How to Classify Job Titles & Segment Your Audience in Clay

Quick Reference

Question: How do I build a job title classifier in Clay that identifies ICP’s, groups contacts by job title and seniority, and normalizes duplicate/variant titles for targeted automated messaging?

Quick Answer: Enrich contacts with Clay’s native enrichment, match current experience to your target company (to verify employment), classify by seniority level (1-4), segment by primary function (Sales/Technical/Marketing), and normalize titles using an AI prompt. This gives you clean segments for personalized campaigns where a CEO gets different messaging than a Manager.

The Problem

When you pull contacts from Clay’s Find People feature, you get raw job titles that are inconsistent, outdated, and impossible to segment properly. “Founder & CEO,” “Chief Executive Officer,” and “CEO/Co-Founder” are all the same person—but your campaigns treat them differently.

This guide shows you how to:

• Verify contacts still work at the target company
• Classify job titles by seniority level
• Segment by primary function (Sales vs. Technical)
• Normalize titles for natural-sounding outreach

Step 1: Enrich the Person Profile

Start with your Find People data, then use Clay’s native Enrich Person feature to pull updated LinkedIn data.

Why this matters: Find People data can be stale. Someone listed at Microsoft might have left 6 months ago.

Step 2: Match Current Experience to Target Company

Here’s the gotcha most people miss: enriched profiles return all current experiences. A CEO might also be a board member at three other companies.

Solution: Use a formula to string-match the company name from your original Find People data against the enriched current experiences.

This does two things:

1. Confirms the person still works at your target company
2. Pulls the correct job title for that specific company

If there’s no match, flag them as “no longer at company”—don’t waste sends on bounced contacts.

Step 3: Classify Seniority Level

Create a seniority classifier using Clay’s AI or a simple formula:

Level	Titles
Level 1	C-Suite, Founder, Partner, Owner
Level 2	VP, Director, Head of
Level 3	Manager, Lead, Senior
Level 4	Individual Contributor, Associate, Specialist

Why segment by seniority? Your message to a CEO should be different than your message to a Manager. Seniority determines:

• Pain points you emphasize
• Value props you lead with
• Tone and length of message

Step 4: Classify Primary Function

Segment contacts by their functional area based on your ICP. Common segments:

• Sales: AE, SDR, Sales Manager, CRO, VP Sales
• Technical: Engineer, Developer, CTO, Technical Lead
• Marketing: CMO, Demand Gen, Growth, Content
• Operations: COO, RevOps, BizOps

Use an AI prompt that takes in:

• Job title
• LinkedIn headline
• Profile summary
• Current job description

Then outputs the primary function classification.

Step 5: Normalize Job Titles

Raw titles are messy. Normalize them so your outreach sounds natural.

Before: “Hey, I saw you’re the Founder & CEO / Board Member…” After: “Hey, I saw you’re the CEO at [Company]…”

AI Prompt for Normalization

Given this job title: {{job_title}}

Normalize it to a single, clean title following these rules:
- If "Founder & CEO" or "Co-Founder/CEO" → keep "CEO"
- If "Head of Growth & Partnerships" → keep "Head of Growth"
- Remove prefixes like "Senior" or "Associate" unless critical
- Keep the most senior or relevant title only

Return only the normalized title, nothing else.

Step 6: Segment by Company Size

Add company size buckets for further segmentation:

Bucket	Employee Count
SMB	1-50
Mid-Market	51-200
Enterprise	201-1,000
Large Enterprise	1,000+

Different company sizes = different buying processes = different messaging.

Putting It All Together

Your final table should have:

Column	Purpose
verified_at_company	Boolean - still works there?
seniority_level	1-4 scale
primary_function	Sales, Technical, Marketing, etc.
normalized_title	Clean title for personalization
company_size_bucket	SMB, Mid-Market, Enterprise

Now you can build campaigns that target:

• Level 1 Sales leaders at Mid-Market companies
• Level 2-3 Technical leaders at Enterprise companies
• Any seniority Marketing at SMB

Each segment gets messaging tailored to their role, seniority, and company context.

Need Help Building This?

I’m Matt, founder of Pipeline Factory. We help companies build Clay workflows and train them to own the technical know-how in the long term. If you need any help, feel free to contact me. If you are interested in learning more, you can also subscribe to my Substack newsletter.