In 2025, effective outbound isn’t just about sending more emails. It’s about sending the right message to the right person at the right time. That’s where signals, context, intent, and execution come into play.

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If you’re like most Marketing leaders, you’ve probably found yourself weighing two powerful, but very different tools: Clay and UserGems.

What we’ve seen from the most high performing teams? They use both.

Let me explain.

Clay is Your Outbound R&D Lab

Clay is powerful. It lets you build custom tables, enrich contact records with obscure fields, and experiment with creative outbound triggers like “people who posted about migrating CRMs on LinkedIn” or “CMOs who attended a competitor’s webinar last week.”

You can spin up a mini-campaign in a few hours with a GTM Engineer and see what hits.

But once something works? You’ll quickly realize these tables and use cases aren’t built for scale.

• There’s no automatic CRM context to tell you if someone was a past customer, a past user, or involved in a lost deal.
  
  
• Crafting contextual, multi-step sequences demands manual efforts and advanced logic.
  
  
• Activation requires building custom tables and flows or bringing in an agency.
  
  
• Without native integrations, bringing insights directly into tools like Salesforce or Outreach requires custom builds.

It’s great for V1s, but turning them into GTM motions takes a ton of effort.

UserGems Is the Outbound Engine for Scale

UserGems is where validated signals go to become pipeline.

It combines contact-level signals (like job changes, referrals, new hires) with account-level intelligence (intent, funding, competitor tech usage, hiring trends) and your CRM data (closed-lost opps, call transcripts, deal history).

Then, Gem-E, the outbound AI agent, uses those signals and context to write sequencing-ready messaging, pre-queues it in Outreach or Salesloft, and feeds it directly to your reps.

It’s not just about signals. It’s about:

• Knowing a new buyer is showing intent and recently hired a key role
  
  
• Seeing that an account is growing and has a history with your team
  
  
• Or that a past champion landed at a competitor account showing signal today
  
  

It’s not a sandbox environment. It’s the easy button for repeatable outbound campaigns.

The Best Teams Use Both 

We recently spoke with a marketing leader who laid this out beautifully. Their workflow looked like this:

1. Prototype in Clay: They use Clay to experiment with new signals (e.g., “website visitor that clicked ‘pricing’ page” or “marketers who changed jobs and now use Salesforce”).
   
   
2. Validate Results: If that signal gets good response or conversion in a sprint campaign...
   
   
3. Operationalize in UserGems: They feed it into UserGems, combine it with native signals and CRM data, and let Gem-E automate the messaging and activation.

This way, Clay becomes their source of innovation, and UserGems is their engine of execution.

They even joked, “I build a v1 of the signal in Clay. Then when it works, I bring it to you guys to do it the right way.”

You don’t need to pick between Clay and UserGems. You just need to know where each fits.

• Use Clay for edge-case enrichment and creative signal exploration.
  
  
• Use UserGems to scale what works with precision, context, and AI messaging.
  
  

And when your CEO asks how outbound is going? You’ll be able to say it’s not just working it’s driving pipeline on autopilot.