Clay helps teams grow their business by connecting them to the tools, data sources, and automations they need to move as fast as possible. With data enrichment and automated, personalized outreach, go-to-market teams use Clay to book more deals and drive more revenue.
Clay’s company growth is reflected in their growing research function, with the mission to make research as open to all employees as possible. The research team gives cross-functional partners the tools and guidance they need to run high-quality research.
The Challenge: Outgrowing Basic Surveys
Studies at Clay used to live in basic survey tools. Responses being collected were scattered across shared accounts, and generic forms were set up from pop-ups or emails, which lost many respondents along the way. Internal teams were adding their own "talk to us" buttons to the product just to reach users.
Clay needed a platform that would:
- Bring all research and customer data into one secure place
- Support a rigorous quantitative research and survey program
- Help evangelize research to engineering and product teams
- Deliver the most value without an enterprise research suite budget
Why Clay Chose Sprig
Sprig could meet Clay's needs on day one and grow with its research program. Sprig could also help make research part of how Clay builds: running studies alongside launches gives technical teams a natural moment to bring research into the process.
Clay started with Surveys, an easy first step that got every study and all survey data into one secure place that was easy to analyze. Next, a council of four teams spanning research, design, product marketing, and engineering spent about three months comparing tools against a shared rubric. Sprig came out on top.
Today, Clay's product marketing and education teams run studies in Sprig alongside the research team.
Making Research Queryable
Clay's most-used Sprig feature is the MCP connector. On a day-to-day basis, Sprig MCP enables Clay’s research team to share survey results and democratizes tooling.
- Research methods as Claude skills: Clay's researchers loaded their methods into Claude skills. Anyone can find existing insights, build a research plan, and generate a Sprig survey from the team's question bank.
- Live results in Slack: Working with Clay's data science team, the researchers piped Sprig responses into Snowflake tables, so anyone can ask in Slack how a survey is tracking and get a quick, in-line snapshot.
- No waiting on the final report: Longer-running surveys stay visible to everyone while they're still being fielded. For the very latest data, teams go straight to Claude and the Sprig connector.
Measuring the Solution
When Clay brought on Sprig, the research team set out to improve three metrics: how many surveys could run at the same time, how many users answered the same core questions so the team could set reliable baselines, and how many respondents dropped off before finishing a survey. All three moved in the right direction. More teams can now run research at once, every study adds to a shared set of benchmarks, and more users finish the surveys they start.
More Research with Better Data: 5x more surveys running
As demand from other teams grew, the research team set out to support more concurrent surveys. Much of that growth comes from product marketing, which now runs in-product launch and livestream promos alongside the research team’s studies.
With more teams running studies at once, Clay set a 30-day recontact rule and global cooldowns so no single user gets over-surveyed. That lets Clay scale its research while protecting users’ time and attention. Since adopting Sprig, Clay runs five times as many concurrent surveys.
Building Baselines Across Every Study: Benchmarks Established
Clay now adds the same standard questions to as many surveys as possible, including overall satisfaction, UMUX, and willingness to join future studies. Aggregated across studies over time, those answers give Clay benchmarks and sharpen its personas and ICP.
Keeping Respondents Engaged: 83% of users go from prompt to survey
Before Sprig, Clay used in-app prompts to send users to long-form surveys. Only 13% of users who saw a prompt clicked through, a big reason the team decided to switch.
With Sprig, 83% of users now continue from in-product prompt to Survey. Because Sprig reaches the right users at the right moment, the survey feels like a natural next step in Clay rather than a detour. Clay has used this in-product handoff on two studies so far and plans to expand it as the team runs more research through Sprig.
Pricing New Products with Confidence
Whenever a new product enters early beta, Clay uses Sprig to run a standard set of questions, especially for self-serve users:
- How useful is each feature capability to you?
- How would you expect each to be priced: free, included in your plan, or worth paying extra for?
- How would you feel if you could no longer use this feature?
- If you lost access today, how would that affect your work?
Across three launches this summer, the results of these pricing questions have helped place each product in the right pricing tier. Because the questions repeat, every new launch is measured against the last, so the team can quickly spot what's unusual or worth acting on.
Clay’s Outcome: Putting Numbers Behind Personas
Clay's personas have been built mostly through qualitative research and haven't yet been measured in a structured, quantitative way. With solid baselines on satisfaction and usability in place, the team is ready to measure them.
- Run a large segmentation study to validate the segments Clay believes exist
- Follow up with lightweight drip surveys to track how those segments shift over time
- Keep questions short and in context so research never feels like a burden to users
The goal is to start with one larger point-in-time study, then keep it current passively, so Clay catches big shifts in its customer base as they happen.
With Sprig, research at Clay is live data anyone in the company can pull the moment they need it.
