Looking for the best Clay alternative?

What is Clay.com and how does Clay work?

Clay is a platform that helps you scale personalized cold outreach with enriched data about your leads. It sources contact and company data from over 50 data providers, enables you to run AI research using its AI Claygent, and manage hyper-targeted outbound campaigns to drive revenue growth for your business.

Clay is a good software for B2B businesses looking to drive sales, but it is not suitable for all kinds of businesses.

Clay’s key features:

• Data enrichment from multiple sources.
• Integrations with other products in your sales and marketing tech stack, such as your CRM, marketing automation software, etc.
• AI research agent to help you learn more about your prospects before you reach out to them.
• Personalized copywriting using AI to write emails and messages to prospects.

However, for many businesses, these promises haven’t delivered the expected value because setting it up is complicated, it feels clunky to use, and it’s pricey for most teams.

Customers often rely on Clay partners for implementation and support, and many sales teams struggle to adopt it. In fact, Clay customers say that salespeople don’t really use it, even when they have access because it is quite difficult to use.

Moreover, Clay does not help with list building, account book building, or identifying your ICP accounts and contacts. Clay does not provide real-time buying signals and first-party data as it works on a waterfall model based on data from other providers.

So if you’re in the market for a software to improve your sales pipeline and enhance data enrichment, you could consider one of the many Clay alternatives that offer better value.

Clay.com user reviews

Clay users are quite vocal about what they like and what they don’t about the product. Here are some reviews from public forums like G2 and Reddit.

Complex and cumbersome to use

By virtue of being a configurable tool, Clay becomes cumbersome to actually implement and use.

“It's not always very user-friendly. I have needed help on actions that should, simply put, be a lot easier to navigate and implement. In short, it feels like you need to be a spreadsheet expert to get the full worth of your investment, and it shouldn't be that way.”

Steep learning curve

Users report that the product isn’t very user-friendly and that not many sales reps actually use the tool even though they have access to it.

“There can be a learning curve with Clay. We have had some salespeople struggle to quickly get up to speed with the tool.”

Need for Clay partners

Implementing and using Clay requires businesses to work with third-party solutioning partners.

Expensive

Clay offers a basic free plan, but its feature-rich packages are quite pricey with the cheapest plan priced at $134/month.

Clay alternatives

B2B companies are hungry for software like Clay, and there are now several alternatives that deliver better data enrichment, deeper prospect insights, and a more intuitive, user-friendly

platform, all at a fraction of Clay’s cost.

But it is important to evaluate them and understand their offerings before deciding which ones to choose.

This checklist will help you make sure that the product you finally choose to buy gives you everything your business needs:

• Accurate data enrichment: Many sales intelligence tools have a large database but a lot of the contact information and firmographic data about the contact could be outdated. But a GTM software that you consider as an alternative to Clay should ideally have first-party data and get real-time updates.  
• Comprehensive integration options: It is essential for any GTM software to have easy, seamless integrations with other tools, and work with minimal switching or manual data sync between the different products.
• Automation capabilities for enhanced efficiency: In the era of AI and GenAI, being AI-native is non-negotiable for any B2B product. The product you choose must give you the luxury of being able to automate as many pieces of work as possible so as to reduce the time taken to get tasks completed efficiently.
• Advanced lead generation tools: Data enrichment is only one part of the process. What adds value to your tech stack is a tool that helps with identifying and filtering ICP leads, and tracking job changes in addition to enriching them with email ids and phone numbers.
• Intelligent analytics and AI insights: While evaluating the features and functionalities, make sure you also have access to AI analytics and insights as these will provide a solid foundation for your detailed analysis so you can iterate your processes and workflows for maximum efficiency.
• Flexible customization and scalability: Every B2B company has its unique workflows and processes depending on the industry they are in, the team size, etc. The product you buy should be flexible and customizable and should be built to scale and evolve with your team as your business grows.
• Data privacy and compliance: Given that people's data and personal information are at the core of sales intelligence, it is critical to maintain basic privacy and compliance standards and be ethical even outside of legal and regulatory requirements. Highperformr, for instance, only uses publicly available data and content available on social media to curate a well-rounded picture of the contact.

What is Highperformr?

Highperformr is an AI-native GTM workflow platform and an AI lead generation software that helps users identify and enrich ICP leads based on first-party data, use social signals and insight for precise outreach, and spearfish leads to make outbound sales more efficient.

The platform enables users to manage their entire GTM workflow – from identifying leads that match their ICP, building lists of contacts based on different kinds of intent data, enriching leads with contact information and social insight, and reaching out to high-potential leads based on their recent social activity.

Highperformr is the best Clay alternative in the market today, because unlike Clay that only manages lists and workflows, Highperformr helps users identify leads and build contacts lists that match their ICP and then move the lists into their GTM workflow.

Users can build, consolidate, and organize their lead lists, enrich the lists with over 50 fields of information about the contact and provide them with real-time social insight to help with precise outreach that could increase response rates.

Here’s what you can do with Highperformr:

• Get first-party intent signals in real time
• Identify ICP leads from social media
• Identity ICP leads using keyword search
• Track job changes of key contacts to find warm leads
• Build contacts lists of all ICP contacts from a single target account
• Get real-time insight on job changes, promotions, event participation, or other activity
• Get weekly/monthly reports on a contact’s new connections on LinkedIn
• Enrich leads with contact information, firmographic information, social intent signals, social activity insight, and other publicly available data.

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How Highperformr is better than Clay

• First-party data: Highperformr has direct and real-time access to LinkedIn data under the hood, and can help you find not just the contact details of the person but also get insight on how active they are, what topics they talk about, who their recent LinkedIn connections are, etc. Clay and other Clay alternatives on the other hand relies on LinkedIn Sales Navigator data to enrich your contacts. 
• Real-time signals: Highperformr is the only Clay competitor today that provides real-time signals about leads, enabling you to act on intent signals and buying signals instantly. In a market that demands quick action, Highperformr is an essential software in any B2B company’s GTM tech stack. 
• AI enrichments: Highperformr provides you with real-time first-party data about contacts and companies, and adds a layer of AI enrichments that help you understand your contacts better and enrich the CRM with more details about the contact, such as topics of interest, recent certifications, etc. 
• Quick time-to-value: Unlike Clay that has a steep learning curve and requires users to work with the product for some time before figuring out the best way to work with it, Highperformr promises quick time to value. Highperformr’s in-house solutioning and onboarding expert makes it easy for users to hit the ground running and see value from Highperformr in just days after configuring the leadgen and enrichment module. 
• White-glove onboarding and Applied AI solutioning: Clay can only be implemented through third-party Clay Partners while Highperformr provides every customer with white-glove onboarding and implementation with the help of an Applied AI Engineer who can work with you to use Highperformr to find the right kind of leads and book meetings effectively. 

• Similarity search: With Highperformr, you can find contacts similar to an ICP contact you have, and find companies similar to accounts you’re targeting.

• Build lead lists: Highperformr enables you to build lead lists that match your ICP based on event or tradeshow participation, keyword search, social media engagements and audience, competitor audience analysis, etc. 

• Intuitive and easy to use: Highperformr has been built to be a simple, self-serve platform that revops leaders, sales folks, lead development representatives (LDRs) and market research teams,  can use to enrich and filter leads easily. Clay has been known to be complex to configure and use with not many account executives (AEs) and SDRs (sales development representatives) using the software regularly.

• Rollover of unused credits: Highperformr works on a very flexible credits model and allows users to carry over unused credits to the next month. Customers are free to use as many credits as they like, and purchase credits for as low as $10. 

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