Clay vs Facilities Finder: When to Build vs When to Buy a List

If you are in RevOps and your sales team sells to industrial companies — manufacturers, distributors, food processors, metal fabricators — you have probably hit two very different walls trying to build a territory prospecting workflow.

The first: your list is thin. You have a spreadsheet of company HQs, but half the accounts you need are plants, branches, or warehouses that never appear in ZoomInfo or Apollo. The contacts your reps need — plant managers, operations directors, maintenance supervisors — work at those locations, not at headquarters. Clay can't enrich your industrial list when none of the 150 data providers it connects to have plant-level records. There is nothing to enrich.

The second: you have a list, but it is raw. Wrong titles. Missing emails. No context. Reps spend hours cleaning it before a single email goes out.

Clay solves the second problem brilliantly — for accounts where a clean HQ record exists. Facilities Finder solves the first one — the one Clay's 150 providers can't touch, because none of them carry facility-level records.

These are not complementary tools for the same job. They are tools for different jobs entirely. Clay is the right choice when your buyer is a CEO, CIO, CFO, or VP of Marketing at a SaaS or tech company — someone whose contact record Apollo, ZoomInfo, or Clearbit already has. Facilities Finder is the right choice when your buyer is a plant manager in Bloomington or a maintenance director in Fresno — someone those databases have never heard of.

What Clay actually is (and what it is not)

Clay is a data enrichment and workflow automation platform. Think of it as a smart spreadsheet where every column can call a different API.

You give Clay a list — companies, contacts, whatever — and Clay goes to work: pulling firmographics from one provider, verifying emails from another, scraping recent LinkedIn activity with its AI agent (Claygent), scoring each record with a formula column, and pushing the finished result directly into your CRM or sequencer.

The magic is the waterfall: Clay chains 150+ data providers in sequence. Try ZoomInfo first. If no email, try Apollo. If still nothing, try Hunter. Clay charges a credit only when it finds valid data. For SaaS and tech companies, where Apollo, LinkedIn, and Clearbit have deep coverage, this works remarkably well.

What Clay is not:

• It is not a database. Clay has no proprietary records of its own.
• It is not a source of truth. It enriches lists you bring to it, using sources someone else maintains.
• It does not decide who should be on your list. That judgment happens before you open Clay.

This is not a knock on Clay — it is how the product is designed, and for many workflows it is exactly right. But it creates a specific gap for industrial sellers.

Where Clay hits a wall for industrial sales

The core problem: the data providers Clay connects to are HQ-centric.

ZoomInfo, Apollo, LinkedIn, Clearbit — they model the world as "one company, one record." A food processor with 12 plants in three states looks like one row in their database, usually pointing to the corporate office in a suburb of Cincinnati. The plant manager at the Fresno facility, the maintenance director at the Iowa Falls location — they may not exist in any of those 150 providers at all.

So when a RevOps team tries to use Clay to build a territory list for industrial reps, the waterfall enrichment is powerful, but there is nothing to enrich. You cannot chain 150 providers against a plant-level record if none of those providers have plant-level records. Clay can't enrich your industrial list because no connector has plant-level data — and the connectors that try return HQ contacts that your reps can't use.

This is not Clay's fault. Their entire integration gallery reflects the SaaS and tech GTM ecosystem, which thinks in HQ-level accounts. It is just not built for selling to physical facilities.

The result: teams that try to "build" an industrial list inside Clay end up with a partial picture — the corporate holding company, maybe the CFO's email, almost certainly not the plant-level decision-makers they actually need to reach.

What Facilities Finder is

Facilities Finder is a source of truth for US industrial facilities — 600,000+ plants, branches, and warehouses across all 50 states, each modeled as its own record. The only B2B database with facility-level data — every plant, branch, and warehouse, not just HQ.

Where other databases show one row for a parent company, Facilities Finder shows every location that company operates. Our AI ingests billions of public signals — satellite imagery, map providers, company websites, EPA filings, permit records, trade publications — and extracts what actually matters: products, capabilities, employees, certifications. Search for a regional food processor and you get each of their plants separately, with the physical address, employee count, facility type, AI-enriched industry profile, and the decision-makers who work at that site — not the ones at HQ.

The key capabilities:

• Facility-level records: Each plant, warehouse, or branch is its own searchable record, not a footnote on a corporate profile.
• Parent-company rollup: Pull every facility a parent company operates across the country. Search "Greif" and get all 118 US facilities across 30 states — not just the HQ in Delaware, OH. Relevant for key account mapping and competitive displacement.
• Decision-makers at each location: Plant managers, operations directors, maintenance supervisors, safety officers — tied to the facility where they actually work.
• Territory filters: Draw a polygon or radius, filter by industry and facility type, rank results by employee count. Built for field sellers who think in geography.
• Industry and size filters: AI-enriched industry classifications — 35,000+ categories drawn from what each plant actually produces. "Plastic injection molders in Ohio with more than 50 employees" is a natural-language query, not a three-hour research project.

Facilities Finder answers the question Clay cannot: who belongs on this list in the first place.

The comparison table

Who wins? Depends entirely on who you're selling to.

Clay and Facilities Finder are built for different sales motions — not for the same motion from different angles.

Clay is the right tool when your buyer is at corporate HQ. Selling SaaS to CTOs? Selling B2B services to CMOs? Selling finance software to CFOs? Clay's enrichment stack works — because Apollo, ZoomInfo, Clearbit, and Cognism already carry those contacts. The 150 providers in Clay's waterfall are exceptional at finding, verifying, and enriching the corporate decision-makers who sit at headquarters. For a rep whose named accounts are indexed under a single corporate address, Clay is a genuine force multiplier.

Facilities Finder is the right tool when your buyer is on the plant floor. Selling conveyors, dust collectors, MRO, packaging materials, industrial services, or logistics to a manufacturing plant? The buyer is the plant manager or operations director at that specific site — and none of Clay's 150 providers carry that contact, because their data model does not have the plant as a first-class record. Clay can waterfall across a hundred sources and still return nothing useful, because the plant itself is not in any of them.

Facilities Finder is the only B2B platform with facility-level data — 600,000+ US plants, warehouses, and distribution centers, each modeled as its own record, with 25 million+ plant-level decision-makers attached. No amount of enrichment fixes a missing source record.

When to use each one

Use Facilities Finder when:

• You are building a territory list from scratch and do not know which companies to target
• You need every plant a parent company operates, not just corporate HQ
• Your ICP is defined by facility type, geography, and size — not by SaaS buying behavior
• You need to reach plant-level contacts, not corporate procurement

Use Clay when:

• Your buyer is a CEO, CIO, CFO, or VP at a SaaS or tech company indexed by Apollo, ZoomInfo, or Clearbit
• You have an HQ-level account list and need to enrich it at scale with firmographic, intent, or personalization signals
• You want an AI research agent to personalize outreach to corporate decision-makers at the parent company
• Your sales motion lives entirely at the corporate address, not at branch or plant locations

The honest conclusion

Clay is one of the best-built tools in the modern GTM stack. For SaaS and tech teams chasing CEOs, CIOs, and VPs at corporate headquarters, the enrichment workflows and the Claygent research agent are exceptional.

But Clay is a workbench, not a source. It enriches what its 150 providers already know — and those providers have no facility-level data. For industrial sellers, that means the plant manager in Bloomington, the maintenance director in Fresno, and the operations supervisor at the Iowa Falls line never appear in any Clay output, because they do not exist upstream. No waterfall, no Claygent prompt, no formula column can surface a record that is not in the source.

Facilities Finder is built for the job Clay was never designed to do. The only B2B platform with facility-level data — 600,000+ US industrial facilities, AI-enriched at the facility level, with 25 million+ plant-level decision-makers keyed to the plant, not the HQ. Draw a polygon on a map, filter by what each plant actually makes, and every qualifying facility inside your territory appears — each with the right person at the right address. Clay is the right tool for one sales motion. Facilities Finder is the only tool for the other.

See plant managers in your territory →

See also: ZoomInfo vs Facilities Finder · Apollo.io vs Facilities Finder