Improving Company Data and Finding Contacts: Seeking Community Input | Clay

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Improving Company Data and Finding Contacts: Seeking Community Input

·Oct 02, 2025 03:12 PM·

Real-world scenario: Boss hands you a list of 244 companies that may or may not be using our competitor. Only company names. John, do you think Clay could get us data on these? Me: "Yes"... Here's what I did and where I could use the groups help (please):

Took his "Intel" (list of 244 company names) and used Claude 4.5 to go out and find the company domains (done in like 2 minutes). THEY WERE GOING TO OUTSOURCE THIS PIECE!
Created a .csv with Company Name and Domain and imported into Clay
Clay automatically added in some company data like company LinkedURL (many missing)
Used HubSpot Lookup object to see if any of these accounts are already clients of ours (located 16 existing client company records)
Ran Find People at these companies with some Senior Level filters (attached), and using some logic, enriched the contacts that were not already clients (work email/mobile phone).
Exported the CSV but now I've got a total of 20 companies with tons of contacts at those companies. That means I was unable to find people at 208 companies from the list (after removing the existing clients). While I understand not every company will have people meeting the Senior level, this looks bad.

Here's what I think I did wrong:

I should have enriched the company data before running find People. I went back into the master list and found many more company LinkedIn URL's.

Questions for the community:

Are there other company enrichments that I should be pulling in to improve my "Find People" results?
Did I miss a step somewhere?
Are my filters for the Find People the cause?
Lastly, if there is a "fix", how do I properly go about only finding people that I haven't already found in another workbook (I'm about 1500 credits deep right now). I believe the answer has to do with using filters but pulling from other workbooks?

Happy to review videos/how-to's to get through this. Or if someone wants to hop on a call and walk through it, that would be lovely.

Izzy (.
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Hey John! Do you recall what I shared about functions vs job titles in C101 cohort?
Izzy (.
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^ that should answer the data coverage issue you’re facing
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John T.
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Ok, let me take a look at that again and see how it turns out. I'm still curious how I would go about only enriching the "new" contacts once I apply changes/not rerunning the entire list again
Izzy (.
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Marina H. Lindsey F. Polly any of you want to take a stab at answering John’s second question here on only enriching “new” contacts? (haha think of this as a pre-TA exercise)
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Marina H.
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I can try 😀 My wild guess John T. is that you would need to pick a Job function that matches what your company does since they’re competitors and I assume that would be similar function, eg software development, or financial, or whatever, but can’t be all of these at once?
Polly
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Izzy (. John T. I'm not sure if any of the below is correct but what I have done to segment which contacts are enriched is I've created some custom fields in our CRM:
clay enrich status
last clay enrichment
first clay enrichment
I then have a formula enrichment in a workspace that updates this back into the CRM if enrichment takes place (and when). I can then exclude these from within the CRM segment list Another alternative could be doing a new import of contacts only to enrich?
Izzy (.
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Yes that's definitely a great approach if these contacts already exist in your CRM and you want to exclude them!
Izzy (.
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John T. i encourage you to look through the side panel on all the filters you can set for find people search for your second q
Izzy (.
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and re: Marina H. - same question to you: Do you recall what I shared about functions vs job titles in C101 cohort?
Marina H.
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Now that i sat in front of my laptop rather than mobile I see why my previous answer wasn’t relevant. Job Functions are inferred, and I think your suggestion is to use Job Titles instead? First take a Job Title of your existing best client and ask LLM of your choice to generate extra Titles, and then paste them into Job Titles. Right Izzy (.?
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Izzy (.
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Yes queen! You crushed it 100% spot on haha
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Izzy (.
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that's the answer you're looking for on #1 John T. ^
Izzy (.
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and just to close out this loop - John, there's an option to exclude a table of people from your people search as one of the options in the side panel of Find People search
John T.
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Duh! I was thinking I couldn't exclude the table because it came from the original workbook. The exclude table should work. I'll go back to the Company list I had, and when I do "find people at these companies" with the refined job function search, I'll exclude the previously found/enriched table from my results. Will report back how it goes (sorry been between meetings). Polly love the additional CRM fields option to exclude them from future enrichments. I can see how that could get ugly quick (without it). Marina H. Thanks for the refresher as well. Looking forward to next week
Willy H.
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this is so awesome to see in real time haha
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