing that we're having a huge success in using Clay is that we're reaching out to the right decision makers in the company that we're reaching out, so that makes our sales cycle takes much less than a normal sales cycle. I'll give an example, like the normal industry sales cycle is eight months sales cycle and we are having success in selling in three months, for example. So I think that Clay's helping us in reaching the right persona and making the sales cycle much shorter.

Cons

  • I think that our main market today is Brazil and we think that there's still some data missing in the Brazilian market, so I think it's a little bit cultural. I think it's not that easy to find data trust of all databases in Brazil, so I think there's room for improvement. Obviously it's not specific of the Clay product, but still the data management of the country, so I think there's a good way to improve the product.

Return on Investment

  • I think that the most positive impact was making the sales cycle shorter and I don't have a negative impact.

Usability

Other Software Used

HubSpot CRM

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