$ man enrichment-pipeline

Enrichment Pipeline

The full flow from raw data to scored, personalized, routed contacts. CSV in → Exa research → Clay enrichment → scoring → variable generation → platform sync → outreach. Not one step — the whole chain.

most people think of enrichment as "find an email address." that's step 3 of 10. a real enrichment pipeline starts with raw company data and ends with a fully qualified, personalized, routed contact sitting in an email sequence with custom icebreakers and pain points. every step in between — company research, signal detection, persona identification, email lookup, MX routing, variable generation — is part of the pipeline. if any step fails, the output degrades. a pipeline with great enrichment but no personalization sends generic emails. a pipeline with great personalization but bad email validation sends to spam. every link matters.

my standard enrichment pipeline for a new partner engagement: (1) seed list → Clay table with company domains. (2) Exa icebreaker enrichment — crawl each domain for case studies, news, thought leadership. (3) Exa signal detection — sweep for funding, M&A, hiring, expansion, tech adoption, complaints. (4) Clay company qualification — score against ICP criteria. (5) Clay persona enrichment — find contacts matching persona tiers. (6) Exa persona widening — if certain persona tiers are thin, broaden the title search. (7) single-provider email lookup — one provider, not a waterfall. (8) MX record check — Google vs non-Google routing. (9) Clay research prompt — generate {icebreaker}, {pain_point}, {poke_the_bear} per contact. (10) platform sync — qualified + enriched contacts push to Instantly or HeyReach. this pipeline ran across 73 companies in one session. the Exa steps alone produced 150KB of contextual research, 342 trigger signals, and 122 new contacts.