Clay tutorial for beginners: build your first outbound table step by step

What do you need before starting this Clay tutorial?

This Clay tutorial needs three things before you open a table: a Clay account, a written ideal customer profile and a sequencer or CRM to send leads to. The Free plan gives 500 Actions and 100 Data Credits a month with up to 200 rows per table, as of October 2026.

Write the ideal customer profile as filters, not adjectives: industry keywords, headcount range, country and the two or three job titles you want to reach. Clear filters make every later step cheaper because you enrich fewer wrong rows.

If you plan to push leads to Instantly or lemlist, create an empty campaign there first and copy your API key. Clay's Instantly docs say to use a version 2 key, because Instantly is retiring version 1.

Step 1: How do you find companies in Clay?

You find companies in Clay with the Find Companies source. Clay's docs say every table begins with a source: click + Add at the bottom of a workbook, choose Find Companies, set filters, review the preview and import to a new table. If you already have a list, choose Import from CSV instead.

Clay's guide to finding companies recommends description keywords as your primary filter, adding industry categories only when needed. AI filters for sub-industry, revenue stream or business type remove unwanted companies before rows are returned, so you do not pay for them.

Filter logic is worth learning early. Filters combine with AND across different filter types and OR within one filter, so an either-or across two types needs two separate searches. Technographic filtering is available and costs 3 credits per company returned, according to Clay's docs.

Step 2: How do you enrich companies in a Clay table?

You enrich companies in Clay by clicking Add enrichment, searching for the data you need and mapping the input column, usually the company domain or LinkedIn URL. Typical first enrichments are headcount, location, funding and tech stack.

Use free formulas and filters before paid steps. Clay's docs list formulas, filters, scoring and normalisation as free of Actions, so you can drop companies outside your headcount range before running anything that costs credits.

Every enrichment has run settings, including an Only run if condition. Set it so later columns only run on rows that pass your filters, and run each new column on a handful of rows before running the whole table.

Name each column for what it holds, such as Headcount or Uses HubSpot, because later steps map inputs by column name. Clay University's sequencer lesson notes that a missing input error usually means the wrong column has been mapped.

Step 3: How do you use Clay Find People at those companies?

Clay Find People works best from the company table you just built. Clay's docs recommend Find People at These Companies over a standalone search when you already have a company list, filtered by job title, location and experience.

You can run it two ways. As a source it creates a new, separate table and stops at 50,000 records in total; as an enrichment it saves into your company table and returns 10 people per row by default with full profile data. Choose the enrichment route when you want to rank contacts before saving them.

Clay's docs suggest using company LinkedIn URLs rather than domains as the identifier, because domain lookups can match the wrong company, especially subsidiaries. You can also exclude up to 3 sets of people, such as existing customers, using Clay tables, CSVs or manual lists.

Exclusion lists are capped at 300,000 people in total and 100,000 per source, according to Clay's Find People docs. Each excluded entry needs a professional profile URL.

Step 4: How do you find work emails with a waterfall?

You find work emails in Clay with the Work Email waterfall, which tries several providers in order and charges only for the one that finds a match. Click Add enrichment, search for Work Email, choose Quick setup and map the domain and name columns.

Switch on the free Infer Email first step, which builds an address from a pattern such as first.last@domain.com and stops if the guess validates. Then set a validation provider so each found email is checked before it reaches your sequencer.

Pick a validation strategy to match your sending setup. Clay's guide recommends Conservative, meaning safe-to-send only, for cold outbound on new domains, and Balanced for warmed domains with a sending history. The Tentt guide to waterfall enrichment covers provider order and costs in detail.

If Infer Email finds nothing valid, the paid providers run in order. Leave rows empty when every provider fails rather than guessing, because unverified addresses raise bounce rates on your sending domains.

Step 5: How do you add a Clay AI column with Claygent?

You add a Clay AI column by choosing Add column, selecting an AI column and either writing a prompt or choosing a saved Claygent. Clay's docs say variables map to your table columns automatically, then you save and run.

Good first AI tasks are narrow: classify whether a company sells to enterprises, pull the main product from its homepage, or write one opening line from a recent post. Switch web search on for live research and off when the answer should come from data already in your table.

Clay's Claygent guide gives three rules that keep AI output usable: return a fixed set of fields, attach the URL the answer came from, and return Not found rather than inventing an answer. Claygent Builder lets you test up to 10 inputs at a time for free, and Clay suggests adding the column with auto-update off and running two or three rows first.

Step 6: How do you push leads from Clay to Instantly or a CRM?

You push leads from Clay to Instantly, lemlist or Smartlead with each tool's Add Lead to Campaign action. Clay University's lesson on pushing data to a sequencer sets out five steps:

1. Create a new campaign in your sequencer.
2. Add your sequencer API key to Clay.
3. Add the Add Lead to Campaign enrichment.
4. Map the email, name, job title and personalisation fields.
5. Check the leads appear correctly in the sequencer.

Map the validated email column, not a raw email column, and set Only run if so rows without a valid email are skipped. For Instantly, the action needs a campaign ID and email, with an optional Skip if Lead is in Workspace setting. For HubSpot, use Create object or Update object; Clay's pricing page lists CRM auto-sync on the Growth plan.

How much does a first Clay table cost?

A first Clay table of 50 contacts usually fits inside the Free plan, based on Clay's published credit examples. Clay's docs give 0.5 Data Credits for a LinkedIn profile enrichment and 0.5 for an email found, so 50 x (0.5 + 0.5) = 50 Data Credits, half the Free plan's 100.

Actions are the other meter. Assuming 5 paid steps per row (company enrichment, people search, email waterfall, AI column and the push), 50 x 5 = 250 Actions, inside the Free plan's 500; the 5 steps are an assumption, so check the usage panel after your first run.

Phone numbers are excluded on Free and are the most expensive data type, so leave them out of a first table. When a lookup returns nothing, Clay's pricing FAQ says no credits are charged.

Clay tutorial: what to build next

Once this first table works, rebuild it as a template and change one variable at a time: a new title, a new country or a different AI prompt. Then add a signal source, such as job changes or new hires, so rows arrive when something happens rather than when you remember to build a list.

Clay University's Clay 101 course and the docs cited here are the best next reading after this Clay tutorial. Tentt builds production Clay systems for B2B teams, and the free GTM stack resources in the Tentt newsletter collect tools that sit alongside Clay.