Clay Lead List Onboarding

For new Clay users building their first lead list

Walks a new Clay user through finding companies that match their ideal customer profile and the buyer personas at those companies, then saves matches to Audiences and finds work emails and phone numbers for the first ten contacts.

Ethan Huang

Growth at Clay

About this Skill

When to use it

Use this Skill when a new Clay user needs help building their first lead list by describing target companies and buyer personas in a short guided conversation. It searches for matching companies and people, saves them to Audiences, and surfaces work emails and phone numbers for the first ten contacts. Avoid using it for building automated workflows, sending outreach, or general account administration.

What it delivers

Delivers a company preview and a contact information table with names, titles, emails, and phone numbers for up to ten contacts. These results support deciding who to target next, without sending outreach or triggering any automation.

SKILL.md preview

# SKILL.md

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## Inputs and setup

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## Outputs and examples

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How someone would prompt this

Help me build my first lead list in Clay: find companies that match our ideal customer profile, suggest a buyer persona, and get contact info for the top ten people.

Inputs & outputs

What someone provides before the Skill runs, and the reviewable artifacts it returns.

Inputs

Clay workspace connection
- Connect or reuse an authorized Clay workspace
- complete plugin and CLI setup if not already signed in.
Business context
- Clay reads your workspace's saved business context once to ground its suggestions
- you confirm or correct them.
Targeting criteria
- Describe target companies by industry, employee count, headquarters, revenue, and company type
- describe the job titles and seniority you want to reach.
Result scope and destination
- Optionally request a specific number of results
- otherwise Clay searches a default batch and previews ten at a time
- matches save to your connected workspace's Audiences.
Contact enrichment choices
- Clay reuses existing contact identifiers and any email or phone already on file
- you can confirm which missing details to look up.

Outputs

Company previewA table of matching companies with name, website, industry, employee count, and headquarters location so you can review fit before saving or contacting them.
Contact information tableA table of up to ten contacts with name, title, company, email, and phone so you can decide who to reach out to next.

Representative output

Company preview

Name	Website	Industry	Employee count	HQ location
Example North Software	north.example	Software Development	120	Austin, United States
Example Harbor Software	harbor.example	Software Development	Not available	Toronto, Canada

Contact information

Name	Title	Company	Email	Phone
Example Buyer A	Revenue Operations Manager	Example North Software	buyer-a@north.example (from Audiences)	Not found
Example Buyer B	Director of Revenue Operations	Example Harbor Software	Not found	Not attempted — unavailable

We got these results through checking 3 data providers (Provider A, Provider B, Provider C) for email and 2 for phone (Provider D, Provider E).

How the Skill runs

Follow the steps in order. Each row includes the full instruction.

Connect Clay and load context

Connects to your Clay workspace, installs the Clay plugin and CLI if needed, and loads your business context plus search settings before starting.

Describe target companies

Asks you to describe the companies you want, suggests a profile based on your business context, then searches and previews the first ten matches.

Define buyer persona

Asks what titles and seniority levels you care about at those companies, suggesting a persona grounded in your business context and chosen companies.

Find people and contact info

Searches for matching people at the target companies, saves results to Audiences, and looks up work emails and phone numbers for the first ten contacts.

Connections required

No connections listed.

Install Clay and run it

1Install ClayUse the connector or official plugin in your coding-agent environment.
2Sign up or log inAuthorize Clay access and return when the connection is ready.
3Install the SkillRun the one-line install command from the Add this Skill card.
4Run the SkillPaste the example prompt and review the result.

Version history

Version 1From submitted SKILL.mdCurrent