Joining Clay, Engineering GTM
and why I'm excited for the opportunity
Excited to announce I joined Clay
After 5 years in cybersecurity, I decided it was time for something completely new. Frankly, I thought I’d stay in security longer, mostly because experience and skills compound over time when you stay in one industry. But, every once in a while, a truly unique, special company emerges.
I’ve followed Clay for nearly two years and have always been a fan. So when
reached out, I didn’t need much convincing to do a ‘trial’ for a few weeks. My assumptions from the outside were all confirmed when I became an insider. The story and future are compelling.The opportunity checked many boxes for me: 1) team, 2) culture, 3) differentiated product & GTM motion, 4) position/market opportunity, and 5) a role that provides ample opportunity to get creative. (Check out the SIMPLE framework for evaluating startups.)
In addition, they were just included in Wing Venture Capital’s Enterprise Tech 30, a list of the most promising private enterprise companies decided by an invite-only group of VCs and heads of Corp. Development. One of the most interesting takeaways is that Clay is the only non-AI SaaS company in the early-stage category. That says a lot.
What is Clay?
In short - Clay is a data enrichment & orchestration platform for growth, sales, & GTM teams. Teams use Clay to scale personalized inbound, outbound, expansion, and retention experiences with aggregated data from around the web.
Data enrichment comes from 2 sources:
Aggregating & providing access to 150+ providers (yes, you can use Clay to replace ZoomInfo to get better coverage & a wider range of data points.)
Claygent is an AI agent that you can use to scrape and analyze websites and ultimately collect unique data relevant to your ICP. Give it a mission, and it will perform that mission for every company or person of your interest.
Clay helps you automate any manual research that sucks up so much of your team’s time.
Then, you can orchestrate this data to accomplish a wide variety of things:
Enrich your CRM (Salesforce, HubSpot, etc.)
Write personalized emails at scale
Send those emails and data to a prospecting sequencer
Automate the creation of company research briefings
The list goes on…
GTM Engineers
There are no “Account Executives” or “Solution Engineers”. Instead, Clay has GTM Engineers. Simply put, we help customers engineer GTM solutions with Clay.
Customers are blown away when we can build personalized demos on the fly and ultimately show people something they didn’t think was possible. There’s no better demo or ‘magic moment’ than combining those two.
For example, you can see how fast I built a prospecting workflow in one of my last posts: Automate Founder Prospecting in < 6 Minutes.
GTM teams need a better data source (or aggregator)
Typically, teams rely on an enrichment database to fill contact information gaps. These are the common person, title, email, and phone numbers. As a company scales, it may extend to 2 or 3 enrichment providers because its original database doesn’t have 1) enough accurate information or 2) large enough coverage for phone and email information 3) data specific to their unique ICP.
Other data comes from manual research from SDRs and AEs needing to personalize their outreach. Teams scour the web to find:
Recent job openings
Linkedin profiles
Recent news about the company or person
10k filings
Blog posts
The # of engineers a company has
Whether or not a company is SOC2 complaint
The list goes on, and each company has its snowflake requirements.
No database can provide all the information that is needed.
If we’re honest, the research aspect of these jobs is mundane and tiresome. That’s why, despite all efforts, people may do some of it, but it’s not happening as much as needed. You go crazy after a while…
In addition, there isn’t enough time to find all the needed signals and apply them at scale across many target accounts.
This area of GTM has been in need of serious modernization.
This is where Clay comes in.
Clay’s data enrichment approach
Some data providers are good for some data and bad for others. Instead of getting trapped with one solution, you can leverage the strengths of each provider to assemble the most complete set of data specific to your business.
Clay uses a waterfall approach to find the data across these providers. Check one provider; if data isn’t found, then go to the next one. Here’s an example:
The result is significantly better data coverage with higher fidelity.
This information could be anything from fully enriched LinkedIn profiles to phone numbers, funding, etc.
Now, what about all of those snowflake requirements that require manual research?
Is the company SOC2 compliant?
Does the company deploy its software via containers?
How many warehouses does the company have?
What about divisions?
How many developers are on the engineering team?
What persona does the company sell to?
This is all the information databases don’t have. Still, it could be critical to qualify early, personalize, or use it as a signal to identify companies that may be more ready for your solution than others.
This is where Claygent comes in.
You can use Claygent to find information anywhere on the web and programmatically bring it into your Clay table at scale. No more manual research…
Claygent - Clay’s AI agent that automates your manual research at scale.
You can use it for 3 key use cases:
Data missions: Find & aggregate data that can give you a competitive advantage.
Data insights: Ask any question about the data you collect.
Actions: Orchestrate the data to push it into your tooling to.
Enrich your CRM
Feed personalized emails into your outreach/prospecting tool.
Use Zapier to prepare a research doc for the company you’re meeting.
The list goes on…
Here are some examples of Claygent missions:
You can get super creative with this… literally, you never have to do manual research again.
The community also LOVES Clay
Check Clay out and let me know if you need help (alex.lindahl@clay.run).