Clay Alternative for Enterprise: Why Growing Companies Switch to Lantern

There is a specific moment when enterprise revenue teams realize Clay is no longer working for them. It rarely announces itself dramatically. It usually shows up as a slow accumulation of friction.

The RevOps manager who has spent three hours manually exporting enriched records into Salesforce — again. The legal team that flags Clay in a security review because it does not meet SOC 2 Type II requirements. The VP of Sales who asks why a champion just moved to a target account three weeks ago and nobody caught it. The CRO who realizes that the team has built an elaborate Clay workflow that exactly one person understands and that person is now on PTO.

Clay is a genuinely good product. For the teams it was built for — GTM engineers, growth agencies, scrappy startup sales teams who want maximum flexibility and are willing to build custom workflows — it delivers real value. But enterprise revenue operations have requirements that Clay was never designed to meet. When those requirements surface, teams start looking for a Clay alternative built for the scale, compliance, and integration depth that enterprise actually demands.

This article is for revenue leaders at that inflection point. We will be direct about what Clay does well, specific about where it breaks down for enterprise teams, and clear about what Lantern is built to do differently.

Why Clay Works — Until It Doesn't

Credit where it is due: Clay changed how modern GTM teams think about data enrichment. Before Clay, building a waterfall enrichment workflow meant juggling six separate vendor APIs and writing custom integration code. Clay made that accessible to non-engineers and created an ecosystem of tables, formulas, and enrichment sources that genuinely solved a hard problem.

Clay's strengths are real:

• Waterfall enrichment across 100+ data sources — find the best available data by cascading through providers automatically

• Flexible table-based interface — power users can build remarkably sophisticated workflows

• Active creator ecosystem — a large community of templates, tutorials, and GTM engineers who know the tool deeply

• Affordable entry point — the credit model makes it accessible to small teams before they need to commit to enterprise pricing

• Strong for outbound list building — finding, enriching, and personalizing prospect lists is genuinely Clay's sweet spot

The problems are not with what Clay does. They are with what Clay does not do — and for enterprise teams, those gaps are the entire job to be done.

Breaking Point 1: The Credit Model at Scale

Clay's credit model is elegant when you are enriching a few thousand records a month. At enterprise scale, it breaks down arithmetically and operationally.

Consider a standard enterprise RevOps workflow: enriching a 500,000-record CRM, running weekly account rescoring against 10,000 target accounts, and monitoring job change signals across a 50,000-person contact database. In Clay's credit model, each enrichment action consumes credits. Waterfall enrichment across multiple providers multiplies that consumption. At enterprise data volumes, the math stops working — teams either hit credit limits and pause enrichment mid-workflow, or they pay for an enterprise Clay contract that costs significantly more than the SMB pricing while still lacking the enterprise capabilities they actually need.

Beyond cost, there is an operational problem: credit-based pricing creates incentives to be selective about what you enrich. Enterprise teams cannot afford that selectivity. They need their full data set enriched and maintained continuously, not batch-processed when the budget allows.

Breaking Point 2: No Reverse ETL — Enrichment Stops at the Spreadsheet

This is the single most important limitation for enterprise teams to understand. Clay enriches data. It does not push that data back into your systems of record automatically.

When Clay completes an enrichment run, someone has to export the results and import them into Salesforce. Someone has to manually trigger the Outreach sequence update. Someone has to update territory assignments when account data changes. In small teams, this manual step is annoying but manageable. In enterprise organizations with complex CRM architectures, territory logic, and multiple downstream tools, the manual sync step becomes a full-time job — or it simply does not happen, which means the enrichment work is wasted.

Enterprise revenue operations require closed-loop data activation. Enrichment that does not automatically flow back into Salesforce, trigger downstream sequences, and update the right records in real time is not a complete solution. It is the first half of a solution.

Breaking Point 3: Compliance Gaps

Enterprise SaaS companies routinely face security reviews, vendor assessments, and procurement requirements that SMB tools are not built to pass. Clay does not carry SOC 2 Type II certification. For companies selling into regulated industries — financial services, healthcare, government — or for any company with a serious infosec team, this is a hard stop.

GDPR and CCPA compliance add further complexity. Enterprise teams processing contact and account data at scale need documented data processing agreements, clear data residency controls, and auditable data handling practices. Clay's self-serve model was not built around enterprise procurement requirements.

This is not a knock on Clay's security practices. It is simply a structural reality: Clay was designed for self-serve adoption, not enterprise vendor assessment processes.

Breaking Point 4: No Dedicated Implementation Support

Clay is a self-serve product. When you need help, you file a support ticket, search the community, or hire a Clay-certified agency. For a startup GTM engineer building their first enrichment workflow, this is fine. For a VP of RevOps at a 1,000-person company trying to migrate data infrastructure and prove ROI in a quarter, it is not.

Enterprise implementations are not setup tasks. They involve integrating with existing Salesforce configurations, aligning with IT security requirements, training sales and marketing teams, and building workflows that actually get used. That requires a dedicated implementation partner who knows both the product and enterprise RevOps deeply — and stays engaged after go-live.

What Enterprise Teams Actually Need

When revenue operations teams at 200–5,000 person companies describe what they need from a data platform, five requirements come up consistently.

1. A Semantic Data Model That Understands Your Business

Generic data enrichment gives you a contact record with a phone number and job title. That is useful for SMB outbound. Enterprise revenue operations require something more specific: a data model that understands your account hierarchy, your territory logic, your product lines, your customer segments, and how all of those things relate to each other.

Without that semantic layer, enrichment data does not map correctly to your CRM. Account data lands in the wrong places. Territory assignments break. Scoring models produce results that do not match how your sales team actually thinks about their book of business.

2. Reverse ETL and CRM Activation

Enriched data has zero business value sitting in a table. It creates value when it updates the right Salesforce record, triggers the right Outreach sequence, fires the right Slack alert to the right rep, and updates the right territory assignment — automatically, without manual export steps.

Enterprise teams need a platform that closes the loop: enrich the data, then immediately push the results into the tools where decisions are made and actions are taken.

3. AI Agents That Run Continuously

One-time enrichment runs are not enough. Enterprise revenue operations require continuous monitoring: champion job changes, intent spikes, product usage signals, account health changes. These signals need to be detected in real time and acted on immediately — not caught in the next weekly batch run.

That requires AI agents running continuously in the background, not a table that someone manually refreshes.

4. Enterprise Compliance

SOC 2 Type II. GDPR. CCPA. Enterprise procurement teams require these certifications. Any revenue data platform that handles contact and account data at enterprise scale needs to meet these standards and carry the documentation to prove it.

5. Dedicated Implementation and Ongoing Support

Enterprise tooling is not self-serve. It requires configuration by people who understand both the product and enterprise RevOps deeply. It requires ongoing optimization as the business changes. And it requires a support model that goes beyond tickets — someone who is embedded with the team and invested in making it work.

How Lantern Is Built for Enterprise

Revenue Ontology: A Data Model Specific to Your Business

Lantern's core architecture is built around what it calls a Revenue Ontology — a custom data model built to reflect each customer's specific business. Rather than dropping enriched data into generic contact and company records, Lantern maps enrichment to your actual account hierarchy, your territory logic, your ICP definition, your product segments, and your custom CRM fields.

The practical result: enriched data lands in the right place, every time, without manual field mapping or cleanup. When Lantern updates an account record, it understands whether that account is a named account, a whitespace expansion target, or a churn risk — and it treats it accordingly.

This is what separates semantic enrichment from generic enrichment. The data does not just get richer; it gets smarter about how it fits your specific business.

Reverse ETL and Automated CRM Activation

Lantern's reverse ETL layer is the capability that most directly addresses Clay's central limitation. When Lantern's agents complete an enrichment or scoring run, the results automatically push back into your systems of record — without a manual export step, without a RevOps engineer managing a spreadsheet-to-Salesforce import, without lag.

In practice, this means:

• Updated Salesforce account and contact records within minutes of an enrichment run

• Automated Outreach sequence enrollment when a prospect matches updated scoring criteria

• Slack alerts to the right rep when a champion changes jobs or an intent signal spikes

• Territory reassignment triggered automatically when account data changes

The loop is closed. Enrichment triggers action. Action happens in the tools your team already uses.

AI Agents That Run Continuously

Lantern deploys pre-built and custom AI agents that run autonomously and continuously — not on demand. Key agent types include:

Signal agents monitor for champion job changes, intent spikes, and product usage signals in real time. When a signal fires, the agent updates the relevant CRM records and triggers the appropriate downstream workflow automatically.

CRM cleaning agents run continuously to deduplicate records, merge duplicates, enrich stale data, and maintain CRM health. This replaces what is typically a quarterly manual cleanup project.

Research agents handle prospect research, account scoring, and ICP matching on an ongoing basis — keeping scoring models current without requiring manual refreshes.

Voice agents handle inbound and outbound qualification calls, a capability Clay does not offer at all. For enterprise teams running high-volume qualification workflows, voice automation directly reduces headcount requirements.

Enterprise Compliance Built In

Lantern is SOC 2 Type II certified, and fully compliant with GDPR and CCPA requirements. This is not an afterthought — it is a baseline requirement for the enterprise buyers Lantern is built for. When procurement runs its vendor assessment, Lantern passes.

Data processing agreements, data residency controls, and auditable data handling practices are documented and available. Enterprise legal and infosec teams do not need to get creative.

Forward-Deployed Engineers: Not Support Tickets

Every Lantern enterprise customer gets dedicated engineers — referred to internally as forward-deployed engineers — who join the customer's Slack workspace, configure integrations, build custom agents, and optimize workflows on an ongoing basis.

This is not a professional services engagement with a project end date. It is a persistent working relationship. When your Salesforce configuration changes, the forward-deployed engineer updates the Revenue Ontology. When a new territory is added, the agent logic is updated. When a workflow is not producing the expected results, the engineer digs into it alongside your team.

The contrast with Clay's support model is fundamental. Clay gives you a tool and the community. Lantern gives you a platform and the people to make it work.

What the Switch Looks Like: The TriNet Example

TriNet, one of Lantern's enterprise customers, illustrates what the migration from a fragmented data stack to Lantern looks like in practice.

Before Lantern, TriNet's revenue operations team was managing multiple separate data subscriptions — each covering part of the enrichment need, none of them talking to each other, and all of them requiring manual export steps before data reached Salesforce. The team was spending significant time on data maintenance that was not producing reliable results.

The Lantern migration consolidated multiple point solutions into a single platform. Forward-deployed engineers worked directly in TriNet's Slack workspace to configure the Revenue Ontology around TriNet's specific account hierarchy and territory structure, build the integrations to their existing Salesforce and outreach tooling, and validate that enriched data was landing correctly before the full cutover.

Time to first value: under one week. Within days of go-live, TriNet's team was seeing enriched records updating in Salesforce automatically and downstream workflows triggering without manual intervention.

The tools replaced, the records processed, and the time saved represent a total cost of ownership improvement that is difficult to replicate with a self-serve enrichment tool — regardless of how well-configured that tool is.

How to Know You're Ready to Switch

If any five of these signals apply to your situation, the conversation about a Clay alternative is worth having now rather than later.

1. Someone on your team owns Clay maintenance full-time. If keeping Clay running, managing credits, and manually syncing data back to Salesforce has become a job function rather than a tool task, you have already paid the switching cost in labor. You just have not gotten the enterprise capabilities in return.

2. Your legal or infosec team has flagged Clay in a vendor review. SOC 2 Type II is not optional for enterprise-grade vendor status. If procurement has put Clay on a watch list or blocked further expansion, a compliant alternative is not optional.

3. Enrichment data is not making it into Salesforce consistently. If your CRM data quality is degrading because the export-import loop is breaking down — records not updated, fields not mapped, sequences not triggered — the manual sync model has failed.

4. You are managing more than three separate data subscriptions. If you have ZoomInfo for company data, Bombora for intent, a separate tool for email verification, and Clay for waterfall enrichment, you are paying for four tools to do one job. Consolidation has a hard-dollar ROI.

5. Your Clay workflow lives in one person's head. Bus factor of one is a risk. If the person who built your Clay architecture left tomorrow, how long before enrichment stops working? Enterprise data infrastructure cannot be fragile.

The Right Next Step

If you recognize your situation in this article — not because Clay failed, but because your requirements have grown past what it was built to handle — the conversation starts with an honest assessment of your current stack.

Lantern's engineers will map your existing Clay configuration, your CRM architecture, your data subscriptions, and your RevOps workflows — and show you exactly what the migration looks like, what consolidates, what improves, and what the timeline is.

Talk to a Lantern engineer — we'll assess your current stack and show you exactly what the migration looks like.

[Get your stack assessment at withlantern.com]

Lantern is an enterprise Revenue Data Platform. 50+ enterprise customers. SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, and CCPA compliant. Backed by M13, 8VC, Primary Venture Partners, and Moxxie Ventures.