I wrote about Clarify back in August when we first adopted it as our CRM at Vibescaling. See that article here.
The thesis was: I cared about using AI-native tools, I wanted a clean UI, and Hubspot was so clunky to use.
Cailen would make fun of me when I would say that $HUBS “wiped my energy using the product.”
Clarify hit on all three, and it’s been great using them over the last year.
Since the article, I get asked on my perspective on these AI-native CRMs and pros/cons around them, so wanted to do another sponsored post on how our usage plans to expand inside of the tool (and why we’re still not compelled to move to something like SFDC).
Clarify went from being a really clean CRM to something that's starting to replace multiple tools in our stack.
Not because they bolted on a bunch of features. But because they're rethinking which tools should even be separate in the first place.
What I'll Cover
Let's get into it.
The Three Boxes Problem
The GTM tool stack in 2026:
You've got Clay for enrichment. Apollo or Instantly for sequences. LinkedIn for prospecting. Then you still need a CRM to track it all. That's four tools minimum, and none of them talk to each other well. You're exporting CSVs, copy-pasting between tabs, and spending a lot of your time moving data around instead of actually selling (or recruiting in our case).
I've always thought about the outbound stack in three boxes (shown above): data in (signals + sourcing), enrich/transform (get emails, make sure names aren’t in all caps, etc.), data out (sequences + campaigns). And then separately, a system of record to tie it all together.
A common workflow example (that we’ve written about before with my friend, Brendan Short):
Most CRMs only handle that last part. The source of truth that is separate outside of those three boxes above.
But they leave you to figure out the first three boxes on your own. And the tools that handle those boxes? They don't have a CRM. You end up being the integration layer. You're the middleware. And that's an annoying use of your time.
What Clarify is doing is collapsing those boxes into the CRM itself. They're framing it as "source, send, sell." Find leads, contact them, manage the deals. All from one place. All with context that carries through from first touch.
IMO it's both convenient and creates a data compounding mechanism. When your enrichment data, outreach sequences, and deal records all live in the same system, the CRM gets smarter over time. It knows what you sent, who replied, what you talked about on the call, and what happened next. That's context you lose every time data hops between tools, unless you stitch it together.
What's New (+ What I'm Actually Using)
A lot shipped in the last few months. I want to walk through what's changed how we work day to day, not just what's on the changelog.
Campaigns are live. This is the one I was waiting for. Clarify shipped multi-step email sequences out of beta. Signatures, CC, BCC, etc.
For us, this is huge. We throw quarterly events (our last one with Clay had about 125 people, see a video of it here), and being able to pull a list/report from Clarify and run a campaign without leaving the tool is a massive time saver.
No more exporting to gmail/Claude, formatting it, uploading it, hoping the fields mapped correctly.
I've already started using this for candidate outreach on the recruiting side. We tag candidates in Clarify, build a list with Rep (their AI agent), and fire off a sequence from there.
The contact record, the enrichment data, and the outreach all live in the same place so I'm not losing context between tools.
When your sequence tool is your CRM, every reply, every bounce, every open automatically updates the record. No sync delay or broken Zapier connection without you knowing. The data is just there. If you've ever run outbound from a separate tool and tried to reconcile what happened back into your CRM, you probably know how annoying that gap is.
Rep got way smarter. Rep is Clarify's AI agent that lives inside the CRM. The big upgrade: it now reads full meeting transcripts, not just summaries. So when I ask "what did we talk about with [candidate name] last week?" it gives me a real answer pulled from the actual conversation.
[Disclaimer: we’re still using Granola for a lot of our workflow here, but this new change makes it compelling to switch because it comes with the license fee]
It also does bulk updates now. I can say "tag everyone in New York who we've marked as a strong candidate" and it just does it. Before, that was me clicking through records one by one. Small thing, but those small things add up when you're managing hundreds of candidate relationships.
The MCP integration. The nerdy one, but where I got the most excited. Clarify now connects to Claude via MCP (Model Context Protocol). I've been using Claude pretty heavily. I have custom projects set up with my writing style, how I communicate, tone preferences, all of it.
Now I can go into Claude, pull data from Clarify, and work with it in the context of everything else I'm doing. Last week I asked Claude to pull a list of New York-based candidates from Clarify who we'd flagged as strong, and it just did it. No exporting. No CSV. Just a question and an answer.
You can say "pull that list AND draft a 2-email sequence in my voice AND push it back into Clarify as a campaign." And the MCP connects to other tools too (Notion, Granola, Linear) so the workflows start to stack.
Future post with the Anthropic team on MCP + Claude Code/Cowork for GTM 🙂
Lead Finder. Shipped this week; they're building a database of 100M+ leads directly inside Clarify. Think Apollo's search + Clay’s enrichment, but you never leave your CRM. Find the leads, import them into a list, enrich them, run a campaign —> all in one flow.
For our use case, this would be massive. When we're sourcing for a recruiting search, I want to say "find me Series A/B AEs in SF who've been at their company for 18+ months" and just have that list ready to go.
Right now that requires bouncing between LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Clay, and Clarify. Collapsing that into one step and avoiding a bunch of Clay credits sounds great + I’m excited to test it out more.
Why the CRM Is the Right Place to Consolidate From
Every tool in the outbound stack is trying to expand. Clay is adding more enrichment sources and workflows. Apollo built a CRM. Instantly keeps adding channels. Everyone is trying to be the "all-in-one."
But there's a reason I think the CRM is the natural center of gravity.
Your CRM is the only tool that persists; it is where the relationship lives long-term. It's the customer system of record you come back to on a daily basis.
When you expand FROM the CRM outward, every new feature has access to the full history of the relationship. Your campaigns know what you've already sent. Your enrichment knows what data you already have. Your lead finder knows who's already in your system.
When you consolidate from a point solution inward (like Apollo adding a CRM, or Clay adding outbound), you're bolting on context after the fact. And that context is always incomplete because you didn't have the foundation.
This is also why Salesforce can't just add these features and win. They technically could build all of this. But their UI is so archaic, their pricing is designed for enterprise, and the implementation overhead makes it impractical for a team of 5.
Clarify has the benefit of starting fresh with AI-native architecture and a modern UX. That matters a lot to me personally as an Apple stan and design nerd.
Clay is incredible at what it does. I still use it a ton. But it's a workflow and enrichment tool. It's not trying to be the place you manage your pipeline or track candidate relationships over months. And that's fine. But for teams who want fewer tabs open and less data plumbing, the CRM expanding outward makes more sense than the enrichment tool expanding inward.
Roadmap
Two things on their roadmap worth calling out:
Agents. By summer, you'll be able to build and run agents inside Clarify. Think: a research agent that automatically enriches new contacts when they're added. Or a follow-up agent that pings you when a deal goes cold. The team decided to skip improving their workflow engine and go straight to agents.
Custom objects. Define your own record types (partners, products, investors, whatever) and link them across the CRM. For us, this would let me connect portfolio companies to the candidates we're sourcing for them in a much cleaner way. Right now I'm hacking that with tags and custom fields. Native support would be a big upgrade.
Clarify is making a super compelling case that the CRM is the right place to consolidate from. We’re excited to keep building our recruiting workflow on top of their data foundation.
Been awesome partnering with the Clarify team for the last year + feel free to shoot me a note if you want to chat more about our experience using them as our CRM.
cheers 🫡,