Clay: The Swiss Army Knife of B2B List Enrichment

Below we have a new article I wrote today on how to use Clay to do ABM list building and outbound orchestration...

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Enjoy the article below!

Ryan Allis

Clay: The Swiss Army Knife of B2B List Enrichment

By Ryan Allis, CEO of SaasRise

Let’s talk about Clay. This tool has become a game-changer for our outbound strategy—not just because of its data capabilities, but because it’s a canvas for automation and enrichment.

Clay is like a supercharged version of Apollo. While Apollo is great for raw data extraction, Clay excels in combining, cleaning, enriching, and even personalizing reach outs to your leads using AI. And it connects to multiple data providers using waterfall enrichment. That means if the first source doesn’t have an email or phone number, it automatically checks the next one—saving you time and maximizing accuracy.

Here’s how I use Clay:

• I start by importing a list—either pulled from Clay’s own search or from an external source like Apollo, ListKit, or LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
  
  
• From there, I append verified work emails, typically at a cost of 2–3 credits per record.
  
  
• I enrich with LinkedIn data, pulling in job titles, summaries, and work histories—at just 1 credit per record.
  
  
• Then, I use OpenAI or Claude APIs to generate AI-personalized email copy directly inside Clay.

That’s the magic of Clay—it’s a full-stack outbound orchestration tool.

The Cost of Using Clay

Now, let’s talk cost: to fully enrich a list of 50,000 people with both emails and LinkedIn profile data will run you about 150,000 credits, or roughly $1,500 per month on a Pro plan. You can reduce costs by bringing your own API keys from vendors like Findymail or Prospeo. Doing so can save you 50–75% on enrichment costs.

Beyond emails and summaries, you can also enrich with mobile phone numbers, job changes, and company news. And you can easily build target lists of accounts that fit your ICP. And Clay is also great for segmenting, enriching, and exporting data to CSVs or CRMs. Clay Pro works for up to 50,000 records per sheet. For massive datasets of 50k-1M rows, Clay Enterprise and tools like BaseRow or RowZero are your go-to solutions.

If your ACV is high enough (each customer is worth say over $10k per year to you) then there will be enough margin to invest in high-end ABM list building and prospecting tools like Clay. If you have an ACV of $1k to $10k then you may be better off just using Apollo + Instantly and skipping Clay.

It’s definitely cheaper to get leads off of Apollo, ListKit, or Instantly – but Clay does make it easier to do the list enrichment, organization, and AI personalization.

So if you’re serious about ABM and have the budget, Clay is worth every penny.

What To Do With Your ABM List

Once you have your ABM lists built in Clay, you can export the list to Instantly for outbound sending, set up HeyReach for LinkedIn outbound, and create a matched audience list on Meta, Google, LinkedIn, and Adroll so that you can show ads to the same people you’re reaching out to via email and LinkedIn.

And voila, your brand becomes omnipresent within your ICP.

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— Ryan Allis

About the Author:

Ryan Allis built iContact as CEO/Co-Founder from startup to $50M in ARR, 70,000 paying customers, #81 on the INC 500 list, and an exit for $169M to a publicly traded company. At iContact, he raised over $50M in venture capital (including $15M in secondary capital), and $5M in debt-capital. Today, Ryan is the CEO of SaasRise, the #1 community for experienced SaaS CEOs and Founders with $1M to $100m in ARR. Ryan is also a top SaaS Growth & Exit Coach, and has coached the CEOs of of Instantly, Seamless.ai, Tatango, Pipeline, Revenue Accelerator, RNL, Retreaver, Clearstream, YouCanBookMe, Noteefy, RXNT, and many more growing SaaS firms ranging in size from $5M to $160M in annual revenue. He is passionate about helping SaaS firms have successful exits. Ryan holds an MBA from Harvard Business School. Join the weekly masterminds Ryan leads at SaasRise and GrowthRise.