CRO Confidential podcast host Sam Blond chats with the CEO and co-founder of Clay, Kareem Amin, about two major topics:
- The evolution of Go-To-Market systems: where we are today with the incorporation of AI, and where we’re headed.
- How Clay approaches GTM itself and how they’ve realized their level of success in such a short amount of time.
Clay has raised $50M with a $500M valuation, and they only have 55 people on the team at this point, a lean company compared to other startups with the same valuation metrics. They’ve achieved this due to the systems they’ve set up and the profiles they’ve hired for. So let’s dive in.
The Evolution of AI in Go-To-Market Systems
Clay’s mission is to help quickly turn any idea for growth into reality. They’re a creative approach to GTM.
The idea for Clay came from the goal of giving the power of programming to more Go-To-Market leaders rather than more technical founders or engineers. Kareem and his co-founder initially explored a bunch of areas, centered around revolutionizing the age-old system all Go-To-Market leaders use— the spreadsheet. It’s the world’s most popular programming environment.
As Kareem and his co-founder started building out their early product and quickly needed to go outbound for their first customers. That’s when it clicked. Clay now allows you to pull data from 75+ enrichment tools and aggregate it so you have a higher-quality data set that you can use to narrow down a hypothesis about who your target customers are and what you should say to them. Clay runs that for you, helping you find new customers, convert customers, or help you expand current customers. It blends AI and SaaS and can speed up the outbound Go-To-Market process.
That’s radically different from how account executives and SDRs have been trained on outbound and Go-To-Market. Back in 2007 / 2008, when Sam joined a company as an SDR, he used Salesforce and over time, they bolted on different systems, depending on the needs of the business and what existed in the marketplace. Zoominfo was one of the first tools for looking up your buyer’s contact information. Then Outreach came along to email a bunch of people at once, followed by Gong for call recording, and so on. We’re starting to see that change with the introduction of AI.
Today, you have a few options for incorporating AI into your outbound Go-To-Market motion:
- Try to automate outbound completely using AI SDRS
- Use AI copilots or similar to tools to make your SDRs more productive
- Centralize the more monotonous tasks and allow AI to automate specific pieces
Clay is the latter by using data enrichment and AI to centralize the power with RevOps teams and SDRs to automate tasks like identifying buyers, doing research, drafting emails, etc. So it’s not that the SDRs aren’t still there, they’re now spending time down funnel doing things that aren’t automatable yet like following up with leads, cold calling them, etc.
What AI is Great at and Not So Great at Today
AI is good at doing research, scoring, generation, and search. LLMs are good at generating summaries or going to a website and figuring out what it does, what market it’s in, and telling you what customers the company has by ingesting the data and figuring it out.
Where AI is still aspirational are things like an auto-GPT. You give it a mission. LLMs are good at generating a plan, and then they try to execute that plan. Kareem doesn’t think it can be fully autonomous there yet. That’s where the promise of automated SDRs is.
The problem with this plan is when it gets commoditized quickly or doesn’t go as planned, how do you get the feedback and make it improve over time in a way that doesn’t lead to something that a human will dismiss? If it does well, it still has to pattern break in some way to get your attention.
To summarize this section, AI is already great at:
- Account scoring and determining who to target.
- Capturing information about companies and doing research.
- Transcribing calls and summarizing data.
- Generating content.
If you aren’t doing at least one of those four things, that’s a missed opportunity to improve and leverage the advancement we have in systems.
However the AI still isn’t perfect. To Sam’s point, “I think we’ve all received emails that I would describe as AI hallucinations. I get an email and it’s so obvious that a human didn’t write this email and it doesn’t make any sense. And then one that I would add in is that I don’t think that AI can yet replace the creativity that I see in one-off campaigns. And I think about some of the most effective campaigns that I have produced myself or observed different companies making, and these are Humans coming up with something that’s very on brand for their product and company that has either never been done before or like never been done to the way that they are executing it. And I’ve talked about a lot of these examples on this show in the past, but I think it’s it’s hard to replace the sort of creativity of one off campaigns to really stand out through these systems today.”
What’s Next With AI
Even two years ago, many of the above things weren’t possible. So, what can we expect over the next 12-24 months? First, the things listed above aren’t being fully applied across industries, especially not in a coordinated way. There might be an AI scoring tool, but it’s not connected to messaging.
There’s potential to put it all together into a full end-to-end GTM campaign. It ingests all of your CRM data and maybe marketing materials and website, looks at the information, identifies the best customers and what makes them a great customer, and finds more customers like that by preparing campaigns based on your value props, and you adjust them with the creative.
We will become more data-driven on these GTM campaigns, using AI to generate them, and humans to tweak them. That’s the next 12 months. The following 24 months, “I’m staying open-minded,” Kareem says.
How AI Influences the Org Design or Structure
Will functions continue to exist within the organization with AI? Can we automate entire functions? Does it influence where they report or the size of the teams? These are some of the questions that only time will tell.
Kareem believes that teams will likely become structured differently, with GTM teams doing the creative thinking, planning, and human elements. And a GTM operations team that uses tools and AI to facilitate the work of the GTM teams.
With AI creating a cohesive message across the entire customer journey, we might see the ability to consolidate marketing, sales, and customer success. This means these teams are thinking about the customer journey together rather than as siloed teams.
Compression of team sizes is already happening on the engineering side. They can accomplish more than they historically could in terms of producing products faster. If you apply that same mindset to GTM, we might not need an army of SDRs to accomplish the same activity. With the introduction of Outreach, we thought an individual SDR would be 5-10x more effective. Really, we saw the opposite, with SDR teams growing even bigger.
Companies today aren’t trying to be more efficient. They’re trying to grow. Today, with AI, soon you’ll likely need to hire people and compensate them better because AI will take the ‘routine’ work out of it, and your new workforce will be asked to get more creative.
How Clay Acquired Customers So Quickly
Kareem quickly realized that agencies were trying to help people do prospecting, which was an acute pain for them because they had to prospect themselves. They became a very active user base, and Clay focused on them to both help improve the product and grow a customer base as quickly as possible.
What’s universally applicable here is that if you find a customer segment that allows you to get momentum, not just revenue, you can improve your product faster. That might be a subset of a larger type of users, but if you don’t go for this initial smaller segment, it stops you from growing.
Clay leveraged these existing agencies by giving them room to create content about how they used Clay and what they did to succeed. This helped them get more customers and, at the same time, showcased Clay’s product.
Broader reach meant more inbound, and more inbound meant more people using the product and more feedback to improve it. For the best users, Clay lists them in their recommended experts list. So if a new customer needs help to launch a creative campaign, they can hire them through Clay.
It’s a flywheel of people trying to use Clay to get customers, customers finding out about Clay, those people becoming experts themselves, or sharing feedback on how to improve the product.
Clay deliberately nurtures these happy customers through referral and affiliate programs. But they take it a step further by investing heavily in their brand. For their creators, people who generate content, Clay sends them a little Clay figurine of themselves. It’s a creative way of showing they care and making it fun. You want to do things that make you stand out, things that only your brand can do.
