How to Build a Clay Table That Finds the Right Contact at Each Account

How do you find the right person to contact at each target account?

Start from a clean list of target companies, use Clay's Find People search with tight job title filters and a low limit per company, exclude people you already know, then run a work email waterfall with conservative validation. You end with one or two verified contacts per account instead of a long, noisy list.

This tutorial is for one situation: you are a founder or a one-person sales team with a list of target accounts, maybe 50 to 200 companies, and you need the right buyer at each one. You do not need ten contacts per company. You need the person who owns the problem you solve.

I build enrichment and outbound systems for B2B teams, and the most common mistake I see is pulling everyone with a senior title and sorting it out later. That burns credits and fills your CRM with people who will never reply. The steps below keep the table small and the contacts relevant.

What do you need before you open Clay?

A list of target companies with their website domains, a written ideal customer profile, and a clear answer to one question: which job owns the problem you solve? Domains matter most, because they connect company records to people and emails reliably. Company names alone cause mismatches with similar names.

Write down two or three job titles for your buyer, plus the function they sit in. For a sales tool, that might be a Head of Sales or a RevOps lead in the sales function. For a services business like mine, it is often a founder or a Head of Marketing. Be specific. "Leadership" is not a buyer.

Also gather the people you should not contact: current customers, open deals, and anyone already in a sequence. I wrote about building that list properly in the disqualification rules I set before outbound. You will use it in a later step.

How do you start the people search in Clay?

Clay's documentation says to click Add at the bottom of a workbook and search for Find People. From there you set filters for company attributes, job title, experience, and location. Since you already have a company list, focus on job title and use your domains to anchor the search to your target accounts.

Clay's company filters let you narrow by size, industry, and description keywords, and the location filter lets you include or exclude regions, countries, or cities. If you sell only to certain markets, set location now. It is cheaper to filter here than to delete rows later.

Keep the first run small. Test on ten companies before you run the full list. That lets you see whether the job title filters return the people you expect without spending credits on a hundred accounts.

How should you set the job title filter?

Clay offers three match modes. "Is similar to" includes synonyms, similar titles, and translated titles. "Contains" requires at least one of your terms, ignoring capitalization. "Is exactly" requires an exact match, including capitalization. For most searches I start with "contains" and quoted phrases, then widen only if results are thin.

"Is similar to" is useful for international lists, where the same role has different titles in different languages. It is also the mode most likely to return people you did not want. "Is exactly" is too strict for most real data, because people write their titles in creative ways.

Clay's docs note that you can wrap multi-word terms in quotes to search exact phrases. Use that. Searching for "head of sales" in quotes avoids pulling every person with "sales" anywhere in their title.

How many people should you pull per company?

One to three. Clay lets you set a limit per company, up to 100, but small B2B deals rarely need more than a primary buyer and one backup. A low limit forces your filters to do the work and keeps your credit spend tied to people you will actually contact.

If your filters return more than three people at most companies, your job title filter is too broad. Tighten it before you raise the limit. If they return nobody at many companies, try "is similar to" or add a second title, then run it on your ten test companies again.

When a company returns two good candidates, keep both. The second person becomes your fallback if the first does not reply or has left the company.

How do you exclude people you already know?

Use the exclude filter. Clay's documentation says you can exclude up to three different sets of people using Clay tables, CSVs, or manual lists. Load your customers, open deals, and active sequence contacts here, so they never enter the new table in the first place.

This step is easy to skip and expensive to forget. A cold email to a current customer is awkward. A cold email to someone in an open deal can confuse the rep running it. Excluding them at the search stage is simpler than cleaning them out after enrichment.

If you have more than three groups to exclude, combine them into one CSV before you upload. Keep that file updated monthly so every new search starts from current data.

How do you find and verify work emails?

Add Clay's Work Email waterfall. Its docs say to click Add enrichment, search for Work Email, choose Quick setup or Full configuration, map your inputs, and save. The waterfall tries several email providers in order and, per Clay, you only pay credits for the provider that finds a match.

Clay also offers an Infer Email step at the start of the waterfall. It builds an address from the person's name and the company domain using a common pattern, and Clay describes it as a free step. If the inferred email passes validation, the waterfall stops there.

For validation, Clay offers Conservative, Balanced, and Aggressive presets. For cold outreach, I use Conservative. A bounced email hurts your sending domain more than a missing contact hurts your pipeline. I went deeper on provider order and coverage in how to order an enrichment waterfall.

What should you check before sending this list anywhere?

Read every row. For a list of 50 to 200 accounts, that takes under an hour. Confirm the person still holds the role, the title matches your buyer, and the email passed validation. Delete anyone who looks wrong. A small, checked list beats a large, unchecked one every time.

Look for patterns in the misses. If many results are recruiters or assistants, tighten your job title terms so they no longer match those roles. If many are at subsidiaries of your target, tighten the company match. Each fix makes the next run cleaner.

Only then move the list into your CRM or sequencing tool. If you plan to let an AI SDR handle outreach, run through what to check before an AI SDR sends for you first.

What should you do next?

Run the search on ten target companies with a "contains" job title filter, a limit of two per company, and your exclusion list loaded. Add the Work Email waterfall with conservative validation. Review the results by hand, fix the filters, then run the full list. Your first clean table sets the template for every future search.

If you want help setting up a Clay workflow that feeds your CRM with the right contacts and nothing else, reach out. I am happy to look at your account list and suggest where to start.