10 Best Clay Outbound Automation Services in 2026 (and How to Pick One)

Clay has become one of the most powerful outbound sales tools out there.

You can scrape data, enrich leads, personalize at scale, and automate your entire top of the funnel and outbound prospecting and outreach strategies. It’s literally a game changer.

But the reality is that just buying Clay won’t suddenly fix your poor outbound lead generation or sales function.

If your strategy isn’t working now, Clay won’t magically make it better. In fact, it will just make your problems louder with more messages, more noise, and the same poor results.

Maybe this sounds familiar, and it’s why you’re here: You or your team sign up for Clay, watch a couple of YouTube videos, plug in some personalizations, and launch a campaign.

But the results don’t improve. No meaningful replies. No qualified pipeline. The outreach still falls flat.

That’s because the problem isn’t the tool, but rather how you’re using it.

To make Clay work, you need three things:

1. A strong outbound sales and lead generation strategy.

2. Someone who knows how to build and run Clay systems properly, aka Clay expert.

3. And a process to test, learn, and iterate fast.

This is where most teams struggle. And it’s why so many Clay-powered campaigns flop.

It’s also why working with the right Clay outbound automation service can make all the difference.

These are experts who live and breathe outbound. They know how to craft creative strategies, build the right automations, and actually drive results with Clay.

So if you’re tired of spinning your wheels or you’re not seeing ROI from your Clay setup, this list is for you. These are the 10 best Clay outbound automation services you should consider in 2025.

Here are the companies on our list:

The 10 services at a glance

What Clay outbound automation services means

A Clay outbound automation service is an agency that runs your outbound campaigns end to end, using Clay as the data and enrichment backbone behind the campaigns. The actual scope of the work covers four pieces.

1. List building: The agency pulls your ICP from external sources, enriches it inside Clay, and filters down to the people you actually want to talk to.

2. Message generation: Templates, personalization tokens, and AI-written openers all live inside the Clay tables before they ever land in Instantly, HeyReach, or whatever the sending tool is. Personalization happens at the Clay layer, and the sending platforms only handle the dispatch.

3. Deliverability infrastructure: Domain warm-up, inbox setup, DNS records, and sending-rate management all sit underneath the campaigns. The agency owns this layer too, because without it the messages never land.

4. Reply handling and reporting: Open rates, reply rates, booked meetings, and disqualified leads all flow back into the Clay tables. The reporting is what tells you which segments are working and which ones to retire.

Where Clay actually sits in an outbound stack

Clay is the data and orchestration layer that sits behind the campaigns. The campaigns themselves run inside cold-email tools like Instantly or Smartlead, inside LinkedIn tools like HeyReach, and inside whatever CRM connector the agency prefers.

Clay is the layer deciding who gets pulled into the campaign, what gets said to them, and when.

Here’s the rough flow inside a working Clay outbound stack from end to end.

The stack starts with the lead-sourcing layer at the top. The agency identifies the ICP, pulls in companies and contacts from external sources, and dumps them into a central Clay table. 

LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Apollo, and Crunchbase are the most common sources, with custom scrapers running through Apify or PhantomBuster for the narrower ICPs that don’t show up cleanly in the prebuilt databases.

Enrichment is the next layer in the stack. Clay stitches in firmographic data, contact verification, technographic signals, recent hiring activity, funding events, and any custom data the campaign needs. 

LeadsFactory.io, FullEnrich, Findymail, and LeadMagic are the usual enrichment vendors plugged into the table. Bad records get filtered out before they reach the sending tool, which is the part that protects your domain from deliverability damage later in the flow.

You get AI-driven message generation directly in Clay too before the data reaches the sending tool.

The agency writes the templates, plugs in personalization tokens from the enriched data, and either writes the AI openers manually or lets ChatGPT and Claude generate them through Clay’s native AI columns. The output is a fully personalized message per row, ready to ship into the sending platform.

The actual sending happens outside Clay, in the sending platforms themselves. Instantly handles email, HeyReach handles LinkedIn, and reply tracking pushes back into Clay so the next decision can be made on real data instead of guesses.

That’s what the agency is actually buying you when they sell you Clay outbound. What you’re paying for is the whole layer of decision-making about who gets reached, how, and when.

If the agency can’t walk you through that flow on the first call, you’re talking to someone who hasn’t built much with Clay.

We covered the longer version of this workflow in our piece on how to automate sales prospecting from scratch.

3 questions to ask before you hire one

The category has narrowed enough that a 30-minute sales call should give you a clean answer on whether the agency is the right fit.

Three questions do the bulk of the work on that call.

1. What does your team own when the engagement ends?

The answer to this question separates the agencies that build for handoff from the ones running you on a permanent retainer.

Both models exist in the lineup below, and which one is right depends on whether you want a system you can run yourself in six months or a service you’d rather not think about.

We’ve made our own position on this clear in our post on why we are not a lead generation agency.

A clean answer sounds like a working list of assets. The Clay tables, the Instantly sequences, the HeyReach campaigns, the deliverability infrastructure, and the documentation that lets a junior operator on your team pick up where the agency left off should all live in your accounts when the engagement ends.

The bad answer is some variant of “we manage all of that for you”. Worth knowing up front, because the math changes when you price the engagement against the permanent cost of an external operator rather than the temporary cost of a build.

2. Who writes the messages, and what’s the iteration loop?

The Clay outbound pitch on most sales calls leans heavily on AI personalization, which is true but underspecifies the answer. The right follow-up is who’s actually pressing the buttons.

A good agency has a copywriter or a strategist writing the templates and the personalization tokens, with AI generating the slot-filler openers from the enriched data.

A bad agency hands the whole job to ChatGPT and ships whatever comes out, which is what produces the wave of generic “I came across your profile” emails the category is now famous for.

The iteration loop matters at least as much. Ask how often messaging gets reviewed and rewritten in a typical month. You want a team that runs A/B tests continuously against the previous winners.

The bad answer is every quarter, which means the campaigns are running on autopilot and nobody’s watching the reply quality.

3. What does the deliverability stack look like, and who owns it after?

Most outbound failures are deliverability failures, not strategy failures. The messages just don’t land in the prospect's inbox.

The reps never see the replies because the replies are in the spam folder. The agency reports send volume and open rates and pretends the campaign is working.

Ask the agency to walk you through the deliverability stack on the call. The full list should include domain warm-up, secondary sending domains, DNS records, SPF and DKIM and DMARC configuration, sending-rate management across the inbox pool, and bounce-rate monitoring.

If they can’t name those pieces, they're outsourcing the layer that decides whether your campaigns actually function.

The second half of the question is the one most teams forget to ask. When the engagement ends, who owns the warmed-up domains and the inbox infrastructure?

If the agency keeps them, you’re starting from scratch the next time you run outbound. If you keep them, the asset compounds in value as it ages.

Top 10 Clay outbound automation services you should consider in 2026

1. Nebor.ai

We were originally Utmost, and we rebranded to Nebor in 2026 once the work outgrew the old positioning. Andrew van Rossenberg and Yannick Kok run the agency. Both ran outbound and full-cycle sales for years before they ever sold either to a client.

Salespeople first, automation experts second. For outbound, we build the four pieces of the stack laid out earlier in this post.

The Clay tables that source and enrich the ICP, the Instantly and HeyReach campaigns that ship on top of those tables, the deliverability infrastructure that keeps the messages landing, and the reply and reporting loop that feeds the next iteration.

We’ve written the deeper version of how we set the signal logic in our blog on signal-based outbound campaigns.

The outbound engagement is also the gateway scope at Nebor. About half the engagements stay outbound-only, and the other half extend into inbound capture, signal monitoring, and RevOps wiring once the outbound work surfaces an underlying problem the campaigns alone can’t fix.

Here are some of the workflows we work on:

Automated outbound data enrichment and prospect list building.

Automated, AI-driven outbound pitch generation in Clay

Inbound-led-outbound where your inbound marketing success feeds outbound automatically and generates much better results.

Intent data and buyer signal based outbound where we build your TAM and watch your entire market for business opportunities as they happen in realtime, capture and send outbound messages before your competitors even know the opportunity is out there.

We are best for B2B teams that want outbound run by operators who’ve sold the product themselves, with the option to extend the scope into inbound or RevOps later.

2. ColdIQ

ColdIQ is one of the most visible Clay-focused outbound shops on the market and the agency most companies discover first when they search Clay agency.

They run managed outbound at high volume, with the full stack handled in-house including email infrastructure setup, message writing, list building, and inbox management.

What makes ColdIQ unique is the volume play. They use intent signals like hiring news, funding rounds, and tech-stack changes to time their sends, and they push enough emails per day to make the system economics work for B2B companies that need pipeline at a steady rate.

AI personalization sits at the core of how they make that volume scale without sounding generic.

3. Afonto

Afonto runs AI-powered cold outreach at high volume, with the full stack handled in-house including list building, copywriting, deliverability, inbox management, and reply handling.

The pitch is over 1,000 personalized emails sent daily to ICP-matched prospects, with a 28-day satisfaction guarantee on the trial period.

The model is high-throughput managed outbound with the risk shifted onto the agency. If you don't see results in the trial window, you don't pay.

That's a meaningful commitment most Clay-adjacent shops won't make, and it shapes the kind of company Afonto naturally attracts.

Afonto is less of a fit when your ICP is narrow enough that volume isn't the answer, or when the team wants direct control over the messaging and the day-to-day campaign decisions.

4. Growth Engine X

The Growth Engine X playbook leans on high-volume sends paired with deliverability rigor that keeps reply rates intact at scale, which is the unusual combination most volume shops can't pull off.

They’re the best agency if you want the latest outbound playbook running this week and if you don't need a 30-person agency on the other end of the engagement. They are a small founder-led team.

5. OneAway.io

OneAway sits somewhere between an outbound-execution shop and a Clay-specialist consultancy, with the scope flexing based on what the client needs.

Some engagements include full campaign delivery from list to reply handling, while others stop at workflow design with the execution moving back to the client team.

They build custom go-to-market systems for B2B companies, with Clay and Apify at the center of the work.

Their focus is on automating sales tasks, cleaning CRM data, and designing workflows tailored to each client rather than running a standardized outbound playbook.

6. LeadBird

LeadBird is a B2B lead generation agency that combines hyper-personalized cold email campaigns with Clay automations to deliver booked demos.

What sets them apart is the pricing model itself, which puts the cost on outcomes rather than agency effort.

Instead of a monthly retainer, you pay per qualified lead delivered, which shifts the economics decisively toward outcome-based pricing.

Their service includes account management, list building, campaign copywriting, and reporting, with the trial period structured so you only pay for meeting-ready leads.

Some companies prefer this risk-shifted economics over fixed retainers, and the pricing model self-selects for clients who care more about meetings booked than about the underlying mechanics of how they get there.

If you’re weighing pay-per-lead against in-house SDRs, we’ve written about the underlying trade-offs in outsourced versus in-house SDRs.

7. Avalanche Outbound

Avalanche Outbound is one of the few Clay Certified outbound partners and treats deliverability as a first-class part of the engagement.

The team builds domain warm-up infrastructure, inbox setup, and technical email configuration alongside the campaign workflows themselves.

Their copywriters write outbound messages rooted in buyer psychology, and the system covers cold email and LinkedIn outreach as a single coordinated motion.

Their documentation and training discipline is what makes them valuable to their clients. The team builds out a runbook covering the domains, the sequences, and the Clay tables, then walks the client through how to operate the system once the build is done.

8. Sopro

Sopro is a fully-managed B2B prospecting service that offers cold email, LinkedIn, and display ads. The team handles strategy, list building, message writing, and execution, with Clay-enhanced targeting woven into the data layer.

Their service model is closer to a traditional managed-prospecting agency than a Clay-native consultancy.

Sopro builds and runs the campaigns directly for you, and what you receive at the end of a sprint is reports and booked meetings rather than reusable workflows.

The three-channel approach across email, LinkedIn, and display is what differentiates Sopro from the email-heavy majority of the lineup, and it suits buyers who want surround-sound presence on accounts over the typical inbox volume.

9. frontBrick

frontBrick is a Clay-certified consulting agency that pairs technical Clay expertise with revenue strategy, with the focus skewed toward complex SaaS deals and long sales cycles.

Their team builds multi-channel outbound stacks across Clay, Instantly, Smartlead, and Lemlist, then ties the leads cleanly into the CRM and ad systems on the back end.

They are uniquely oriented toward complex deal cycles. Where most Clay outbound shops chase fast-cycle SMB sales, frontBrick designs for the eight-to-eighteen-month enterprise procurement reality.

They rely on buyer intent signals, funding data, and tech-stack insights to drive their targeting, with messaging built to survive the longer evaluation periods that enterprise procurement creates.

10. Grow Surely

Grow Surely specializes in helping B2B companies above $1 million in ARR acquire ideal clients through tightly-targeted cold email campaigns.

The full service includes audience research, copywriting, domain setup, inbox configuration, email verification, and outbound automation, with Grow Surely owning the execution layer end to end.

The agency is intentional about who they take on. The site makes clear they only work with $1M+ ARR companies, and only when there's a strong fit between the ICP and the campaign mechanics.

That selectivity is the differentiator, because the clients who get accepted are working with a team that hasn't spread itself thin across mismatched engagements. That focus shows up in the reply quality and the meeting-to-deal conversion.

The Bottom Line

The ten agencies above approach Clay outbound from genuinely different angles. Some are built for fast-cycle SMB volume, others for the long enterprise procurement timelines that demand patience and multi-channel persistence.

A few own the entire execution layer end to end, while others specialize in a single high-leverage piece of the stack like data enrichment, deliverability, or CRM integration.

That variety is the real takeaway. There is no single best Clay agency, only the best fit for your ICP, your deal cycle, and how much of the work you want to keep in-house.

The strongest engagements tend to come from the firms that are honest about who they serve and disciplined about who they turn away. Start by mapping your own sales motion, then match it against the agencies whose focus actually mirrors how your buyers decide.