This is a multi-part series – check out What is Clay used for, Clay with LinkedIn, and How Clay uses Data Providers.

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) and Account-Based Experience (ABX) focus on engaging high-value target accounts with personalized, timely outreach across the buyer’s journey. Clay’s platform is built to enhance these strategies by combining data enrichment, workflow automation, and creative personalization into one seamless process that improves sales productivity, more effective reach into buying committees, and the ability to target the right personas with the right content at the right time. 

We’ve deployed Clay with our clients in a variety of different ABX settings.  Based on that experience, we’ve detailed a guide on how to leverage Clay for ABX/ABM, including general tactics and specific workflows integrating Clay with RB2B, Demandbase, and 6sense.

 

How Clay Enhances Account-Based Strategies

Clay acts as a data automation and enrichment hub that feeds your ABM/ABX programs with up-to-date, relevant insights. By centralizing data from multiple sources, Clay helps you quickly identify and engage the key people at each target account. Key benefits include:

• Comprehensive Data Enrichment: Clay integrates with dozens of data providers to enrich account and contact profiles (e.g. firmographics, technographics, funding news). This means details like company size, technologies used, recent funding, and more to each account record. With richer profiles, marketing and sales can tailor outreach to each account’s situation and needs. For example, knowing a tech stack or recent funding round helps craft messages that address specific pain points or goals.
• Buyer Segmentation & Persona Targeting to segment and filter contacts by attributes such as industry, job title, seniority, location, etc.. This helps ABM teams map out the buying committee within their database for instance, identifying all the key personas like decision-makers, influencers, and end-users. By enriching your contact lists and filtering by role, you ensure you’re reaching all relevant stakeholders rather than just one champion. Clay essentially gives you a 360° view of the target account’s people, which is critical since ABM is about engaging the entire account, not just individual leads.
• Intent Data Integration: A major principle of ABX is timing outreach intent and engagement. Clay can ingest intent signals from third-party sources (like website visitor tracking or intent platforms) to help pinpoint when an account is “warming up.” In fact, Clay even has native intent data capabilities to identify prospects actively researching solutions. By integrating with tools like Demandbase and 6sense (which provide intent scores and buy, Clay lets you trigger actions when an account shows high intent – for example, when a target account surges on a relevant intent topic or reaches a certain engagement threshold. This ensures your team contacts prospects at the right time, when interest is peak and outreach is going to resonate.
• Workflow Automation for Sales Productivity: Clay’s automation features eliminate tedious manual steps from enriching data records.  It can automatically pull in data, update records, and push information to other systems (CRM, outreach tools) so that reps don’t spend hours on research or data entry. For example, Clay uses a “waterfall” approach to data enrichment – sequentially checking multiple data sources for missing info for outbound. This means sales teams get fast, accurate data without hunting through numerous tools. The faster your team gets quality data, the faster they can close – creating personalized messages and getting in front of the right people. Ultimately, automating these steps boosts sales productivity by letting reps focus on engaging with high-value accounts instead of doing research.
  • With rich data in hand, Clay helps deliver tailored content for each persona across channels. You can use Clay’s AI-powered features to generate personalized email copy or LinkedIn message scripts that reference the prospect’s specific context (such as their company’s mission, a recent job promotion, or a pain point inferred from intent data). By combining data points and AI, Clay enables “personalization at scale,” making each touchpoint feel hand-crafted for the recipient. Additionally, Clay integrates with Outreach and sales engagement tools (e.g. Salesloft, Outreach, marketing automation) so you can seamlessly push these personalized messages into campaigns. The result is an ABM program that reaches people on the channels they use (email, LinkedIn, etc.) with content that speaks directly to their role and stage in the buying process. 

To illustrate how Clay supports ABM/ABX in practice, let’s walk through a few workflows that integrate Clay with other account-based platforms. These examples show how to improve account targeting, automate identification of key buyers, and personalize outreach using combined data from Clay, RB2B, Demandbase, and 6sense.

 

Turning Anonymous Website Visitors into Target Accounts (Clay + RB2B)

One challenge in ABM is identifying which target accounts are engaging with your website. RB2B (Reveal B2B) is a tool that identifies anonymous website visitors and matches them to their business profiles. By integrating RB2B with Clay, you can automatically turn those website visits into actionable leads:

1. Capture Visitor Data with RB2B: First, deploy RB2B on your site to monitor traffic. RB2B will detect and reveal the companies (and sometimes contacts) behind anonymous website visits in real time. For example, if someone from Acme Corp visits your pricing page, RB2B notes the visitor’s company and any available profile info.
2. Automatic Data Transfer to Clay: Using Clay’s webhooks capability, RB2B can send each identified visitor’s information directly into Clay as soon as it’s captured. This hands-free handoff means there’s no delay – the moment a target account visits your site, Clay gets the data. Clay will receive details like the company name, website, and possibly the visitor’s name.
3. Enrich and Identify Key Personas: Once the visitor info is in Clay, you can enrich the account and find contacts. Clay will use its data providers to pull additional context on that company (industry, size, tech stack, etc.) and, importantly, list out potential buyers at that account. For instance, you can configure Clay to fetch contacts with titles like Head of IT, CTO, or IT Manager if the visitor was looking at a technical page. By enriching the visitor’s company data and finding relevant contacts (emails, LinkedIn profiles, phone numbers), you now have a small roster of the buying committee at Acme Corp rather than just one anonymous visitor.
4. Segment and Prioritize: Not every website visit is equal. You can set up criteria in Clay to flag high-value visits – for example, visits to the pricing or product demo page might be considered high intent. Clay could add a score or tag to the Acme Corp record indicating strong interest. This ensures sales only spend time on qualified, high-intent accounts. (Clay’s enrichment and scoring capabilities let you custom-define what a “high priority” account is, combining factors like web engagement, firmographics, and even third-party intent data.)
5. Personalized Outreach to Visitors: With enriched data and identified contacts, your team can now reach out in a highly personalized way. For example:
   1. Send an email to the Head of IT at Acme Corp, mentioning multiple people from your team were exploring our pricing page – I’d love to share how [Product] might fit your IT initiatives” – a message that feels natural and relevant to their recent activity.
   2. Connect on LinkedIn with the visitor (if identified) or another key persona at that account, and reference a piece of content related to what they viewed (e.g. “We recently helped another company in your industry optimize their spend, as discussed in our latest blog you might’ve seen.”).
   3. Because Clay keeps all this data in one place, the rep can easily pull in details like the company’s recent news or the contact’s role to add context to the message. This makes the outreach far more personalized than a generic cold call.
6. Automate Follow-Up Actions: Clay can also automate what happens after the initial outreach. For instance, if the contact engages (replies to an email ok), Clay can update your CRM (ensuring the account’s status moves to an active opportunity) and even trigger a task for the sales rep to follow up immediately. Conversely, if there’s no response, Clay could move the lead into a nurture track or schedule a different touch (like adding them to a LinkedIn Audience for ad targeting). All these steps reduce manual work and ensure no interested account falls through the cracks.
   

Using Clay with RB2B in this way supercharges your ABM efforts at the top of the funnel – it transforms anonymous traffic into identified accounts with key contacts, enriched data, and a plan for personalized outreach, all without your team doing the heavy lifting of research.

 

Intent-Driven Outreach with Demandbase and Clay

Demandbase is an ABM platform that provides deep insights into account behavior and intent. It can tell you which companies are showing buying signals (like researching certain topics, even interacting with your ads). By integrating Demandbase data with Clay, you can automate timely outreach to the right persona with the right message as soon as an account shows interest:

1. Leverage Demandbase Intent Signals: Set up your Demandbase platform to monitor target accounts for key intent signals. For example, Demandbase might reveal that Globex Corp has a spike in interest for “network security solutions” (perhaps through content consumption or third-party intent data). It might also show you the engagement level – e.g., Globex’s employees have spent 120 minutes on your website this week, indicating high engagement.
2. Sync Hot Accounts to Clay: When an account reaches a defined threshold (e.g., an intent score above X or enters a “Decision” journey stage in Demandbase), have that account’s data flow into Clay. This can be done via an integration or even a simple export-import on a schedule. The goal is to get those high-intent account records into Clay automatically, along with any known contacts or insights from Demandbase. For instance, you could use Demandbase’s Salesforce integration to tag the account as “High Intent – Security,” and Clay can be set to pull all accounts with that tag for processing.
3. Identify and Enrich Buying Committee Members: Once the account is in Clay, use Clay to fill in the contact gaps. Even if Demandbase provides some known contacts (e.g., those who interacted with a campaign), you’ll want to ensure you have the full buying committee. With Clay, you can automatically search for key personas at Globex Corp: for a security solution, you might look for titles like CISO, Security Director, IT Manager, VP of Infrastructure, etc. Clay taps multiple data sources to find these people and append their contact info (email, LinkedIn, phone). This step yields a list of qualified contacts at the hot account, each enriched with details (role, tenure, location, etc.) useful for personalization.
4. Personalize Messaging with Intent Context: Now, craft outreach that leverages the intent signal that triggers a count. Since Demandbase indicated interest in “network security solutions,” your messaging to Globex should speak to that topic:1
   • In an email to the CISO, address the specific interest: “I noticed your team researching network security – as a CISO, ensuring your network is protected must be a priority. Here’s how [Your Company] recently helped a peer in your industry bolster their network defenses…”. This shows relevance and timeliness.
   • For a contact in finance or operations at the same account, the angle might differ (e.g., focusing on ROI or efficiency of the security solution rather than technical specs), but you’d still use the fact that the account is actively evaluating network security to tailor the content.
   • Clay’s AI copywriting can assist here by taking the intent data and other enriched info (like industry or tech stack) to generate custom email drafts for each persona. For example, it might incorporate the prospect’s industry regulations if relevant (financial industry needs security compliance) or mention a competitor’s technology that the account uses (which Clay’s data enrichment might have revealed) to position your solution.

By integrating Demandbase’s intent data with Clay’s enrichment and automation, you ensure that whenever an account shows buying intent, you’re immediately reaching out with a message that hits the mark. This alignment of content (message about security), channel (email/LinkedIn), persona (CISO vs others), and timing (right after intent is shown) exemplifies ABX in action.

 

Prioritizing In-Market Accounts with 6sense and Clay

6sense is another ABM platform that uses predictive analytics to identify accounts in different stages of the buying journey (for example, “Awareness”, “Consideration”, “Decision” stages for a given solution). It scores accounts based and can highlight those most likely to convert. When paired with Clay, 6sense helps you focus sales efforts on the hottest opportunities and arm your team with the data to personalize outreach. Here’s how you can integrate the two:

1. Pull In-Market Accounts from 6sense: Configure 6sense to regularly export or flag accounts that reach a high buying stage or score (e.g., any account in the “Decision” stage for your product category, or an account with a 6QATM score above a certain threshold). For example, Initech Ltd might be marked by 6sense as being in a Decision stage for “CRM Software,” indicating they are actively evaluating vendors and close to making a choice.
2. Import to Clay for Enrichment: Bring these priority accounts into Clay. This could be automated via API or done by syncing a CRM field that Clay watches (such as a checkbox “6sense Qualified” on the account record). As the accounts come in, Clay will enrich each one’s profile and ensure you have all relevant contacts. Even if your marketing team already has some contacts at Initech (perhaps captured via form fills or past outreach), Clay can find additional members of the buying committee you might not have – e.g., the Operations Manager who will be a system user, or the VP of Sales who influences the CRM decision, etc. The platform’s ability to integrate multiple data sources means if one provider doesn’t list a contact, another might, giving you comprehensive coverage of the account’s personnel.
3. Prioritize and Segment by Persona: Within Clay, segment the contacts from 6sense-flagged accounts by persona type. For instance, label contacts as Decision Maker, Influencer, or User. In the CRM software example, a VP of Sales or CIO at Initech, Decision Maker, a Sales Ops Manager might be an Influencer, and a Sales Team Lead could be an End User influencer. Segmenting helps in tailoring messages: decision makers get high-level ROI-driven messaging, while users might get more tactical, feature-driven content. Clay’s filtering makes it easy to create these sub-lists so each persona group can receive content that resonates with their interests and concerns.
4. Craft Tailored Content for Each Persona: Use Clay’s AI-driven content tools or your marketing content library to prepare messages for each segment:
   • Executive (Decision Maker): Send a message focusing on strategic value – e.g., “How adopting our CRM can increase your sales team’s productivity by 20% – a quick win for you .” Mention any firmographic details Clay provided, like “Noticed your sales team at Initech grew by 30% this year – scaling teams often need better CRM infrastructure; here’s how we can help…”.
   • Technical/Manager (Influencer): Share content like case studies or integration capabilities – e.g., “How our CRM seamlessly integrates with your current tech stack (Clay’s enrichment would tell you what major tools they use) to make the Sales Ops Manager  – End User Champions: Perhaps invite them to a webinar or send a short demo video that speaks to daily user benefits.
   • Clay’s AI can automatically insert dynamic details for personalization. For example, if 6sense indicates Initech has been searching for “CRM implementation best practices,” the email to the IT Manager might say, “Attaching a guide on CRM implementation best practices, since planning a smooth rollout will be key for your team.” This shows that you understand what they’re researching and adds value up front.
5. Automated Outreach Cadence: Once content is ready, Clay can push these contacts into appropriate outreach sequences. High-priority 6sense accounts like Initech might warrant a multi-channel cadence: day 1 email, day 3 LinkedIn InMail or connection, day 5 phone call, etc. Clay can integrate with sales engagement platforms or even trigger emails directly. You can time these touches based on 6sense insights too. For example, if 6sense updates daily intent signals, you might schedule emails to go out the morning after an account’s intent spikes, to ensure your message is one of the first they see while they’re evaluating solutions.
6. Continuous Monitoring and Updates: As outreach progresses, track engagement and update statuses. Clay can log email opens/clicks (if integrated with your email tool) or note if a LinkedIn connection was made. If an account goes cold (no engagement and 6sense shows intent dropping), Clay might pause the sequence or move the account back to marketing nurture. Conversely, if engagement is high, Clay can alert the sales rep to reach out live. Additionally, any new intelligence from 6sense (like suddenly the account starts researching a specific competitor) can be captured by Clay and appended to the account notes, so the next touch can address it (“I saw you were also looking at [Competitor]; here’s a comparison guide that might help your evaluation.”).

In this workflow, 6sense acts as the radar that spots high-potential accounts, and Clay is the engine that kicks into gear once an account is spotted – pulling in data, gathering the buying committee, and launching personalized outreach. This ensures sales efforts are focused on in-market accounts with the best chance of conversion, and that every contact at those accounts receives messaging aligned to their role and interests.

 

Automation and Personalization Tactics with Clay

Lastly, let’s highlight some broader automation and personalization tactics that Clay enables for ABM/ABX. These can be applied across the above scenarios and more generally in your account-based strategy: the Perfect Time: With Clay’s integrations, you can set up triggers so that the moment an important signal occurs, a tailored outreach is initiated. Whether it’s an intent surge (via Demandbase/6sense) or a target account visiting your site (via RB2B), Clay ensures a rapid response. This “speed to lead” is critical – reaching out within hours or even minutes of a signal can dramatically improve connection rates. For example, if 6sense signals a spike in interest, Clay could automatically draft an email referencing that topic and alert the account owner to give the prospect a call. By aligning outreach timing with buyer interest, you create a responsive, engaging account experience (a core ABX principle).

• Automating Lead Enrichment & CRM Updates: ABM often involves many touches and data points per account. Clay can act as the central brain that continuously enriches and updates this information. When new contacts are discovered or when existing leads change roles, Clay can update your CRM records so that your sales team always has the latest info. It can also append notes, Whitepaper X” or “Attended Webinar Y” to contact records by capturing responses from your marketing automation. All of this is done automatically, saving your team from manual data entry. Moreover, Clay can score or prioritize leads based on the enriched data (e.g., assign a higher score if the lead’s title is VP or if the company uses a complementary technology). This automation lets sales focus on high-intent, high-fit buyers without worrying about cleaning or researching data – the prep work is handled behind the scenes.
• Dynamic Personalization with AI: One of Clay’s most powerful capabilities is using AI to transform raw data into meaningful, personalized outreach. Instead of generic templates, Clay’s AI Message Writer uses the enriched data tables to draft unique email lines for each prospect. It can reference details like:
  • Company news or mission (e.g., “I saw that Initech’s mission is to streamline financial workflows – our solution aligns well with that goal…”).
  • Job changes or milestones (e.g., “Congrats on your recent promotion to CFO – typically at this stage, companies evaluate how they manage XYZ, which is why I’m reaching out…” based on an alert that Clay captured via a job changes, Technology stack or tools (e.g., “Noticed you use Salesforce and Marketo – our platform integrates with those, making implementation frictionless” if Clay’s data shows those tools in use).
  • Prior engagement or intent (e.g., “Since you’re researching network security, here’s a resource on best practices…” as we described earlier).
• These AI-personalized snippets can be used in both emails and LinkedIn messages. For LinkedIn outreach, you might have Clay draft a brief connection note or InMail that feels personal (mentioning a mutual interest or a specific problem you know the prospect is facing). While it doesn’t allow automated sending through Clay directly, your reps can use the AI-generated text as a starting point for 1:1 messages. This approach saves time and ensures every touch feels highly relevant to the recipient. Teams have successfully integrated Clay with GPT-3/ChatGPT to do this at scale – for example, crafting custom introductions or even direct mail notes based on each contact’s situation.
• Multi-Channel Orchestration: ABX is about delivering a coordinated experience. Clay can serve as the orchestration layer that makes sure each account gets a sequence of touches across channels. Using Clay’s integrations, you can set up plays like:  Call + Direct Mail:** e.g., Clay finds a new decision-maker at a target account, auto-generates an introductory email, schedules a follow-up call task in Salesforce, and even triggers  sonalized gift or mailer via a service like Sendoso (Clay has an API integration as showcased in the Sendoso case).
  • LinkedIn + Email: e.g., Clay pulls the prospect’s recent LinkedIn activity (maybe via an API or scraping tool) and notes they posted about a certain topic. You then have an AI-crafted comment or message ready, which the rep can use on LinkedIn, followed by an email that references that post – a one-two punch that feels very tailored.
  • Ad Retargeting Audiences: Clay can export lists of high-priority contacts (say, all decision-makers at accounts in decision cycle) to feed into ad platforms (LinkedIn Ads, Google Customer Match) so that those individuals see targeted ads complementing your direct outreach. The content of those ads can be aligned with the messages your emails carry, reinforcing the same key points. Because Clay keeps the list updated (e.g., adding new decision-makers, removing outdated contacts), your ad audiences stay fresh and on-target.
• Continuous Learning and Optimization: Finally, Clay helps you close the loop and improve your ABM strategy over time. By aggregating data on what outreach worked (who replied, what content got clicks, which accounts converted), you can analyze patterns. Maybe you discover that certain intent signals lead to faster sales, or that one persona is particularly responsive to a specific value proposition. Clay can facilitate this analysis by centralizing the outcomes along with the input data. These insights allow your team to refine targeting criteria, adjust personalization tactics, and update automated triggers to focus on what works best. In essence, Clay not only executes your ABX tactics but also captures the data needed to evolve them, ensuring your approach to engaging buyer committees gets smarter each quarter.

Clay is a powerful ally for any team implementing ABM or ABX strategies. It provides the data foundation and automation needed to engage target accounts in a timely, personalized way. By enriching accounts and contacts from multiple sources, Clay helps you know your buyers; by integrating intent signals and triggers, it helps you reach out at the perfect moment; and with AI-driven personalization, it helps you resonate with each persona on the buying committee. The net effect is a significant boost in sales productivity – reps spend more time speaking with the right people and less time on research – and a better experience for the buyer, who feels understood rather than spammed.

Clay simply makes this scaled personalization feasible and efficient. As a result, your team can reach deeper into buyer committees, deliver the right content at the right time, and ultimately accelerate pipeline and revenue from your most valuable accounts.