Send Yirlo replies and hot leads to Clay

How the Clay connection works

A Clay table can use a webhook as its source. When you add one, Clay generates a URL that accepts POST requests, and every request becomes one row in that table.

Two event types leave Yirlo for a webhook. reply.received fires on each genuine response, and hot_lead.received fires when a response is judged interested. Create a Yirlo webhook aimed at your Clay URL and the table populates as campaigns run. Send both types to one table, or build separate tables: one holding only hot leads and another holding every reply.

Yirlo attaches an X-Yirlo-Signature header to every event, computed with HMAC-SHA256, which lets you verify the sender. Further down, the signature-checking section shows where that verification sits in a Clay flow.

Set it up in six steps

Before starting, have a Clay workspace ready, plus a Yirlo project that already contains a campaign. Follow the steps in order, so Clay can derive its columns from an actual sample event.

• In Clay, create a new table and choose a webhook as the source. Copy the POST URL Clay shows you.
• In Yirlo, open the Integrations area and add a webhook. Paste the Clay URL as the destination.
• Choose the events to send: reply.received, hot_lead.received, or both.
• Press the Send test event button in Yirlo. Yirlo sends a sample, and Clay adds it as the first row.
• Check the columns Clay created from that sample. Rename them if you like, and add your enrichment or routing columns to the right.
• Let the campaigns run. Each real reply and each hot lead arrives as a new row without further action.

The fields in each event

A single lead and the message that prompted the event make up each payload. You get the contact's email address, their name, the company they work at, the campaign that contacted them, and what they wrote back. The event type shows whether a row is an ordinary reply or a hot lead.

Clay builds its columns from the first payload it receives, which is why the test event comes first. The sample shows the exact field names Yirlo sends, so you can map them in later columns without guessing.

The email address is the natural key for the table. A lead who replies twice produces two rows, and a unique-key lookup on the email column in Clay lets you collapse them into one record before anything is routed.

Checking the signature

The X-Yirlo-Signature header holds an HMAC-SHA256 of the event, made with the secret for your webhook. To verify, compute the same HMAC over the request body with your secret and compare it to the header value. A match means the event is genuine and unaltered.

Clay's webhook URL is the receiving end, so the check happens in front of it. For a table that feeds outreach or a CRM, put a small endpoint of yours between the two: Yirlo posts to your endpoint, the endpoint verifies X-Yirlo-Signature, and it forwards only verified events to the Clay URL. A few lines in a serverless function or an n8n Webhook node is enough.

Treat the Clay URL as a secret. Anyone who has it can add rows to the table, so keep it out of shared documents and screenshots. If it leaks, create a new webhook source on the table and update the URL in Yirlo.

What to do with the rows in Clay

The table is a working queue of people who just answered a cold email. That makes it a good place for the steps that sit between a reply and a human conversation.

Common uses for a hot lead table:

• Add enrichment columns for company details or extra context before a salesperson opens the thread.
• Score each lead on company size, industry or the campaign it came from, then rank the queue.
• Route by rule: enterprise accounts to one owner, smaller companies to another, replies that mention pricing to a separate channel.
• Push qualified rows on to your CRM, Slack or a sequencing step once the columns you need are filled.
• Keep a running record of which campaigns produce interested replies, with the reply text beside each one.

Campaigns that suit a Clay workflow

Teams that build in Clay tend to sell to other operators: RevOps and sales operations leads at SaaS companies, founders of lead generation agencies, heads of growth at startups, and outbound managers at staffing firms. Yirlo proposes campaigns like these from your website and finds one decision maker per company in each audience.

Each first email takes the angle that fits the company it lands in. A RevOps lead might hear about what a team their size pays for routing leads by hand, while an agency founder might hear about the hours that disappear into assembling client reports. The writing centers on the reader's own business, and you can edit every campaign, audience and email in the app ahead of time.

The usual objection is that another tool means another place to check. With the Clay table, interested replies arrive where your team already works, with the reply text next to the lead's details. The inbox in the Yirlo app stays available for reading full conversations and replying.

Staying under the 50,000 submission limit

Each Clay webhook source takes up to 50,000 submissions. For most outbound programs that is a long runway, because rows come from replies and hot leads rather than from every email sent.

When a source fills up, add a new webhook source to the same table. Clay gives it a fresh URL, you replace the destination in Yirlo, and rows keep flowing into the same table with your columns and formulas intact. Doing this before the limit is reached keeps the row history unbroken.

Sending only hot_lead.received to a dedicated table is the simplest way to keep volume low, and it keeps the table focused on people ready to talk.

Other ways to move the same data

Clay can run next to other automation tools, since the same signed webhooks plug into Zapier, n8n and Make through each tool's own webhook trigger. A dedicated Yirlo app in those three is coming soon.

The Yirlo API can also read hot leads and the inbox on a schedule, which suits a nightly sync into Clay. The lead CSV export has 17 columns, including email, name, title, company, website, LinkedIn, industry, company size, location, campaign, status, conversation, deal status and note, and imports into a Clay table as a file.

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