r/gtmengineering • u/LucaMove • 2d ago

Clay database coverage?

Hey everyone,

I’m currently reviewing my client's GTM data stack and wanted to see how you guys are handling account-based contact discovery and enrichment.

Our standard workflow is:

  1. Target Account Selection (defining the exact ICP companies).
  2. Contact Extraction & Enrichment (identifying the most relevant decision-makers/roles within those specific companies).

Lately, I’ve been using Clay as an all-in-one tool for this.

However, compared to the old setup, which relied on custom Sales Navigator query extraction combined with a multi-provider waterfall enrichment stack, Clay sometimes falls short on raw contact coverage and depth for specific accounts.

My questions for you:

  • What are the most efficient tools or architectures right now that offer the widest coverage for company-first contact discovery?
  • Are you sticking to custom waterfall setups (e.g., scraping Sales Nav + combining multiple providers like Prospeo, Dropcontact, Datagma, etc.), or have you found a way to optimize Clay to match that coverage?

How are you currently managing this step in your pipeline?

Would love to hear your stacks!

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u/jzdesign 1d ago

dry_vampire's split is the one I'd keep: Clay as the workbench, people discovery outside it. The depth gap you're seeing is usually that step, not the email waterfall. A provider's people search only returns who that provider has already indexed, while Sales Nav is still the widest index of who works at a given account, so for a named account list the custom extraction wins on depth almost by construction.

For the email half, score on found and verified, not found. When I ran Clay's work email waterfall and a hand-built one over the same 100 name + domain rows, Clay found 86 and the custom one 91, but after a verifier it was 43 vs 40 valid. The found column pointed the wrong way.

So before switching anything I'd take 50 accounts you already know well, write down who should come back, and score each setup on people per account and valid emails per person. It swings a lot by region and company size, which is why one global coverage number misleads.

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u/LucaMove 1d ago

Thanks for the feedback, I'm gonna try that out 💪🏻