Clay Tables vs Workflows: building automated inbound with Chris Viglietta

London, Paris. It's just crazy. So this is cool.

When you fly in, how many days are you typically at your destination there?

I go for like a week.

And do you fly around in the Clay plane?

Oh, fly in it and then jump out of it. Yeah. All right, Derek. Calling in from the other Mountain View.

Yeah, I'm in the other Mountain View. There's 2 Mountain View, Californias.

I didn't know that, actually.

Yeah, there's one in SoCal. Looks like, uh, we've got Rupak from— well, I don't know, it may be the same one. No, maybe, maybe the same one. I'm not sure.

It's the same one. I was just trying to inject some fun into it.

Oh, okay. So you are in the same Mountain View as I am.

Yeah, NorCal.

Yeah.

Okay.

All right. I'm at Otter AI, so if you ever want to stop by our headquarters.

Yeah, you're down the block. Oh, cool.

Where are you guys at?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm in Mountain View, so if I go down there to grab some sushi, you're just a couple doors down.

Great.

Sushi place.

Good to meet you guys.

All right, maybe we should, uh, maybe we should get this party rocking.

I get started?

Let's do it.

Yeah.

All right guys, I'm gonna kill the music for now. If you haven't already, scan the QR code, it'll play into something later. All right, Jared.

All right, uh, let's see. I'm gonna do a little intro here before handing it off to Chris. Uh, am I able to share my screen? Yeah, I think I am. I think I am. Okay, so what are we doing here? I'm Jared Waxman, founder of Go-To-Market Engineer School. And we've got, every time we do one of these cohorts, these cohorts are 8 weeks long. Before the cohort, we try to get out a bunch of useful workshop material to get out to as many people as possible. So we've got 4 free workshops. This is the first of the, what I'm calling the back-to-school week. And we're really glad to kick it off with Chris today. And then next week, We are talking about a bunch of things, agents that run themselves, and just checking with you every once in a while, getting the most out of job data, job posting data, context layers, all that kind of stuff. So you could see some of the events we've got going on next week. If you want to register for any of those, here's the Luma event. Go-to-Market Engineer School does kick off at the end of the month. We're partnered again with Clay for what's going to be the 5th cohort with Clay. We've had a few hundred students go through it so far. You could see some of the countries and companies that they're from. It's basically an 8-week program. The first 4 weeks we are going through a bunch of different workflows. We're giving you access to a bunch of tools including Clay, Sumble, Swan, Octave. You're going to bring your own Claude or ChatGPT and we're going to work through that throughout the whole program. And then you're going to finish up by creating a capstone project for like a real customer. It could be your customer, your client, your employer, or we'll help match you with somebody so you have a real customer to build capstone for. And A few things that make this, I think, a little bit unique and special is really this focus on actually putting learning into practice, building something, and then demonstrating that, showing that off, and having a video to add to your portfolio. Having practitioners in the room every week live, having a stack of tools. No go-to-market engineer gets by with just one thing. It's a whole toolkit you show up with. Then we've got recruiters and alumni that come to the to the capstone demo. So it's good fun. And yeah, we got a couple of weeks left to apply and then it gets kicked off at the end of the month. So if this is of interest to you, I hope to see you in the course. And with that, I'm going to kick it off to Chris, who is, I think, the only person that I know that has actually— well, I think that you've jumped out of a plane. My recollection, which may be faulty, is that you've jumped out of a plane to teach people Clay. I'm probably a little bit off there, but it's somewhat close.

It's not too far off, you know, in the plane, out of the plane.

Yeah, I mean, I remember seeing videos of you with like a helmet on and like a microphone and you're kind of shouting through it. And so thank you for putting your life on the line, Chris, to get people excited about workflows, AI, go-to-market, and, you know, getting going with this sort of new way of doing things. And thank you for coming today.

Yeah, thanks for having me. And, you know, it's funny that you bring that up because in a way, today we're here to talk about Clay tables, Clay workflows. When do you use either or? Like, what is going on here? And what's funny about that is that I sort of like started making videos that people know me for from Clay tables. And so it's kind of like this homage. And so this presentation is like my way of trying to make this fun. And to kind of educate everyone on how to think about tables and workflows. So I'll sort of just get started. Does that sound good, Jared?

Yeah, let's, let's get going. I mean, I think for, you know, for myself and a lot of us here, like, okay, we've been learning, Clay. We've been, you know, we think we know what we're doing. And then pretty much every 2 weeks you change it up on us and you launch amazing new things. And then we got to, we got to relearn. So this is, this is just, you know, kind of par for the course in this, in this world of AI. So let's kick it off. I want to, I want to understand what I should be doing differently.

Classic.

I don't need anybody that's not speaking here. Thanks.

So, okay, so if you haven't already, feel free to scan this QR code. It'll make sense later. And if not, I think a lot of people already did it. It'll get the point across. So let's dive into this. So quick intros. My name is Chris, and I run a lot of our events. based marketing. Think workshops, live training at Clay. I view myself as a lifelong learner, and a lot of people view me as like this demo daredevil guy where I build like Clay tables and demos like jumping off mountains, surfing, flying in helicopters, hot air balloons. This picture is just like a little collection of things I've been able to, to do while at Clay and teach Clay. And fun fact about me, Lived in Paris for 2 years off of crypto money, lost all the money. It's gone now. So now I'm here teaching online webinars with all you guys here today. So what is Clay? Really quickly, infrastructure for go-to-market engineering. So we are able to bring a lot of different data sources together into one place. We have over 150 data providers. You can find some intent signals and data. You orchestrate your workflows inside of Clay, and then you send it somewhere. Whether it's a sequencer campaign or updating your CRM or accessing it via MCP or CLI, that is what Clay does. So again, data comes in, you orchestrate it, and then you execute upon that data. So really quickly today, we're going to talk about 4 things in particular. Workflows. We're going to show you how to build a go-to-market workflow authentically. We're going to convert a Clay table into a workflow and kind of talk about when and where that's a good idea. And then also go a little bit deeper into like when to use a Clay table versus a workflow, and then I'll leave it up for some Q&A at the end. So workflows, let's talk about it. Workflows are a visual builder in Clay. If you haven't already seen this, where there are nodes and those nodes are go-to-market primitives. Those primitives allow you to enrich data, score, route, and assign. through these different nodes, which just means your go-to-market teams can actually build more powerful workflows in this kind of interface. And on the screenshot to the right, you can see what that looks like in Clay. So how do you think about this? Well, think of it as workflows being Table 2.0. So on the left side, this is what tables look like today, right? It's basically like a lot of rows with a lot of columns. Some people call it a spreadsheet. And on the right side, we have this node-based visual builder. So you can see there's some process and order. So workflows allow you to do visual-first building, which means you have observability into what has ran and what hasn't. So you can see the logic. You can build upon a go-to-market data layer, which is very important with audiences, which is another thing that we launched, which allows you to unify first-party and third-party data like your Gong calls, CRM, into Clay and then use Clay data and put into one record, which allows you to use account scoring agents and then allows you to build go-to-market plays in minutes. And so I'm going to show you how to do that today through terminal, CLI, Sculptor, whatever tool you want to use, you can access Clay data and build upon it. So Workflows has helped these 2 customers build 2 specific plays: automated inbound and signal-based outbound. And we're going to dig into this. And today we're going to talk a lot about automated inbound. And so actually, as I'm talking, feel free to just like drop in the chat, what is your job title? Like, are you like RevOps? Are you sales? I'm just curious as like I'm talking. So how does it work exactly? Well, there are triggers, so you can trigger a workflow off of a webhook, off of a CSV import, or off of a segment in your audiences. You have nodes that you can connect to it, and then you have runs. So a trigger starts the play and then it follows the flow. The thing I want to drill into as we go through this is the observability of a workflow and why that will be important when you're converting tables into workflows and why you should use a workflow versus a table. And if anybody here has built Clay tables, you know what I'm talking about. It can be a mess sometimes, and only you may actually know what and how that table runs. So let's get into the first section here, how to build a workflow agendically. There are 2 ways to build a workflow. Drop in the chat if you've already built a workflow. Actually, I'm curious, who here has built a workflow? We have yes from Donnie. I see some growth people, good market engineers. RevOps, founding account executive. Who else has built workflows in Clay already? So far we're 1 for 1. Not yet. All right, no worries. So great, there are 2 ways then that you can build a workflow. Okay, so we— someone said kind of, but a table was easier for me. So there are 2 ways to build a table, uh, workflow. You can import an existing Clay table, which is the most common path for existing Clay customers. So that'll be the easiest to get you up and running. I'm going to show you when that's a good idea and where it might break, actually. And we're going to build it from scratch. That's what we're going to do right now. We're going to build it from scratch. I'm going to show you how to do it so you understand. So before we build it from scratch again, where and how do you build a workflow? You can build it from Clay CLI. That means you can use Clay from Sculptor, which is inside of Clay, your terminal if you like that scary black box, Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor, or whatever agent plugin tools exist in the market that I'm not fully aware of. So you can build a lot of things with Clay CLI: TAM sourcing, account scoring, and building workflows. TAM sourcing means you can find accounts, you can score those accounts, you can find contacts, And you can also build these workflows. So the thing we're gonna build today is an automated inbound workflow. We're gonna talk about why is that important, show you a little case study, and do a live build. So why are we talking about automated inbound and why workflows as a solution for building automated inbound? Well, we ran this survey on 6,300 or so websites, and the crazy thing was Only 32% of these people actually responded to their leads when they had a lead submitted on their website. So drop in the chat if you currently struggle with replying to inbound leads at your company. And as you're dropping that in the chat, I also want to highlight something here, which is 68% of these websites didn't reply to their leads. And of the 32% that did, the ones that did reply replied in 1 hour to 1 day. So yes, how do you qualify an inbound lead? How do you follow up with them? So I'm going to show you how to build this workflow. And for people who have built an automated inbound workflow before, you know, a lot of the stress comes from how do you qualify this lead? How do you know who they are? And there's a whole slew of other information. and problems there. Like maybe your form has like 10 questions and so your drop-off rate is super high. And because your drop-off rate is high, you have less leads. And because you have less leads, you have less pipeline. Because you have less pipeline, your boss is mad. So that's the kind of thing we're going to solve today. And now why is this important? Well, 90% of your inbound process can be automated. We can find new leads, we can look them up in your CRM, we can enrich that data, we can qualify them, we can route them to the right reps. We can draft replies with AI and we can add them to a sequencer. It can all be automated. And so we're gonna build that. So let's build because I feel the need for speed to lead. And so if you've been in RevOps, you know that speed to lead is very, very important. Drop in the chat if you understand this meme. I wasn't sure if people would get it. I feel like it was kind of, kind of perfect, but you let me know. If this meme lands. So I'm gonna build it.

All right.

So there are 2 places to build your workflows. So on the right here— okay, great. I'm glad some people are replying in the chat here that the meme is landing. So, you know, I could build it from here, but I am going to actually build it directly from Clay's UI. So let me go to clay.com. Oh, shortcut in case you guys don't know this one, clay.new will open up a brand new Clay table. I feel like there needs to be a new one now called like clay.new workflow. So if you go to the left side, you will find Workflows. And within workflows, you can see all different workflows. We're going to click New. So from here, you can build it manually, you can start with an audience segment, or you can import a workbook. So I'm just going to take this prompt and I'm going to show you what I'm doing. So we could build it manually, or we can put it here and describe what you want to build. So what I just copy and pasted was that I want to build an automated inbound workflow that takes in a new lead from a webhook, looks up the person in my CRM to see if it's a match, enrich it, and then I want you to check if this person has over 400 employees at their company. If they do, I want you to classify this lead as enterprise, and if it's under 400 employees, I want you to mark it as SMB, small-medium business, and then I want you to draft a personalized reply to the person and add it to a sequencer. With the drafted message. So all I did was I took this process, and I just wrote it in text, right? Finding a new lead, look in CRM, enrich it, qualify it, route it, reply, send. That's all I'm doing here. And so if I hit Enter, Sculptor will start to build this workflow. And on the left-hand side, we have this chat interface. And before, you would have to create a Clay table. You'd have to like kind of know which enrichment and column you actually wanted to use and maybe use Sculptor to figure it out. And so we're making great strides here to kind of like help people go from 0 to 1. Sculptor will probably ask you some questions for clarification. So let's take a look at what it's doing. So it already named my workflow SMB vs Enterprise. And it's also saying, here's what I'm going to build. I'm going to take a webhook, look in the CRM. I'll try and zoom in here for you guys. I'm going to enrich this person. I'm going to create a rule for the employee count. I'm going to draft a message and add to Sequencer and then ask me. What CRM do I want to use? And let's just say I use Salesforce, right? So I answer the question and it will keep building. And the— another question here, where should the drafted reply be sent for outreach? Let's just say a Clay campaign. So we have an internal sequencer tool called Sequencer where you can send emails from. You can actually send multiple messages in a sequencer. And if your question is like, when should I use sequencer? You can use it for like quick experimental plays. You can connect many inboxes. You can even buy inboxes now in Clay. And you can really launch any go-to-market workflow live.

Who—

drop in the chat who's building this like with me as I'm going through this. I'm just curious.

Well, if it's a lot to take in sort of in this session here, yeah, I mean, that's—

Yeah, no worries. I don't expect anyone to—

There'll be the recordings, so we'll send it out to everybody and you can go through it on your own.

Yep. No worries. I'm just curious if somebody was. So it's asked me a few more questions. It's asking which sequencer should I use? Now, the thing to note is, and we'll kind of touch on this a little bit later, but like, when do you use a workflow? Well, workflows allows you to build deterministic workflows inside of Clay using those primitives like we talked about before, which means there are specific things that we offer in Clay, like enrichment, code blocks, and a whole bunch of other— and like, there's really like 4 main primitives. And as it starts to build, you'll kind of see like how it starts stitching this together. I've started to find that it takes a little bit longer from CLI because it'll take more time to think about it and it'll spend more tokens versus from Sculptor. I think it's like pretty fast. So it's actually already did the first step, which is it added a webhook. Okay, fantastic. That's the first step here. And it's resolving the fields. And so the next thing that it should add is going to be a lookup in Salesforce Enrich person, enrich company. All right, so it's running the errors here and it's trying to solve them. Now it's trying to draft an SOQL lookup. It's always so interesting to see what it's trying to do.

So, Chris, it's, you know, we're using Sculptor here, but like if I was in Claude and I had my MCP, can I say, hey, go build me this workflow and would it run through the kind of the same types of things but through the Through the, through the Claude chat?

It would. So some people like to do all their workflow planning in Claude Code. Like, they'll actually like do the brainstorming, they'll use Whisper Flow, they'll chat with their computer to figure out like, hey, like, I want to do this process, ask me some clarifying questions, like, how can I do it? So you could. And actually, it took a second here, but now Workflow Sculptor is actually building it. So it took the webhook, now it's looking in Salesforce, it's enriching the person, enriching the company, it's doing a little conditional logic check here to see if there's over 400 employees, and then there's a little branching that's about to happen here for SMB and enterprise. So if I go ahead and open up my terminal, you just fire up, you know, whichever instance you want to use. So if I fire up Claude, I could say build this workflow in my Clay workspace, and I'll just drop in that same prompt that I had before. So let's compare this while it's running. So it loads the Clay skill. It has a playbook. It's going to check what sequencer and CRM actions actually live in my workspace. So another important thing to note, workflows have access to your business context. So in Clay, if you go to your settings, you will actually be able to see that Clay is actually starting to like find information on your business for you and apply that to all of your Clay agents. To your workflows, and I'll kind of show you that in a second. So for now, I'm going to switch back to this workflow. All right, so it built the entire workflow, right? Let's check. So webhook data comes in, look up in Salesforce, enrich the person, enrich company, check if it's over 400 employees, do a little branch logic. If it's over 400, draft a reply for enterprise. And so you'll notice if you click into this note, this looks— this is a Claygent builder. And so we have agents now in Clay, and it'll auto-populate all of the fields for you. And if you go into edit in the builder, it also creates these prompts for you based on whatever you told it. So in this case, it's writing a short personalized reply. To an inbound lead from a large company. It's using all the variables from the webhook data and there's some rules in here. So that looks like pretty decent. And then it's going to add it to your audiences, which is again, it's the unified data layer inside of Clay that merges your first and third-party data. And then it's going to also enroll it into a sequencer campaign. So let's test it, right? Let's see if this works. So if you click on test, I'm going to manually input my email address, and you'll notice that the workflow will start to run, and you can see where it starts running, where it gets completed, and where it fails. And when it fails, on the right-hand side, you can see the error. You can see enrich companies missing required output company identifier. You can tell Sculptor to fix this. So not only can you build workflows, you can actually troubleshoot them and fix them with AI now. And this will also tie into like why tables versus workflows in a little bit. And so if I open this, let's see if I can debug it while it's trying to. Oh, it already fixed it, I think. So, oh, so there was no company. Okay, so for here, let's just go and change this to the enriched person company domain because I didn't put it in the webhook when I tested it. So let's talk about this real quick. How do you can— how do you see when something has run inside of a workflow? Well, I'll show you, and I'll run one more test. And so what I'm doing here is I'm just inputting like a test run data of like a fake form submit to see if the workflow works. So you can see here, it did enrich person, it enriched company, it found the company's domain, it's checking if there's over 400 employees. And it's like, okay, let's check this. Over 400 employees. It says success, right? Because it looked up Clay's domain, it enriched the company, it was like Clay has over 400 employees. And it routed the logic to this specific agent to draft this reply, it added to my audiences. And let's see what that message looks like.

All right.

So obviously we can improve this messaging to include maybe my name, some more personalized information, which we can just go back to the prompt and fix. And you just tell Sculptor like, hey, use my first name. So it's like, hey there, thanks for reaching out about the enterprise workshops at Clay. I'm glad to connect, especially given that your team at Clay has this many employees. It's so high because a lot of people say that they like work at Clay because they're go-to-market engineers and like they're freelancers and or agency owners and Yeah. So there's your reply. If you jump over into the runs on the top, you can actually see your uptime and observability and cost. So going back to what we talked about, right, speed to lead, and going back to this picture, 68% of these businesses didn't even reply to their leads. And of the 32% that did, they responded between 1 hour and 1 day. This workflow took 5 seconds. So imagine somebody visits your website and in 5 seconds, under a minute, they all got a personalized reply. Huge uplift for you, huge win, and has observability into like why this is useful for your business, how many credits it costs, and what ran. And if you click into this, you can actually view the workflow. You can see exactly what ran, what didn't, and see the tracing and also see where it broke and then fix it. So very, very cool. This is how you build agentically inside Clay. How am I doing on time? I'm doing good. Yeah, you're doing great. Yeah, I'll stop for questions at the end. If you have questions though, just drop them in the chat. So you can come back to it later. And like that way you don't like lose your train of thought. Um, everyone in the chat, feel free to like drop on a scale of 1 to 4, 4 being like my mind is blown, 1 being Chris, that was lame. Drop in like your initial reactions to building workflows inside of Klarna.

Excellent.

Love it. Rocket ships. Way easier than I expected. Well, I aim to please. 4. Love it. Sick. Okay, let's keep going then. So, the next thing Is how do you convert a table into a workflow? Okay, so an example would be, and this is the one I'm going to use today, I have a Clay table. It has 155 columns in it. If you show that to someone, they're going to be like, dude, I am not looking at this table. I don't understand what's happening. It's being triggered by a webhook, and what it does is that it scores a lead, it looks it up in a CRM, and it does like a few other things that you might want to do with automated inbound, right? This is, this is the, the demo that I used to show for automated inbound. We're going to convert this, so 155 columns, to a workflow that is always on. There's code nodes to do a lot of the logic. It syncs to audiences, so you're not enriching the same account or contact multiple times. And we have observability. So let's go ahead and let's build it. And the thing I want you all to remember is, again, when to use tables, when to use workflows. Workflows are much more powerful. All right. So I'm going to open up this space right here. All right. So I'm going to show you first the table. All right, so this was the table, and this is why we're going to convert tables to workflows and when it's a good idea. So as you can see, there are 155 columns in here. To be honest, I don't even remember. I built this maybe a year and a half ago, but it still runs and like nobody asks questions. It pulls in data. We look up someone's email, we identify if it's a personal or work email, we look up their domain, we see if they're inside of our HubSpot. This is a demo account. We use a Clay waterfall to find the person's LinkedIn because here you can see it was empty from CRM. We use Claygent to find the LinkedIn if it doesn't exist from the waterfall. We merge the fields, we enrich the person, we find out their company job title, we figure out the country, enrich the company employee count, revenue waterfall, right? You've probably all seen this. And then here we do title scoring, employee count scoring, country scoring, merge it all together and see like, are they qualified to buy Clay? Put a lead score and then update that contact and then assign it to a rep round robin style at the very end right here. So that's what the table does. And so let's see if we can import this to our workflow. So I'm going to go over to workflows. I'm going to click on new. And we're going to now import a workbook. Now I need to find it. Because we have so many people in here. So I believe it's called Chris Workshop. And I have my Chris Workflow Demo. Select the table inside. And so let's pay attention to what's going to happen now. And this is something I want to talk about with workflows. So you'll notice Sculptor creates this prompt which says, I want to build a workflow based on my Clay workbook. First thing I want you to do is read every table, understand the schema, and understand what the table does. So we're allowing Sculptor to actually try to understand what does the table do. Now, if you're like me and you've built Clay tables doing some weird stuff and you've tried to be creative, it may not understand fully what you are trying to do as a creative person. So for example, in my, one of my videos, I use Clay to find donuts that are gluten-free, sugar-free, donut, uh, and dairy-free in a helicopter. When I tried to do this before, Sculptor was like, yeah, I'm gonna just remove all that. And like, what you're trying to do is like, just do like, uh, accounts sourcing workflow. And it just removed all the fun outta my workflow. And I was like, man, That's not cool. Like, you totally removed any API calls I did, and I'll show you what I mean later. So just keep that in mind when you import a table. If you have any, like, unique sauce in there, you may run into some issues, and you may need to actually prompt it first inside of something like maybe Claude Code, or spend some time doing some upfront, like, planning, and then say, like, I want you to copy this table exactly, because in the prompt here It's not doing it exactly. So here you can see it found my workbook, it found the demo, the workbook ID, and it's going to basically query every single table. So if you didn't know this, thanks to Clay CLI, now we can actually query Clay tables, we can analyze it, you can vibe code dashboards on top of your Clay tables. It's very cool. And let's see. It basically said that it figured out what it needs to build. So it said, okay, what you have here is Chris's demo table, HubSpot inbound lead enrichment, 155 columns. Like I said, it's a single end-to-end inbound flow from form submission, grading, enriching, push to HubSpot, assigned to a rep. Yes, that's correct. It asks you a question, which workflow should I build in the open canvas? I want you to like grade it and route it. So now it's going to build the workflow. And so while it's building the workflow, in the chat, I'm curious if you want, share which Claytable you're thinking about turning into a workflow. Like, what does your current Claytable do?

How should we be thinking about that, Chris? Is it like, is it existing Clay tables that are just too complicated to explain to other people? Or is it existing Clay tables that like don't really do what we want because the logic is too complicated? And so it's like an existing Clay table plus additional functionality. Yeah.

Good question. And I'm gonna like dig into more like the specifics of like when to think about it in the last section. The short answer would be observability and the ability to build in a headless environment, which is a nerdy way of saying you can build it through any like agent plugin tools. You can build it through Sculptor, you can build it through Cloud Code. Yes, you can use workflows. So we have Clay tables that they want to import range from lead generation, custom account scoring and territory distribution for sales reps. Alex just spoke to someone yesterday and basically people are looking to do a quarterly refresh of assigning reps new accounts. Based by territory, and he says it's a pain. And we kind of built a workflow for him to do it, and his eyes lit up. He's like, oh my God. He's like, his mind was blown. Um, custom account scoring, complete beginner here. Ashley, on, on the plus side of this, you basically can start building workflows from day 1. And Alex, yep, that's exactly it. So while this is still like, okay, so it's starting to add the webhook here. So while it's building, let's kind of like briefly touch on when to and when and how to think about workflows versus tables. I really want to go back to when you build a Clay table again, like a lot of people may not understand what you've done in this table because you can move those columns around. And so you move them around in a way that makes sense to you. What we've often found is like somebody would, you know, run one enrichment, maybe like 20 columns down, take the result, and then move it to the very beginning of the table. But when someone tries to debug it, or understand why it broke, it's kind of hard to pinpoint why it broke. And so if you're building a go-to-market system, which is what we are all trying to do, a system needs to be able to be debugged and understand like what broke and like how long did it take to run, how much did it cost. These are all questions people always have with Clay tables when you build it and you're trying to show it to leadership or your boss or a client. They want to know what is happening in this spreadsheet because that's all they see when they see Clay. If they don't understand the product. All right, so it has a plan. It's going to do webhook, look up HubSpot contact, enrich person, and grade. Oh, done at 9:45. Not bad. And so While that's building, I'll kind of just show you, since we have 15 minutes left and I only have time for questions, that when I use this, this is what it came up with, right? It basically built this. I did this last night. It took the webhook, it read the form fills, looked up in HubSpot, did all these things. And so I'm just going to run a test on my email again to see how this runs. And so let's see. So you can see here the data is flowing through. It's reading the form, looking up in HubSpot. It's checking, does Chris Viglietta already exist in HubSpot? It's going to enrich me. It's going to figure out my company. It's going to grade me. It's going to see if I exist in HubSpot, update HubSpot, right? So let's look at the grading. So you go again, go to runs, and you can see what has ran, and you can see all the results here on the right side. So you can see Let's start from the beginning. So took my email, read the form fields using a code block. This is all Agentic. I didn't build any of this manually. It checks if I'm inside HubSpot. It enriches me. It grades me as a lead. So the result was we have 200 to 500+ employees. It says I'm a tier 1 lead. True. Because over 400 employees, and then updates me in HubSpot. And at the very end here, I can even say send a Slack message to a rep and alert them that this new lead came in. And let's see if I just check that real quick. So in the sake of time, I'll stop there. But now you guys understand the power of like, you can actually just take a Clay table that has some logic in there that you already have and import it to a workflow, see exactly how it runs. You know exactly the flow, you know where it breaks, and most importantly, you see how long it takes now to run a workflow, which is 2.4 seconds to automate. inbound leads, how many credits it cost, and where it failed, where it completed, so forth and so forth. There was a lot there. So Jared's question, tables, workflows, breathing intensifies. Tables are still one of the best places to get your data into one spot and run enrichments and use Clay workflows, uh, waterfalls, which we all love and understand, which— and for the people here who are new, a waterfall allows you to stack multiple data providers into one and ultimately increase your fill rates for a very specific data point that's valuable to you. And also source lists of contacts from hot accounts. A workflow is great for orchestrating go-to-market work. So as you can see, there's a lot more observability into the system, and that's very important when you're talking to leadership or a client, or even for yourself if you have multiple systems running. And you also want to run things agentically and use agents on top of it and query that data from Cloud Code or Codex. And if you need reasoning, branching, conditional logic, and code nodes. Sorry for this screenshot here, but remember, workflows are like tables 2.0. On the left-hand side, this is what it looks like before. It looks like a spreadsheet. There's like hundreds of rows, sometimes tens of thousands of rows, and there could be hundreds of columns. And if you look at it, you're like, okay, I don't want to look at it actually. If it's not your table, you don't want to look at it. And on the after, it's a workflow. It follows like a linear progression. We understand what's happening, where it's happening. And Clay tables will always have a special place in my heart because like I said, I sort of like built my initial like brand at Clay by making videos about Clay tables in interesting places. And so I thought this was funny. I made this. Were tables always useful? Yes, they always were and they always will be. And as my final thing for you all here, I want to show you when you guys— do you guys remember this slide? Drop in the chat if you guys remember this slide. So if you remember this slide and you did scan it, like I said, were tables always— were tables always useful? Yes, they always were. And basically, this is my golden meme demo table where I use a table. I use a webhook, and when you guys scanned it, I basically took your LinkedIn and I can see like Hafsa in here. I can see Samuel, I can see Martin, I can see Hafsa, I can see Mudassir, I can see Sandeep, I see Ashley, I see Arvin, I see Todd, I see Justin, I see Alexander, I see Rupak, I see Ariel. And so what I did was I took your LinkedIns and I ran that same automate inbound flow in a table. I figured out your company name, I figured out your recent LinkedIn company activity, your job titles, your previous job titles, past work experiences. I checked your company domains, seniority levels. I checked out, um, what's your persona, how many employees your company has, how many salespeople are on your company's team. I scraped your company's website to make sure that it's verified and valid and not parked or hitting a 404 error. I then enriched your LinkedIn to find and validate your work emails across 10+ different data providers. And I figured out your company's mission, who your ICP is. I figured out all of these things because, as they say, a picture's worth a thousand words. And so what I did was I created personal memes for each and every one of you using your own data live. And so as an example, I'm just going to show one here. I'll use Ashley. So sending leads to sales versus orchestrating go-to-market alignment with diplomatic precision. And each of you will actually receive this meme from me, uh, probably very soon. And I took it a step further. I also drafted like personalized Google Docs, um, for each one of you. So this is like pre-meeting sales notes that reps can use. And if a picture's worth a thousand words, You know, how much is a song worth? And so I also created songs. You will get those as well. Takes longer to generate. And ultimately, I just wanna leave you guys on that note. Worktables are always useful. They always were, but workflows are more powerful. So—

Awesome. I look forward to that, Chris. That's a cool way to end it. Probably have a couple of questions here. Who wants to come off mute and shoot Chris your question? Don't be shy. Well, I'll kick it off with a quick question, Chris. Listen, you know, you've taught so many people tables and now you're teaching people workflows. Is the ramp time to understand workflows Shorter, or, or does it kind of— is it harder to teach people workflows? What are you seeing here?

I think it's easier to teach people workflows. Actually, something that I'm, I'm playing with, and this is so new, right? And for those of you who don't know, we are doing Clay Hot Summer, which means that we launched 12 new features in the last 12 weeks. And workflows was part of that launch. And lots of people are like trying to figure out workflows. And so as someone who does live training, I'm in the early days of noticing how people who have never seen Clay before learn Clay through workflows now versus a table. And so actually in the curriculum that I teach, I actually start on the atomic level for me, which is a table. To show you Clay primitives, and then we slowly zoom out into audiences and then workflows and then going into the CLI or terminal and then MCP. So that is how I approach it. And what I found is when somebody sees a workflow, they get it, they get it, and they can come back to it because they may not spend all day long inside of Clay like I do. So you may be able to leave a workflow and come back to it later. And you'll be like, okay, I understand what this did because of that visual flow.

It's more of a visual representation of what, what's happening when. Let me check my, my mental model on workflows with you. And this could be completely wrong, but my, my read was that the audiences is the state layer, not tables. Like, like workflows is a separate orchestration runtime that it reads and writes to audiences and tables are now mostly like builder inspection surface. Is that, is that completely wrong? Or like, or workflows really just sitting on top of tables?

Workflows are sitting on top of audiences. And so I didn't talk about audiences too much here. But imagine that you build clay tables. Over time, you may have a dozen or more clay tables. You may be enriching the same contact or company multiple times. And whatever signals you built in one table, whatever enrichments you ran in another table, they're all living in different places. And with audiences, which is the view I'm showing now, if I click on one of these, this is a record inside of Clay's audiences and you actually see everything in one place and you can actually see, you know, activity, through various signals you're tracking, the people and contacts on the account, any deals on the account, account intelligence and overview. And this is much more powerful. And on the Data Hub side, you can also see all of the signals you're tracking across all of your audiences. You can track all the enrichments you're running and any account agents you're running, and then see your fill rates on like all the different data points. And so workflow—

So audiences is fairly new too. So a lot of folks who, you know, who learned Clay a year or two ago, you know, that's something else we all need to catch up on. But they kind of go hand in hand. Like if you really want to understand and get good at workflows, you should— you really need to understand audiences, right?

Yes and no on that. I would say you definitely will learn— you will definitely want to learn audiences in general in tandem with workflows, because imagine you now want to chat with your data. You're not chatting with tables, you want to chat with like a single source of truth, and audiences allows you to connect your first-party data like your Salesforce or HubSpot CRMs with your call data like Gong and the data inside of Clay into one unified record. So things aren't living in different places anymore. They're all in one place, which will make your life so much easier. And you should want your life to be easier.

I do. I very much do. Somebody from, from, from our participatory group here must have a question.

Chris, this is Todd Yancey. I do. Excellent presentation. Thank you very much. Yeah, absolutely love what Clay can do. I also see you have a number of templates. Are you going to provide that Clay table that you have? That's fantastic. To the people on this call, that would be great.

Yeah, I'll try to share like a version of it. People have asked for it in the past. And here's another thing, right, about templates. It has like all my API keys in it. So you'd have to like rip and replace API keys, you'd have to sign up for it. And if I give you a table, you're gonna ask me like, Chris, like, what do all these things do? I don't actually understand. And this is what I mean. Like, I tried to import the meme generation table into a workflow. It completely ignored all the creativity that I had put into it. And it was like, oh, you wanna build an automated inbound workflow? Okay, bet. And then it just made like a 5-step sequence. And I was like, no, that's not what I wanted. And I had to go back and forth with it. So I will share a version of it though with everyone.

Okay.

Yeah, API keys certainly strip out, but, or just put a, you know, just put a notation in it and we can put our own in. But that would be fantastic if you could do that. You'd be my best friend.

Thanks, Todd. Will do.

Yeah.

Chris, quick question. So as I'm thinking about Correct me if I'm wrong, if I'm thinking of where this is going. I just started getting into audiences, looking at the power of workflows. Do you think in practice tables really become a place to just build like custom functions that you then run in your workflows? Because the, the account building is kind of standardized through the audiences now, which is great. Workflows manage the system essentially. So it really would just be like, I need this enrichment for something that's not baked in. It's a very custom thing. I'm going to go build it in a table and then run it in my workflows, keep everything standardized.

Am I thinking about it correctly? That's a great question. So the thing about the workflows is you can actually add a function from the workflow. And when you click it, it'll basically pull up all the functions that you currently have in here. And so one of the things, in case nobody had noticed, was a work email— waterfalls actually don't exist inside of the workflow builder right now. They will exist as a function. And so I do see this world in which you will actually build functions out of the table and you can call upon them. from the workflow. If that makes sense.

Mm-hmm.

That's a great question. But I still think it's not just for building functions. It'll also be for doing like quick tests. Like nothing— as far as I know, nothing is as fast as like let me spin up a Claytable. Let me pull in a data source. Let me just run a Signal on it. Let me just see what it looks like really fast. And so I almost use it as a place to like ideate and build quickly. But when you wanna build a real system, like end to end, like you can't beat workflows. You just can't. Especially when you need to show it to other people.

Got it. Yeah, that makes sense. Kind of test, iterate, and then turn it into workflow once it's working.

Yeah, the analogy, I'm not quite set on it, but I've been thinking about tables as almost drawing with pencil, and I can draw a line, I can erase it more easily. But when I build it in a workflow, it's almost like in pen. It's like, no, this is what it's going to do. And if it doesn't do something useful, it shouldn't exist as a node and just strip it. Versus in a clay table, I might have a bunch of random columns that I may not actually use, but I'm just playing around.

Yeah, makes sense.

Cool, thanks. Yeah, thanks, Alex.

I got, I got one more, I got one more, uh, question to, to ask before we wrap up there. Uh, uh, thanks for teaching the, the workflow, uh, session. Uh, just a question on the workflows part. Is there, uh, a system or enrichment tool, doesn't matter if it's in a clay table or if it's within Clark Code or using the CLI in the terminal, is there like some sort of a system where once, once you retrieve that data from a source via like an agent from Clay, does it have a way to auto-translate the information into your respective language once it lands into your table or something like that?

Sure.

Yeah. I mean, you would just have an agent node translate text into the language so you could just have that as like a, let's just call it like a translator agent node at the very end of the workflow before you write it back to your CRM.

Oh, okay. I wanna talk about translators is like English, Spanish, French, that kind of, that kind of translation. Okay, cool. Just making sure.

And this is like a great use. You know, a lot of people talk about they're using AI in their workflows. A lot of them aren't actually. And like, this is a great use case of using AI in a workflow, which is translation.

Got it. Got it. Thanks.

All right.

I think we are at time. Fantastic, Chris. We will send out the video. link so you guys could go through this again on your own time. I appreciate you all being here, and I hope to see you next week for the 3 sessions we've got going on next week. Take care, everyone.

Thanks for having me, Jared. Thank you everyone for coming. If you have any questions, you guys know where to find me. See ya.

Thank you, Jared, for scheduling all this.

Really appreciate it.

Yeah, of course, Todd. Take care. Bye-bye.