Clay All The Way

Recently, I listened to SaaSter's CRO Confidential episode with Sam Blond and Kareem Amin (CEO of Clay), and it confirmed much of what I've experienced using Clay as an early GTM hire at Metronome and consulting for some clients.

What an amazing tool they are building - If you are not using Clay as your GTM co-pilot tool, you will be behind the curve in 2024. The best GTM folks will be Clay savants in 2025.

Kareem mentioned that Clay's mission is to empower GTM teams, much like Figma did for design. “Creative for GTM.” They want to give GTM the power of programming to us “less technical” sales folks, and they’re breaking through.

AI is everywhere today, but especially bloated in a few sub-industries - customer support, sales tech, and legal tech:

While sales tech is bloated right now, Clay stands out by fundamentally changing how sales teams operate. It’s the centerpiece that orchestrates everything else we do in GTM.

For me, Clay is more than just another sales tech tool—it's a sales co-pilot that has become indispensable, helping to automate a bunch of manual tasks I typically would have to do myself. Whenever I want to do something, I always think first, “How can Clay shave off the amount of time?”

This is a cliche, but AI tools can be divided into two categories:

• Co-pilot: Assist people in real-time, enhancing decision-making and automating repetitive tasks - augmenting their capabilities

• Agents: Autonomous tools that perform tasks independently. In sales, however, fully autonomous agents are still in their infancy, as the human touch is essential for building trust - I am not bought into this at all yet, and think the AISDRs are causing a ton of noise right now (in a negative way)

Clay.com is a powerful co-pilot, not an agent.

Whenever I consult people on Clay, I always bucket the “what is Clay” answer into three buckets (ugh, PTSD from case interviewing):

The FETE Acronym Of What Clay Does: Find, Enrich, Transform, Export

1. Find: Clay gathers data from prospecting databases, web scraping, or our CRM, automating data collection seamlessly

2. Enrich: Clay finds accurate contact details like emails and phone numbers (close to 100% accuracy with a technique called Waterfalling), along with data on the web (like podcast episodes or insights from a 10k)

3. Transform: Using formulas or AI, Clay lets you summarize, clean, and generate custom content/normalize names/etc

4. Export: Clay integrates with CRMs and outreach tools so you can send all this enriched, transformed data to sequencers to automate campaigns

Clay in Action

Once you learn the basics of Clay, you want to whiteboard out a use case that is specific to your company - I still like to think of it in the Find —> Enrich/Transform —> Export framework

Here are some of the use cases I’ve used/seen others use, that has been a game changer:

It has saved me hundreds of hours that it would have taken our team to create our campaigns. In future articles, I’ll document (and maybe even record) different use cases.

Some final notes from the podcast/my findings:

• Sam Blond, in the podcast, said Clay is not good for creativity - yes and no

  • In some use cases, you don’t need creativity - such as “Hey {first name}, saw you follow {my company} on LI and wanted to connect, here to be a thought partner as you think through {initiative you’re an expert on}” - use case coming in a future article

  • You can use voice and video AI to do personalization at scale still, which in those mediums is creative. Look at LGM and Sendspark, specifically

• Sam says, “You shouldn’t be uploading contacts into the CRM” - I would say the tools of the mid-2010s eliminated this, but they just aren’t accurate all the time. Clay makes them accurate with its waterfall technique for data aggregation

• Founding GTM hires: this is a foundational skill that will give you a leg up, whether you are a sales leader or an IC

• Clay has been great for web scraping, especially with websites that have pretty programmatic HTML tags

• We are not there (both AI and Clay) with writing full emails, but Clay is still great if you prompt it line by line (Which is relevant if you send a concise 3-5 sentence email - future post coming here)

For those that are Clay-curious, reply to this email or shoot us a DM!