Clay’s Kareem Amin on Building the Sales ‘System of Action’ with AI

0:00We are a creative tool for growth. And so creative here means that we give a lot of flexibility and lots of degrees of freedom to people, which means that we give them lots of different building blocks that they could put together. And one key thing that AI is going to help us to is to pre -configure some of these building blocks so you don't have to tweak everything beforehand. So it just lets you get started more easily and it lets you get to kind of your solution faster.

0:42Hello, everyone. Today we're excited to welcome Karim Amin, co -founder and CEO of Clay, which is leveraging AI to help go -to -market teams unleash creativity and be more effective in their work. Clay is one of the fastest growing AI native applications for business. So we wanted to ask Cream what makes it so magical. Cream doesn't see human sales reps going away anytime soon, but Clay's unique approach is about balancing the opposing forces of imagination and automation. We'll hear about how Cream applies ideas from physics and philosophy to sales and where he sees AI tools heading. Welcome to Training Data.

1:28I'm Alfred Linn. I'm a partner at Sequoia Capital and your guest host for today. We're here with Karim from Clay. And Karim was a physicist. He then started his career in product at Microsoft and at the Wall Street Journal. And then he started Clay in 2017. And Clay is a creative tool to help you grow your business. And it's redefining the way we go to market. So welcome. Yeah, thanks for having me, Alfred. All right, let's start with a controversial question. Is AI going to completely automate away the jobs of the SDR? I don't think so. Oh. I think that the way we're approaching it, there's maybe three ways to kind of like look at this.

2:13Well, let's actually step back a little bit to kind of help people understand what the role of the SDR is in the business and why everybody's focusing on it. So if you're in a traditional B2B company and you're selling to other businesses, you have to have an organization of lots of SDRs that do account research and they figure out who you're selling to and do they have the right properties and you augment that with data that you usually buy from other data providers. And so a lot of the cost is having SDRs, a lot of the things that make you less efficient is just having lots of people doing this research.

2:54And that's why a lot of companies are focusing on improving SDR efficiency. So one thing you could do is improve efficiency by giving them tools or co -pilots. Another thing is to try to fully automate them, automate the work that SDRs do. And that's kind of the magic wand solution, connect all your data, connect third -party data, first -party data, we'll figure it out, we'll send the messages, we'll do the follow -up. And then we at Clay believe there's a third way, or kind of like the, it's not quite the middle way, but it is a third approach, which is take the job to be done, and give it to someone who's more technical, such as a revops person or a growth marketer, who can then use all of the tools that AI gives you to find creative ways to reach out to people, rather than automate all the work and magically have that happen for you.

3:46And the reason I don't think it's possible to fully automate it with today's technology is that you need to stand out from the crowd and AI can automate a lot of the work and maybe even be creative in instances, but it can't continuously do that. At the end of the day, you're selling to people and you need to figure out how to reach them and how to stand out from others in the market. So what is your vision for what the future holds for sales?

4:17What does the sales organization look like in the future? We're trying to run this in our own company. It's very meta. We think there will be a go -to -market organization that combines sales, marketing, and customer success. And you're already seeing this happen in the market. At the end of the day, you need a Go -To -MarketOps organization that provides data and supports the Go -To -Market teams. We want to be the system of action in that. So the system of record could be your CRM. It could be data in your warehouse. And that's all the information you have around customers, how they've interacted with you.

5:03That's where the data lives. but then how you act on the data is going to be in clay. So we've described it in a very sort of theoretical way in some sense, like put it in context. Who are some of your customers? What are they using clay for? And what are some of the results that they're getting? Yeah, most of our customers are SMBs that can just sign up and use the product and they find companies and people and find very unique data points about them. and then use that to craft personalized outreach. The key thing with Clay is that you can craft personalized outreach for new customers or for your existing customers.

5:46And so for a lot of the smaller businesses, they're using it to find new customers. A lot of our bigger customers, like let's say Vercada, is using us to create personalized landing pages for people when they come to their website that are customized to them. And so you can see that it's a creative approach to go to market. So they have a lot of inbound and they want to make sure that people see the right value prop when they get there. You can do that with clay. Other people are using clay in more creative ways. So actually we have a customer that sells dev tools, and they use this technique with us actually, where they monitor our status page to see when the website is down.

6:37And the reason why it's down, and then they message the saying, hey, you could have avoided this if you used our product, which caught our attention, of course. Yeah. Yeah. The ecosystem figures out the developer ecosystem, figures out way more interesting things to to do with your product and you might do. Yeah, of course. And just to add a couple more examples, but companies like Anthropic use us to improve their data enrichment. So we've tripled the data coverage that they have at a fraction of the cost. The reality is there's a lot of data providers out there that have information around other companies that are better and cheaper than the dominant kind of market players, but people just don't know about them.

7:26And they don't know how to use them because they don't have great UIs. And through Epic using it, I would think that they would know how to use AI to cleanse their data and normalize and do all the things that they need to do. They do. So they do know how to do all these things. They're using their own models within Clay. Wow. And so what Clay does is it allows you to, And I think this is generally going to happen in kind of like various fields with AI. So I think of the foundation model companies as providing kind of that layer of intelligence. But then if you want to use it in a particular vertical, you want all the, there's a lot of things that you need in addition to the models in order to actually act on the data.

8:14So what we can do is like pull the data from their various data stores, be able to run the model iteratively and also enrich it with lots of other data providers, not just using the foundation models. And then you have to pass it back and generate messages from it. So we're about making that workflow easy to do. And so using their technology, but then making it possible to do the workflow more easily. So how do you envision the going to market stack and specifically the clay stack changing with AI over time? Let me go back to kind of like the mission that you set at the beginning right. We are a creative tool for growth and so creative here means that we give a lot of flexibility and lots of degrees of freedom to people, which means that we give them lots of different building blocks that they could put together.

9:07And one key thing that AI is going to help us to is to pre -configure some of these building blocks so you don't have to tweak everything beforehand. So it just lets you get started more easily and it lets you get to kind of your solution faster. So a couple of things that we're working on is let's say you sign up to Clay. We look at your website. that we can see who your customers are from, any logos or case studies that you have, we can see what you're writing about what you do. And then figure out who are you targeting, how do we find localite customers to that? Let's pre -set up all of the searches and the data that you would need for those types of customers.

9:49If you connect some of your first party data, maybe you connect your wiki or notion, or you connect your emails that you've sent, and we can then analyze that and use that same language when we're sending out messages. And so that does sound a lot like a fully automated solution, but what we do is actually set up all of our building blocks with using AI and then lets you tweak it from there. Other things along those lines are, imagine you connect your CRM and we take a look at who is a good customer, who maybe you've lost in the past and look at what features you're releasing in the future and then message them, maybe you lost someone because you didn't have SOC2 compliance and now you do.

10:33So that's a good person to reactivate. So we should help you come up with these campaigns as well as do them faster using AI. In some sense, the old world of doing growing, go to market is gonna be very different from the new world. And so, you know, talk a little bit about how clay fits into the new world and maybe one of the jobs that it must have risked and what are we going to do in going to mark in the future with Clay? Yeah, I think what's really exciting is the community that's coming up around Clay. We have over 17 ,000 people in our Slack channel. There's a number of boot camps as you know that have come up to teach people how to do Clay.

11:15And I think the thing that Clay is doing is allowing people to try out more ideas for how to grow their companies. And our mission is really, anytime you think of an idea of how to grow your company, you should be able to translate it to Clay quickly. So people who are having a lot of these creative ideas are capable of that, I think, belong in the new world. I think the old world where you are just really good at putting together a bunch of tools to do go -to -market or you're going through the drudgery of kind of like building a spreadsheet and enriching it with a bunch of tools. That work is going to go away and it belongs kind of in automation.

12:01The new world is around how do you figure out how to pinpoint that someone is going to be a good customer for you and then using Clay to do that. You want to talk a little bit about these clagencies that have set up shop and work on clean and helps other companies with growth. I mean, it's such a fascinating ecosystem that has been created. Yeah, totally. I think this comes back again to just something that I say to the company all the time. When we're building the product, you can think of building a microwave and you go and you put how much time you want on the microwave press start and it works.

12:40Super simple, does what it needs to do. And then you can think of something like a guitar, where it has six strings, so it looks very simple, but you can spend a whole lifetime figuring out all the things you could do, you could play different types of music. And while you're playing the guitar, you're also learning music. And I think it's a similar thing in Clay. Really what we're doing is figuring out how to help businesses grow. And it happens to be that using Clay should be the best way to help your business grow. Every single idea for how to grow your business should be doable in clay. That's kind of our mission.

13:17And I think the agencies or clagencies that have come up around like our product is because they are finding new ways to reach customers. And really it's really about connecting customers. You know, you don't want to receive something that you don't care about. And the more research you do beforehand, the more likely you are to reach someone who actually wants what you have. Because no one wants to send messages that you don't respond to or don't look at or that are unwanted. And the only way to do that is to do this research and to come up with new clever ways to stand out from the crowd. And, Claygencies are really small teams, usually two to four people.

14:08Sometimes they're bigger that are using Clay to help other companies grow. The reason they've come up is that they found this to be an incredible opportunity to make money. There's a number of Claygencies that are making over a million in run rate and that have started six months ago. And fascinating. Yeah, and so they're, yeah, they're just finding that this and a lot of other people, SDRs are upskilling learning kind of the techniques of growth and using clay to do it because they know that they can make a lot of money because there's a big gap in the market. I want to move on to product a little bit and you have a clay research agent or a claygent.

14:52And what is that and how does that incorporate AI to help with the sales process? Yeah, so Claygent is an implementation of the React paper. So it's essentially, you know, an AI agent that can make a plan and then execute it using all the tools that we have. It is incredibly useful to find real -time information that normally humans were needed to do it because it's very nuanced. So you might want to say go to a company's website and see how many pricing plans they have. Or see if they have an enterprise plan and a pro plan. Or see if the difference between the pro plan and the basic plan is $500.

15:37And these can all be indicators to you that this is a good company. And what our agent does is it has access to a number of different tools. So being able to scrape a website, being able to summarize the information or using LLM's kind of understand the context. And it also has access to a number of Clay -specific tools, so data around companies and people that we get from other sources. And it uses that to give you the answer to your question. Many of the people I've talked to that use Clay call it magic because it's a magical experience. And in some sense, the question we always have is, like, where is the magic?

16:19Is it in the models? Is it on something that you do on top? Is it the workflow, the user experience? Describe where the magic happens. Yeah, that's a great question. Maybe this is an unorthodox response, but we love those. Yeah. I think the magic and our competitive advantage is not in one single thing that we do, but it is in the approach that we're taking. So we have a belief that sales and go -to -market is a creative act. I think everybody else has treated it much more in a how do we process this funnel as quickly as possible? How do we automate as many of these tasks as possible? and how do we grow the top of funnel and you know every step in the funnel.

17:17And I think that that's obviously necessary, but I don't think it's sufficient. And we will be talking more about this in the future, but actually it's much better to think about this in terms of moments. So you're creating these different moments for people that after a certain And threshold become a way of going from, you know, through the funnel, right? But actually, and you mentioned that I studied physics and electrical engineering, but a lot of these metaphors, at least in the company, are pretty nerdy. But, you know, in physics, there's activation energy, right? So if you're boiling water, you're boiling it and it starts bubbling.

18:04but only when it reaches 100 degrees Celsius, does it start to phase shift, right, to gas? And I think it's kind of similar, like these analogies make sense in other places. So if you're interacting with a brand, you might have like a few moments of delight, but only after you cross like a threshold, do you then become a customer? So, you know, that way of thinking about it allows us to build a tool that's made for turning any of your ideas into reality quickly so that you can test these different ideas to create these different moments. And we treat, we have fun building the product. We literally use kind of the word creative, I've probably used it so many times already in this podcast.

18:51To enshrine kind of that idea that you're playing with it. the company is called Clay, because you're also putting together things, you're building, you're manufacturing, you want to have that feeling of creation. And I think that we've been able to communicate that feeling through the product, and that's why people love it and want to use it, because they feel like they're building something new. I don't know if this is a contradiction or you're holding things in tension, but you're physicists or your scientists, but you're also creative. You're making, you're producing and making music. You talk about clay as a creative tool, but you also talk about the people who use it are going to market engineers or developers.

19:36So how do you think about clay? Is it to opposite opposing forces held in tension or unifying to opposing forces? How do you think about that? I think it is to opposing forces held intention and I think that's where the most interesting things happen. We agree. And I think, you know, like you want to be a creative tool, but also you need to allow people to do the workflow or the process and in volume, right? So you need kind of the automation, but before the automation you have to figure out what is it that you're actually doing and then you need to be able to do it quickly. But we have a lot of values at clay that kind of hold that tension and maybe a small digression here, but there's a famous philosopher Hegel who thought that like the movement of history was about things being intention so you know you have the thesis and then the antithesis and then they create the synthesis and that's how things move forward.

20:52For him it was kind of like a very mystical thing so it's moving towards God but I think that that general kind of like theme is one that we kind of like believe in it Clay. So describe the company culture then. How do you hold things in tension? I've walked through your offices. It definitely has a very cool vibe, and yet people are very serious and working very hard at the same time. But that's my surface view. How would you describe the culture? We tend to describe it as chill, high achievers. And so what that means is, Because we minimize, like we can acknowledge things like anxiety or fear or frustration, but we don't necessarily react to it in the moment.

21:40And we focus kind of on having a clear mind so that we can do great work. And I think you can do great work when you're not constantly feeling in a rush or I think the clarity of mind is really the key thing. So you can see all the different pieces of what's happening and then use that information to commit. So we do it in our interviews, right? One of the key things that we do in our interviews is you collect information and you share information. We're not necessarily trying to judge you in the moment. We're trying to understand who you are. We're trying to communicate what is available and who we are.

22:22And then we can use all of that information at the end to make a decision. And so that's kind of like a common theme is collect information first, and then have the clarity of mind to be able to make a good decision after that. Another thing that might be interesting is we have a culture, actually the value that we use for this is called negative maintenance. So some people are high maintenance, you want it to be the opposite? Some people are high maintenance, some people are no maintenance, and what we want is negative maintenance. So you remove work from people around you, whether it is because you are kind of in a place of like bringing down the tension so that we can actually have that clarity of thought.

23:09The other thing that we do is we I call it, there's always a way, other people call it like make it work, then make it great. And in some ways, that is attention because you want to make, you want to ship something quickly, you want to make it possible for people to do new things. And you also want to do amazing great work that, you know, you spend time, which requires time. And so the balance there, we leave that up to people's judgment. We are, I think one of the important things actually in a company is making sure that you're aligned. The people, the market, what you're building needs to be aligned.

23:49If you're building a rocket ship, you can't make it work then make it great. It needs to be great from the beginning, otherwise something really bad happens. If you're building a go -to -market tool where people need to be able to do their tactic now and actually doing it first before other people is super key. We ship things as soon as we are able to, and then we continue to craft them until they are meeting our standard of great. That is really great to hear. And I think it's great advice for many founders to just know where you are on the attention scale. Yeah, totally. Your vision is very broad and very expansive.

24:31So we're, you know, one way to ask it in OpenEnd is where does it end? And maybe you're saying, yeah, on the ambitious founder, it doesn't end. But, well, tactically, would you ever build an AISDR yourself? So, yes. The way we would do something like that though, need to be similar or be aligned with the Clay approach. And so an AISDR built by our company would have all the different components of an AISDR and give you complete control over each piece so that it doesn't become commoditized, right? It does everything that every other AISDR does. So what does that mean in practice, it means that you need to have a piece that can take in your company data and figure out which industry you're in and who you're targeting.

25:36So let's call that an AI -CP identifier, and we've already built that part. Then you need a second part that finds local likes, and it might connect to your CRM to see who are your best customers, use what company you're like and who you tend to reach out to and then find look likes. And it needs to do that on a regular cadence. And then we need to connect to your own internal systems to see what your style is and how you communicate with customers. And each one of those can work together and can be configured and tweaked so that you can have all the components of what an SDR does, but with full control and with full ability to mix and match different parts of it.

26:22Otherwise, it wouldn't be a clay AISDR. One about an AICRM. I like where you're going with this. AICRM, I think the way to think about it is what is the role of a CRM in a place where there is the ability to use all of this data to take actions. And CRMs have been set up for SDRs to an AES to enter data into them and for people to pull information and have that be centralized there. But if people don't need to be doing that manually, I think the role of the CRM changes and it potentially becomes a less important piece of the stack. In fact, lots of CRMs try to stop you from pulling data out because they recognize that they're the system of record and they want to keep the data in there.

27:28So they have like low rate limits, various kind of things that just get in the way. And I think a lot of companies have started to move their data into data warehouses so that they have full control. So I guess the short answer is I think an AICRM will look very different than CRM's look today. And we are clay starting kind of in a way the CRM is very useful if it doesn't have data in it. And we're focused on finding the data, finding the customers, and then connecting to wherever you store your data about customers today to make that more actionable. And also taking action. You're in some sense, you're a system of action.

28:16Yes. And so when we talk to some customers of yours, they brag about that aspect and the results that they're able to generate. So, but I'm gonna let you brag about some of the results and do AI sales outreach perform as well as humans even though you kind of know that it's a kind of a bot doing it or an email doing it or campaign doing it versus a human outreach. So what you actually, let me reframe that for you. So I think outreach does better when you have better data around who you're targeting and when you have a clever idea of how to get people's attention. So the example I gave you before of looking at the status paid, that got my attention because I knew that the product was down.

29:06So it's about the timing. I knew that there was an issue, and they were offering me a solution. And that got my attention. And they were using clay to do that. So that was extra interesting. But I think what we found from our customers is that people who are, so SDRs who have data and automation that is powered by clay are getting twice as much kind of like results, opens and responses as people who aren't using it. And twice as much. Twice as much. That's huge. It's a huge, huge difference, multiply it across, the number of SDRs that you have. And so everybody who ends up using it, sometimes they kind of have some SDRs get some of the data and the centralized automation through Clay and others don't.

30:00And so they're overperforming by quite a big margin. And I think this is just the beginning. As the market kind of understands the full range of things that we do, at the moment, I think, a lot of people think of us as really amazing data enrichment and really good for outbound. But really our ambition and a lot of our customers are more sophisticated customers are using us for inbound and for expansion as well. And those are the, that's kind of the range of things that you need to do to grow your company. And it's a full loop. So let me give you an example. If let's say that you are a company like Figma and you have a design tool and you're going to release kind of dev mode for developers.

30:51Well you can take a look at how many of the companies that you have are like five designers or more. let's target them. And then let's then go and do outbound to the head of engineering and let them know, hey, your design team is using Figma, and you should also be using the dev mode for your engineering team so that you decrease the back and forth. So here you're combining inbound and outbound in order to expand a customer. And I think that's what's really interesting about Clay is being able to have an ideal like this and action it really quickly. You know, you've given a lot of examples. What's been something that's surprising about clay that people don't quite understand about clay yet?