The constraint
Aircall sells a cloud phone and communication platform, with a sales organization spread across regions. Every region built target lists its own way: by hand, with its own rules, in its own corner of the stack.
Salesforce sat at the center, with HubSpot and Zendesk feeding it. On top of that, the team paid for ZoomInfo, Apollo, Lusha, and Cognism at the same time. Four data vendors, and still no single view of the total addressable market (every company worth selling to), no shared definition of a good-fit account, and a CRM full of duplicates and half-empty fields.
The real cost was trust. Nobody fully believed the lists their campaigns ran on, so account research kept getting redone by hand, region by region.
What we built
One clean market database inside their Salesforce that maintains itself. Three phases.
Phase one, foundation. A field dictionary came first: one agreed definition for every data field across systems, so "industry" and "employee count" meant the same thing in every region. The first version of the TAM was built and tested in a sandbox, against real workflows, before anything touched production Salesforce.
Phase two, structure. Clay workflows pull and refresh the company facts that matter (size, industry, region, the tech each account runs) on a schedule, so the database updates itself instead of quietly going stale. Every account is graded against a tiered ideal customer profile defined per region, then written back to Salesforce under controlled update rules: enrichment fills gaps, and it never overwrites a field a person owns.
Phase three, adoption. Pair-edit sessions with the sales and RevOps teams, weekly office hours, and the operating steps documented inside Clay itself. The point of the build was that Aircall could run it without us, so adoption was scoped as work, not as a wish.
The plays that ran
New-account intake. Any account entering Salesforce gets the full enrichment treatment on arrival. No more manual research before a new account is workable.
The scheduled refresh. The entire TAM re-verifies itself on a cycle. Company facts that drift over time (headcount, tech in use, region) get corrected on the next pass.
Regional tier grading. Every account carries a grade against its region's ideal-customer definition, written into Salesforce, so the day's priorities read straight off the CRM instead of living in one person's head.
Churn and renewal recovery. Enrichment flags churned accounts and contracts coming up for renewal that are worth a second approach, then routes each one to the right owner with the context attached.
Results
| Metric | Result |
|---|---|
| Accounts created and enriched into the TAM | 3,655 |
| TAM maintenance | Self-refreshing |
| Time window | 6 months |
What this means for you
If your team pays for several data tools and still builds target lists by hand, the missing piece is the system underneath them: one clean account database inside your CRM that refreshes itself and grades every account against your definition of a good customer. Everything downstream (outbound, ads, routing, territory planning) starts from a list your team actually trusts.
