SaaStr 841: Going From Blobs to Billions. Clay's Co-Founder Breaks Down Inbound, Outbound, and AI-Powered Sales.

0:00Welcome to the official Sastr podcast where you can hear some of the best Sastr speakers. This is where the cloud meets. Up today on the Saster Podcast. This is trying to understand who's signing up to your product, figure out if they are a good prospect qualifying them, and then trying to score them to determine how good of a prospect, where they land. And this is, by the way, workflows that Anthropic, Figma, Cursor are all using creative power. And then, like, if they know who they are, they are a good prospect, you've qualified them accordingly. how do you then create some language for them over LinkedIn or email or whatever to reach out to them and get them going, you know, and then do that very quickly.

0:39And so that's what you're trying to accomplish here in like one comprehensive workflow.

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1:59See you there. Saster Annual and AI Summit 2026. It will rock.

2:08Everyone, welcome back. Let's go. I'm excited. We're in here. He came all the way from the States for you guys. So give him a round of applause.

2:19Just by show of hands, who has seen like a clay billboard? any clay anything okay you got some fans already let's go all right so we're excited we have room here today we're going to take some questions so if you want to send me your questions on the live stream uh we'll do some spicy questions at the end yeah okay great and keep it we want to make this very engaging we want to make this very you know conversational and interactive so you know bring out your hardest hitting questions like yeah okay so this will be fun so for those who maybe don't know clay yet or haven't seen the billboards you know a bit of a reputation for like going viral doing all these like crazy marketing things like i know you guys have sent people like clay figures of themselves like you've done a bunch of crazy things like is this just you telling the team like where does and your shoes are even like The shoes are great.

3:16His shoes are great. Yeah. Like everything is brand. So like where does all that come from? Well, maybe I'll just explain Clay for just a minute. While I have some baseline and understanding if you aren't familiar. Basically, we are trying to help everyone in this audience grow their business. At the end of the day, everyone here has a TAM. You're just trying to find the delta. And the only ways you can do that are by converting your inbound, by going and getting outbound or taking your existing customers and expanding that. And we help you do that by giving you all the data providers in the world, giving you LLMs to improve that data and find data points that no one would ever have, like is a company SOC2 compliant or is it B2B or something or something way more interesting.

3:59And then we let you use those as primitives to run growth campaigns and the most creative growth campaigns so we can talk about some of those. And those could be like personalized ads or outbound campaigns or direct mail. And Clay becomes the vehicle by which you run your most creative growth ideas. So coming back to marketing, yeah, we, I will say, brand is very core to our company. We bought Clay.com. Before any revenue, we have a full site in-house. Actually, we contracted with him originally. And this is, again, we almost had no revenue. You have a Clay artist in-house. Yes. But originally, he was a contractor.

4:40And we had almost no revenue. And he had a very innovative business model. So he would like make these blobs. And they're beat of the blobs. Boat blobs. But he would have like, he would say, okay, you can get the blob. But it's like$3 ,000 and you can rent it for a year. And then you'll have to renew it again next year. So it was like SaaS business model for like clay nation blobs. But I was obsessed with the blobs. We were all worse. So we like paid for the blobs. We had a brand of like 15 people. and yes like like there are a lot of inventive things we do on marketing and so but all of these things we don't do just because for the sake of it we do it because it's like very cordless and it's very authentic to who we are you wouldn't hire that a brand or have the playmation artist or pay this much money from blobs every year sure if when you don't even have revenue if it wasn't like cordy right we do it because it's like what matters to us and it's beautiful and like that's really representative and over time as the business has worked it's turn into like a real differentiator on the very creative marketing campaigns that we do now generally speaking i find that b2b marketing is very boring extremely boring and generally people look at like i just saw philip back there he's a cro personio and we had dinner recently and and you know people would look at philip and i mean this with love of my heart people will look at him and be like hey you know you probably get your news from gartner and and and like forrester and that's not true you know like he do scrolls linkedin just like the rest of us and so how do you communicate refill up or amelia or any of these people in a way that feels authentic and fresh and interesting and and and keep that you know and do that with like and do that with some pace and so we're trying a lot of different things more recently we're doing more like like my cfo and i are doing these videos where we analyze the roi of marketing i've seen i was like oh they're talking numbers on the linkedin yeah yeah or like hey hey karen like I want to go to the Super Bowl with five prospects and they'll cost$60 ,000.

6:36And he said no. And those are really resonating and getting a lot of traction. And so we're doing a lot of these things that feel authentic to us and help us connect with the audiences, but in new and innovative ways. And I think the reason we're able to do this is we actually hire very non-traditional people to do marketing. Let me ask you this. On all that, is it working? Does it show up in the numbers and the revenue? Do you guys get a lot of inbound from it? How much of that translates back into the business? Yeah. So, I mean, it obviously depends. some are hits and some are flops but when you're being this creative that's going to happen what I will say unequivocally is we are capturing Mindshare a lot like you just for the last month I've been in Europe pretty much everyone I've interacted with has actually seen these videos with me and our CFO and they bring it up you know and the hardest thing to do in B2B marketing is actually capture Mindshare because it's so competitive there's so many companies out there forget even in our own space but generally so many things are happening and And obviously people are on TikTok and reading the news and there's all these things going on.

7:35So the number one thing is, can you capture a mind share? Can you do it obviously in a way that's consistent with your brand? And then like, how do you translate that to people? And so we do see that in it's accelerating deals. It's bringing in new inbound. It's staying top of mind. And when we have a moment when people need Clay, like they're ready to do something. I want to touch on recruiting real quick. And then I'll let you do a demo for folks just so that they can understand Clay conceptually before we do the rest. The thing I see all over LinkedIn for like the last six months is we're hiring a go-to-market engineer.

8:06We're hiring a go-to-market engineer. And I was like, didn't Clay like invent? Like literally like just manifest the go-to-market engineer into being? So first question, well, one, congrats because that's like all I see on LinkedIn. Second, one, okay, let's just do one. How'd you come up with GTM engineer? there the origin was actually i was coming up with a name for our own sales team the founder led sales for a while and was like okay let's build out a sales team to be honest at the time no one really understood clay in fact amelia backstage was like i was like why aren't you guys using clay yet it's a mess of products obviously this can help but he's like she's like it's too complicated which is a narrative that we're working on but at the but certainly it was too complicated two three years ago when we were selling the sales team despite it being a go-to-market product.

8:56And so I was like, okay, why don't I find people like me who are like growth and ops people, people who are like our customers, and it's very like product oriented. And we really need that product kind of life cycle and feedback loop. And so we need, that's like the mold we were looking for. And so we tried that as the approach. We tried that as the approach and that profile really worked for sales. And now our sales team is 35 people. We're still hiring those people to do our sales. And of course, we have some traditional AEs. But when I was looking for a name for that to capture that, Kareem and I were discussing it and GTM engineer felt appropriate.

9:32You didn't want to do FE? Well, it's not really a forward-to-point engineer. Because a forward-to-point engineer is almost like professional services where they're actually going on site and setting it all up and whatever. This is a sales role, to be clear. But it's coming from a very different background and a very different thing. Now, the thing is, is no other company can do this, actually. Because it only makes sense for us because our product is clay. And if you're a Figma, you're not going to have your designers sell Figma. Two, three years ago, that's what we started as. What we realized in the market is that people were hiring people who looked like our salespeople to use Clay internally as the ops team.

10:06And so what it became is, okay, who are the people using Clay and other tools like it to build revenue systems using automation and AI, to run growth experiments, to grow this? And maybe they're building their own software internally. Maybe they're using Clay. Maybe they're, all of them are operating with a product and growth mindset. They're iterating quickly. They're experimenting quickly. That became the thing. And then we obviously like enabled that and fueled that. And now we actually even have a go-to-market engineering marketplace that we've launched to match talent to the top companies.

10:37Because now the best companies in the world from Cursor to Framework to Webflow to OpenAI are all hiring for go-to-market engineers. And so we are matching people in our community to get those jobs. For folks to, either hiring whatever they call it go to market engineer or fd may if they want to hire an fde what should they look for because like i think the thing for me and like for probably a lot of folks in this room is like people don't have this skill like it just doesn't exist so the way i think about it and maybe even for the explicit question i think what we've just generally seen is the way the org chart in sales used to look like it still looks like most companies.

11:15You have SDRs or prospecting, AUs or closing deals, run-ups or maintaining systems. The issue with this is it operates a lot like an assembly. Assembly lines aren't really good for sharing learnings and scaling ideas. And so the new org chart that we see in all these cutting-edge teams is you have go-to-market engineers, a few of them, who are building product, basically, using clay or building their own or coding themselves, sometimes with a data scientist even, to take some of the best ideas that these sales team people are doing and scaling them. And running experiments to see what works and what doesn't work.

11:47And then just before you do the demo, when you're personally evaluating candidates for go-to-market engineers in-house at Clay, what's the number one thing you look for? I'm looking for creativity is the number one thing. Okay. And that can usually be demonstrated in the take-home. What is this take-home? Like you give them homework? We actually have take-homes for every role at Clay. Okay. But the take-homes could be very different. They could be a lot of different things. it could be like hey like i hear three companies come up with three creative outbound campaigns for them and build a play and let's and let's and do you do you comp candidates to do that or expect them to do that if they want to get the role um it depends generally speaking take-homes at clay are not compensated it's just a part of the process if it's for some reason particularly long we will compensate okay um and a lot of roles like uh by the way the woman sarah you were working with she her first day was actually only yesterday because before that when you were actually working with her she was on a work trial at clay for two or three weeks she wasn't even full-time okay she's on a work trial where we were trying her out i see okay and is that standard for like any role at clay you guys do a trial um in the early days we would do work trials for almost every role okay now we don't because now we know how to interview people and we have a better understanding but there are certain roles like sarah's yeah where it's hard to interview for it's hard to evaluate for in a traditional process.

13:10So we opt to do a work trial instead. All right, let's give people a little context. Varun's going to come to the desk, Varun a swap. It's a demo. Wow, I'm getting upgraded, guys. So we're going to just do a quick demo to get people an understanding of Clay and get a sense. But it's going to be interactive. So what I want is a couple of volunteers to basically give me their LinkedIn URL. One person, do you know your LinkedIn URL? this guy okay this guy right here that's you okay perfect wow 15 000 followers popular man okay we're gonna take

13:50okay we're gonna do that okay amazing anyone else want to volunteer this francis francis was equal

14:02okay

14:06okay so let's get into it all right so basically what I'm going to show you is like an inbound workflow now remember we talked earlier there's only a few ways you can grow a business right inbound outbound and expanding your existing customers inbound and outbound are actually the same thing it's just where's your lead originating from right and so I did that form with you guys to get like something as an inbound point. And we're going to walk through a workflow that covers 70 % of Clay's functionality. And we'll give everyone a really good overview. Okay, so let's say you signed up for this thing.

14:43And we've gotten a few people here. We got Milo, we got Michael, and we got Francis. Amazing. And look, we got a bunch of information about these people. So we know we got Francis right here. He's signing up at Raida.co. We got, he's an angel investor, CEO of Raida. we got a bunch of info about him we have milo over here he says he's a family dad very sweet founder we got a lot of information on milo he's in denmark okay i look this right person 15 611 followers so still still just as popular on clay okay great so we got a bunch of information and let's see what more we can find so we got a linkedin profile we got the companies that they work at we got the domain and and we're getting some more information okay so we know that francis is a founder.

15:28We know that Milo is doing growth, which we know. We know that Michael is a CMO. And we actually have all their past experiences here too. So we can search through this however we want. We know every single title and job they've ever had, basically. This is obviously like a wealth of information that we can do things with. And then we check to make sure that we know their domain is correct. And then we're actually going to find out how senior is the role, right? So imagine someone signing up for your product. Do you want to know, are they like a C-level person or are they like something else? so we have like an ai column here that's analyzing the job titles to determine how senior they are and then categorizing it into like cxo vp director head of something like that because that's pretty useful qualification and you can see the ai prompt over here on the right and how it's like qualifying it into all the different and all the different kind of uh levels of a role and then we see okay how big are these companies to help qualify it sales head count like how many people are on the sales team, that's pretty useful.

16:28We can even scrape their website and like get a bunch of information from the website that then you can search off that and be like, do they have information on the website that could indicate if they're a good fit? As an example, if I was last night, I was talking to someone running a benefits company. And you can imagine they would want to scrape a company's website to determine, hey, are you what benefits are you offering your employees? Then you want to get your work email. So we have Francis's email, Michael's email and Milo's email. And we were able to do this because we have a waterfall.

16:55And so at Clay, we're able to use like we have 150 data vendors in Clay. And we do this thing called waterfalling, where we try lots of different vendors to get you the data. And if it doesn't come in the first one, we try the next one. And then we'll also validate the emails as well. And so you can see that through all of this, just expanded the waterfall right now, basically, yeah, I just expanded the waterfall. and you can see that that's what enables us to get like the highest coverage because we try so many vendors to make sure that we are like getting the right email. Okay, so that's great.

17:27And then we want to like, okay, find something about the company that we can use in email to reach out. And so we got like the mission here for Rada and Y-Step and Riff. We got like a one-liner about each of them. I can show you even the AI prompt that we wrote here. So you're writing a sentence about a company who would understand what they do and you're giving a lot of constraints so that you can have a one-liner that you can include in an email. You're also seeing, okay, who their customers are. And then I am, what I'm doing here is I'm actually going to create a meme. And so for all these people, for Francis, Michael, and Milo, they're going to get a LinkedIn message soon.

18:02And I can show you what the meme is for the meme to make it, you know, even more engaging. I'll show you guys what the meme is too. Can you fix something that's not a meme if they don't want to do a meme? Well, I have a nice message for them too. I guess. We have a meme for the vibes and a thoughtful line for the sale. We're creating a meme here. You can see we're just actually doing a random meme selection and then taking the data from their LinkedIn profile to personalize the meme for them. We do that. Should we look at the memes? Okay, so this is Francis' meme. Yaga anymore? That seamless global IT onboarding.

18:43Raida's got you. Pretty good. Let's look at Michael's. Wow, Michael, 2x exits, new categories, keynote vibes, mental riffs. Pretty good. And let's look at Milo's. Let Milo build momentum. Let's go. So that's pretty good. And then we're actually using Clay to do a lot more very creative research on websites to get new unique data points, right? So we are doing like GTM research. We can see what this one is trying to do. So like get a lot of unique information about their go-to-market strategies that you can then use in your email outreach, right? Because, hey, you know that your outreach, this is the way you do go-to-market.

19:28Here's how you can use Clay to accelerate that, right? So it's very tailored. You also probably want to know, hey, here are some unique data points that these businesses care about. And then you can, in your email, be like, hey, like Clay can help you and find these unique data points in these ways, right? Other qualification details or like your funding information. We get that from a lot of different sources. So again, you can see how we have a waterfall from harmonic and French bass and things like that. People sort through all this, right? So let's say this is like your campaign. People are signing up.

19:56Like, what do they do with all this next? Right. So this is basically a very comprehensive workflow to do a number of things, right? This is trying to understand who's signing up to your product, figure out if they are a good prospect, qualifying them, and then trying to score them to determine how good of a prospect, where they land. And this is, by the way, workflows that Anthropic, Figma, Cursor are all using play to power. And then like, if they, you know who they are, they are a good prospect, you've qualified them accordingly. How do you then create some language for them over LinkedIn or email or whatever to reach out to them and get them going, you know, and then do that very quickly.

20:31And so that's what you're trying to accomplish here in like one comprehensive workflow. And then you even score it. So you have here, like here are the scores for like whether this is like a good fit and you can like set up a very custom score. And then lastly, we're coming up with a couple of things here, right? So what you've also done is we've created a research brief for the sales rep who's going to take the call. So if I go here, I'm going to see Michael's like research brief. And this is like a full document that's been created for the sales rep about Michael and his company that they can read prior to their like meeting.

21:05Will this tie any of their data or is this all just what you found on like the internet? this is all what's online yeah this is all what's online and what they submit in the form and so you have so much here right you have non-traditional data points that you can suggest you have like um obviously a bio on them you have like all this research that's been done you have financials on the company so we can look at another one maybe we look at um milos so again like a very comprehensive brief here that you can you can bring up and then that's like call prep for the rep you can send the Slack message and then you can see here here's the message and so you can send the message over LinkedIn.

21:46Boom. And then lastly, you'll want to update this in your CRM. And so you can check, hey, have they already engaged with us in any way? If not, here you go and then updating the record in the CRM. CRM agnostic? Yeah, we can use any CRM. So this is basically a very comprehensive workflow for inbound that covers a lot of different basis from qualification to scoring to crm upload to sending them a message um and you can pretty much implement immediately to kind of like um get your inbound kind of working and so many companies like for example cursor um they had so many free users using their product didn't know who they were and saw an immediate revenue uplift because now they knew who they were they could convert them into revenue so it's not so it's not just you know like trying to get newly into the funnel it's so they can use it to like nurture basically yeah on qualifications yeah and so really i mean it's very fun with yes totally inbound or taking your existing customers and dramatically upselling them figuring out where they work how can you how can you upsell them there and then putting them into this funnel and then reaching out to them all right do you do you still want like two more volunteers oh to do some growth act let's do it yeah if there's two new volunteers there we're I actually bring you up on stage.

23:01Well, let's just give them a heads up on what's going to happen so they know what they're signing up for. Before you raise your head. Well, we're basically going to do some live growth hacking. And what that more or less entails is you should ideally have some growth problem in your business. And we will help you with it, basically. And so you would come up, tell us a little bit about your business, tell us who your customer is and what growth problem you have. and we will try live to brainstorm a solution. Yeah. So with that being said, we need two people. So if you still want to, so one and then do another.

23:42We've already done yours. Well, there's one in the back. Oh, yeah. Come on in the hat. Hey, guys. One is Martin. Senior Marketing Operations Manager. I'm from a company called Personify Health. Okay, great. I work in marketing ops, but working really closely with SDRs, trying to roll out agents. Okay. And what is the main problem you're trying to solve? Is it the SDR outreach? I mean, for us, the main problem that I'm dealing with at the moment is, A, how we implement those kind of AI agents. We're still kind of primarily human-based because of SDRs. The problem is about kind of phasing our SDRs and phasing an agent, how to do that.

24:26Yeah. And the time to roll this out, right? It would be me doing this. So I think it would be helpful to kind of understand what is the most manual work they're doing right now. And then we can decompose that, how you can build that. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think the most manual reach is a lot of discovery for bringing in top of funnel through marketing. Got it. And like the complicated bit, why it's manual is because there's like complicated account hierarchies or things like different marketing segments. Yeah. Okay. So I think for this, this, by the way, I think is a relatively straightforward workflow you could build in clay.

24:57This would obviously be like different workflows for different audiences. But basically, like I actually used to work in health insurance. So I like deeply understand that market. You know, this is a market that's actually very offline to some degree, because a lot of health insurance brokers in the US are working in brokerages that are mom and pop brokerages, right? So for that, what I would recommend is actually you can use Google Maps or Open Mart to get a lot of the small health insurance brokerages. and then you can use that to reach out to them and then you can use Clay to find the people who work there.

25:29Now again, because they're offline, a lot of them are not going to have LinkedIn profiles is my guess. But a lot of these health brokerages will actually have like an about us page on their website with their team. You can use Clay to scrape the website and use AI to analyze it to tell you who all the people are and then use Clay to find the work emails. So now it'd be like a workflow that you would set up here. And if you don't have the bandwidth internally, which it sounds like you don't, you could hire like an agency and we could recommend some that could help you do this. That's great. Thank you.