[Video] How Clay approaches marketing with Mishti Sharma & Bruno Estrella
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It's hard not to see Clay mentioned when you visit LinkedIn, attend a talk, or chat with GTM leaders. Not only is Clay essential in any GTM tech stack, but Clay is also a force when it comes to their own marketing.
And last week, Clay announced a new fundraising round at a $1.25B valuation, following 6x growth in 2024 and 10x growth in 2022 and 2023.
So, I hosted Clay’s marketing leaders, Bruno Estrella & Mishti Sharma, for a webinar last week to talk about how marketing has contributed to this impressive growth trajectory, and how you can use Clay in your own GTM efforts.
I'm lucky enough to be a Clay investor and have gotten an inside look into how Mishti and Bruno approach marketing. So, I was thrilled to host them and give you an inside look too!
Here’s the video from our webinar:
And while it starts off a bit silly with the song Waterfalls by TLC, it quickly transitions to being on topic!
Takeaways
Clay relies on ecosystem marketing to grow. They try to help creators be successful, which in turn drives their success. Revenue share is just icing on the cake.
Clay is not only building GTM software to change how teams drive growth, but also innovating on the roles they have on their go-to-market teams. Case in point: Their GTM Engineer role.
Clay now describes themselves as a “GTM Development Environment”. But they recognize the need to focus on clear use cases like outbound, as it’s very difficult to scale a horizontal platform without starting with a wedge or niche.
Clay has evolved its GTM motion too: They started with self-serve, then layered in a sales-assist motion—but they didn’t build this overnight!
Clay’s competitors are also complements. This approach means that other players in the space are actually data providers within Clay or integration partners to help you build more workflows—and it’s key to their success.
Chapters
Full transcript is at the bottom of this newsletter
00:00 Introduction and Waterfall Enrichment
03:11 The Growth of Clay and Ecosystem Marketing
09:03 Incentivizing Creators and Experts
11:48 The Role of Go-To-Market Engineers
19:01 Innovating Go-To-Market Roles
26:47 Positioning Clay as a GTM Development Environment
31:37 Expanding Use Cases for Clay
34:21 Balancing Vision and Focus
36:06 Data Enrichment as a Competitive Advantage
46:43 Evolving Go-to-Market Strategies
52:25 MarTech Stack and Integration
54:05 Competitors as Collaborators
57:00 Future Developments and Features
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Transcript from the event
Emily Kramer, MKT1
If you're just joining, I am playing a song and it is TLC Waterfalls. And it's not because I love the 90s, it's for a reason. So if you want to put in the chat why you think I'm playing this song. The winner gets nothing but pride and some 90s street cred. if you know why I'm playing this for this talk.
Emily Kramer, MKT1
Yes, waterfall enrichment is something you can do in clay. Bruno, I didn't tell you I was gonna ask you this. What is waterfall enrichment?
Bruno Estrella, Head of Growth Marketing
Basically, waterfall enrichment is when you can leverage multiple different types of providers to find one data point. So let's say you're looking for a work email. Instead of only relying on one provider, you can try one. But if this provider doesn't have that specific email or industry or phone number or whatever, you keep trying other providers until you actually find that.
Emily Kramer, MKT1
Yeah, you cascade through providers and data and Clay has like a hundred of them. And so you can get way more data than just using one data provider because you can waterfall your way through a hundred. Anyway, I just like to play music at the start of these things, especially on a Friday. Anyway, I have Mishti and Bruno here. They are the marketing leaders from Clay.
I am an investor in Clay and it's been really fun over the past year or so to watch the trajectory of Clay. I'm sure you all have been following along too. They grew 6x in revenue last year and the previous two years they grew 10X. That's like off the charts growth.
They announced a massive funding round at an over $1 billion valuation on Wednesday. And while Clay might seem like an overnight success, they've actually been around a little while, but the last couple of years, since they really narrowed and focused on what they were doing. They're a pretty horizontal platform, but they've been able to narrow down and really focus.
So we're going to talk about that. So what are we going to talk about today? We're going to talk about a few things. We're going to talk about how they do marketing at Clay. And then we're going to talk about how you can use Clay to do better marketing.
.
Bruno Estrella, Head of Growth Marketing
Thank you.
Emily Kramer, MKT1
But I've been talking a lot about ecosystem marketing and ecosystem marketing is what I call using third parties to grow. So partners, influencers, even customers, experts, creators, some of these are synonyms, but you get it, using third parties to grow.
So I think this is the next big thing or the current big thing because we're seeing search decline rapidly. Spray and pray outbound has kind of taken over and that's not working very well either. And so there has to be new channels and new ways to reach people. And my money's on ecosystem.
My go-to example of ecosystem marketing is always Clay. When I'm talking to advisees or other talks, I'm like, go see what Clay is doing with experts and creators and agencies.
So Bruno, tell me more about what you're doing there, how it's worked, how you've approached this and anything else you want to say about your ecosystem strategy.
Bruno Estrella, Head of Growth Marketing
Yeah, I think when it comes to ecosystem strategy, I think the main thing is you first need to see how can you leverage that within your product. I think with clay is kind of like a natural thing because of the flexibility and power of the product right?
And to give everyone context for those that might not know what clay is,Clay is a very horizontal product, which if you jump in there and you create an account and you open a Clay table, it will feel like a spreadsheet in a way. But it can bring any sort of data into Clay and you can manipulate that data very easily with AI and send that data anywhere. So what this enables is it actually enables people to build very creative workflows when it comes to data enrichment and outbound and inbound workflows. in general.
What this actually enables freelancers and agencies to move much faster right? Clay enables them to look way smarter as well, because they can do things like waterfall enrichment, which was previously only done by very robust companies and marketing teams. They can use AI to have very specific types of enrichment and move much faster.
And as a service provider, when you build things like this and you look smart, the next thing is you're going to create content about this workflow that you build, right? because you want to grow your business in general. So that's initially how we actually started to think about this.
Okay, Clay is a very horizontal product. We have initial demand from freelancers and agencies.
How can we make them look really good? When we think of ecosystem marketing, I think when it comes to content distribution through these people, that's something that we always have kind of as a mantra in our team, which is, why does this specific feature or workflow or campaign that we're doing matter for them? And how can we make them look good? Cause if they look good, we'll end up looking good.
Emily Kramer, MKT1
It's in the ethos of the company and the product team as well. It's not just a marketing thing. It's “we want to make our partners, these service providers, these agencies look good. If they look good, they're going to love us even more. We're going to look good” All of the things.
Bruno Estrella, Head of Growth Marketing
Yeah.
Bruno Estrella, Head of Growth Marketing
Exactly. And that goes beyond service providers too, because as you mentioned, Clay, we actually partnered with a hundred types of data providers. as well. So from a product and even business point of view, they come to us for our distribution. The more that we grow, they grow as well. So how can we align these incentives from a business point of view? And how can we leverage their leverage their audience and how can they leverage us to grow their business. So that's the other angle.
From a product and technology point of view, it's something at Webflow as well. It comes with flexibility and power of your product, right?
People will come and build better creative things, that will naturally translate to content creation. But from an internal company point of view, the ethos is like, how can we make these people look way smarter and how can we help them build businesses and practices on top of our product?
I think like one company that did this well, that doesn't really sit within SaaS and technology is Reforge. Early on for those not familiar, Reforge has a lot of courses on product and engineering and product growth. and everything. They partner very closely with industry experts to teach Reforge courses. partners they typically wanted to be associated with Reforge because of their brand. And then that led to more concentration and distribution for their ecosystem too.
Emily Kramer, MKT1
Obviously your product is flexible and you can do anything with it and it's pretty horizontal.
And so that creates people wanting to create content naturally. And I saw that a little bit when I was at Asana, people wanted to show what they had in Asana. And we didn't really have ways to enable people to share that.
But how else do you incentivize these people tactically. and share what you can? I know you all are super transparent. Are you sweetening the deal? Are you giving them a kickback? What's happening?
Bruno Estrella, Head of Growth Marketing (11:18.968)
Yeah, we build a few programs that incentivize them to actually create more content, right? So we created our creators program and there's basically a ladder of value depending on how in-depth in our ecosystem you are.
The first one is our creators program. These are people that are what they want to get involved in clay. Basically, we give them access to tools to create content. We give them assets for them to create content about us. Every time we do feature launches like we programmatically create videos that use AI to get their voices, their avatar, go into this feature and show them how they're using.
So again, how can we make them look smart with a feature launch that it's about us? And then we also give them revenue share for any person that they bring in. So we try to control the inputs as much as possible. Like, hey, you should create content about this. Here's all the assets that you need.
Here's this program and we can give them badges and everything so they can share the word. And then on top of all, we give access to tools and you can also get revenue share from the deals that you bring in.
Emily Kramer, MKT1
Right. I don't think what you're doing would work if you just did revenue share. So people thinking, oh, why don't you just do the revenue? It wouldn't work.
What works is that built into their strategy, they don't just think about, It's not an afterthought. Oh, when we launch, hey, we should let creators know. It's very built into the strategy. I saw how you approach from behind the scenes, how you approach some of the launch announcements, that you've, or not the launch, the fundraising announcements you've been doing over the past week. And partners are, and your ecosystem is built into that strategy. It's core.
Bruno Estrella, Head of Growth Marketing (13:06.221)
Yeah, exactly.
Emily Kramer, MKT1
You're using these third parties to grow incredibly intentionalyl and then in turn they're growing too. You care about that. You care about making them look great. And the rev share is icing on the cake.
Bruno Estrella, Head of Growth Marketing
Yeah. And honestly, this is actually A big learning that we had is most of these people, they don't care as much about the revenue share. What they care about is the brand association with us. So the more that we can bring them in and feel like they are part of this company in this ecosystem, the better for us. And that comes with brand association, own assets and so bringing them in on specific things.
Emily Kramer, MKT1
Right, exactly.
Bruno Estrella, Head of Growth Marketing
Like product launches, and getting feedback on our product. Whenever we launch something, we make sure that they look good. The revenue is honestly an afterthought for them.
So like I said, we have the creators program and then we have our experts program, which is like a much more vetted community of people who know the ins and outs of Clay.
Emily Kramer, MKT1
And that's similar to what you did at Webflow as well. Bruno used to be at Webflow leading growth marketing as well. And at Webflow, you do a similar thing where you have sort of experts who create templates and things like that. And so it's quite similar.
Bruno Estrella, Head of Growth Marketing
Yeah, exactly It's because the product is somewhat similar when it comes to flexibility and power. So we have a lot of demand from agencies, but at the end of the day, we need to vet and make sure that these agencies know what they're doing with Clay. That's when revenue share and source deals and influence deals become a thing.
Mishti Sharma, Head of Product Marketing
I think it also helps to have a really strong mission statement that we're going towards. We have a strong point of view on how we see the world.
And to Bruno's point about the brand association, I think it's like as an agency owner, you have to be on the cutting edge and you have to be helping your clients learn about the like smartest, most technical, cutting edge ways of doing go to market, how they should be using AI. You're almost like their consultants ideally on how to like change and keep up with the times. And I think since we've aligned ourselves so strongly around that, we're not just a transactional tool where you use clay and get emails back. It's so much more than that. It's kind of like a new way of seeing this whole industry.
Emily Kramer, MKT1
On top of that you have this huge Slack community as well. So you have the Experts program, you have the Creators program, and you have Slack community. I believe you have something like 18,000 people in there. So that's another piece of it too.
When I think about ecosystem marketing—and it doesn't just have to be experts or service providers—there's tons of ways to do this.
But I think about it as map out your ecosystem, map out all the players, map out who operates here. And so that could be the agencies, the integration partners, whatever it is, map this out and then say, is there something mutually beneficial here?, Are there incentives we can align? What could we do to make those incentives happen? Could they help us grow? And so you're analyzing that.
Which I think you all have done a great job of, but I hadn't thought about it works really well, especially on the creator, influencer, micro influencer side, when there's that flexibility and power in the product. But that's great way to say, could this work in terms of using micro influencers and creators to grow? Because they have unique things to share. If people don't have unique things to share, it gets pretty boring. I think that's the other thing.
Bruno Estrella, Head of Growth Marketing
Yeah.
Yeah, that's the thing. It's sort of like hard to implement when there's not that flexibility because you're kind of capped out or like, and it doesn't feel legitimate a lot of the time too, because you're like, I'm sharing the same thing over and over again. Yeah.
Emily Kramer, MKT1
Yeah, when people share the same thing, it doesn't work. They don't want to just share a boring, you know, the same old announcement or the same product launch. you know, starter LinkedIn post you gave them. They want to be able to show that something additive and that's what makes it work so well.
I think this is like a good segue. So your product, Mishti you were saying, it's kind of on the cutting edge. The word cutting edge makes something feel so not cutting edge, but I don't know what else to say.
You're pushing go to market technology forward, Clay, as well as others, and just bringing all this to people. AI, automation, workflows, being able to research accounts, all of this happens in Clay.
So, you're trying to do two things. One, You're trying to educate people beyond just the product, how to stay ahead, how to build a modern go-to-market organization. And so of course you're building a modern go-to-market organization.
You've put out a lot of stuff and I've seen it make the rounds on LinkedIn about a go-to-market engineer, a GTM engineer. What is it? Does everyone here need one? Tell me about this approach
Mishti Sharma, Head of Product Marketing
Yeah, I'll just preface this by saying what it is for us is not what it needs to be at other companies. But just to give context on where we started, the idea and need for this really originated in the early days where we were doing a lot of reverse demos. So we would directly be talking to people, telling them to screen share and actually like click on their own screen, use the clay product. And we were helping them, We had to think super quickly and help them solve their problems like in a half hour call.
They didn't need to be super polished trained salespeople. They really needed to be clay product experts. And they needed to be like creative and technical enough to quickly understand, okay, what are the problems of the person I'm talking to? How can we help them? And how can I actually do it live for them or like do it for them after this call and send them back a clay table? And so they ended up basically for us being a mix of a sales engineer, an AE, and an SDR.
Emily Kramer, MKT1
Do you want to show your diagram?
Mishti Sharma, Head of Product Marketing
Yeah, sure. Okay. I'll share this link in chat too. This is the piece that I wrote trying to explain GTM engineering, but these are kind of the functions that we collapsed into this role at Clay. I think the broader point is basically that sales and go-to-market are getting more technical and the old way of having super siloed roles and a bunch of SDRs using a bunch of tools and doing manual work is not sustainable anymore.
One of them described themselves to me yesterday as like the SEAL Team 6. They go in, they're able to quickly understand what you need, do it for you, and also land the deal. So that works really well for Clay.
I think to your point about does every company need one or like what does go to market engineering at other companies? I think it really depends on what what's important at your company. For example, like we had a lot of inbound. So our GTM engineers weren't really having to try as many growth experiments and like outbound experiments as I see some of our customers who are using clay rely on. So for example, OpenAI and rippling are two very different examples. where OpenAI, Clay is helping their rev ops job do their job a lot better, rev ops org.
Emily Kramer, MKT1
So the go-to-market engineers helped them figure out how their rev ops team might get the most out of this?
Mishti Sharma, Head of Product Marketing
Yeah. We're not telling them, start a go-to-market engineering team. Like they don't need that. They are using us. Basically our go-to-market engineers who sold that deal were almost like consultative sellers. You can think of it like they were helping.
Emily Kramer, MKT1
It’s almost onboarding in a way too. Like even before they buy, you're starting to onboard them so they can't live without it. I think you need another circle in that Venn diagram. The point is, it's almost customer success before they even buy.. If you're onboarding someone in the sales call and they feel like they've already made progress, how do you go with something else when you're already in the product and understand it and starting to build it out?
So everyone else is just demoing and prospects with Clay are in the tool. And I think that's the, dare I say, brilliance of it all.
Mishti Sharma, Head of Product Marketing
Yeah.
Bruno Estrella, Head of Growth Marketing
One example that I saw literally yesterday, we were running this outbound campaign and we got this lead replying like, I need to jump into a call in 30 minutes because I want to pitch this to my, to my CRO. And one of our GTM engineers jumped into the call with this like positive reply from an outbound campaign. built a table for them right away. Was like, what do we need to do? How can we help? And then we built a clay table right away.Then they went ahead and pitched the CRO and basically closed the deal.
Which like if you were to take a step back and see how traditional workflows would be, which is like, okay, you got a positive reply from a outbound, right? outbound campaign. You would have to send that to an AE, then do scheduled meeting to show the product. And then the AE will probably bring a solutions engineer later in a different meeting.
Which is basically a way for us to sort of speed up the process of buying the product. That actually provides value from a product perspective too. I can see it's very clear how this can make a huge impact.
Mishti Sharma, Head of Product Marketing
They give us like the most insightful product feedback that we get because they're in the product all the time. So I think the broader message is like, if you're just starting out, probably it's good to hire salespeople that would be your customers.
If you're a legal startup, like hire some lawyers to be your salespeople. You don't have to hire like sales as a standalone skillset, but for us, it made sense to combine that with like people with technical expertise who could think kind of in systems because Clay is very oriented around that and our customers have to do that. But it'll depend for every company, I think.
Emily Kramer, MKT1
Yeah. So originally when you told me that you were doing this or writing about this, I don't remember exactly when it was, I thought a GTM engineer was going to be the person who you think should use clay in an organization. So I thought a GTM engineer was going to be the actual SDR, marketing, rev ops combination.
And so,I know a lot of people because I have these conversations, wonder who should own Clay? Who should own Outbound? Who should own the account research? Who should own this?. Is this more of an ops function? Should SDRs and BDRs be moved to marketing from sales?
This is an age old question, but I think the technology is speeding up these conversations about new roles.
If you try to have the same roles that you always have, whether in sales or in customer success or in marketing or in rev ops, and you're using all of these new workflow tools, AI tools, all of this stuff, clay, it's not gonna work. The traditional roles do not work with the brand new set of technology that's completely transforming how we do marketing and go to market. And so teams need to iterate and think this through.
So who do you think within an organization should own clay?
Mishti Sharma, Head of Product Marketing
It does depend, but I'll actually be more helpful than that by giving some specific examples. So I think, again, the OpenAI example, it's rev ops. Their rev ops team is owning clay. They're doing things like, or Intercom is another example of this, where rev ops is doing extremely targeted list building, passing off qualified leads to the sales team to process.
Or we'll see people like Anthropic, huge inbound lead pipeline, they enrich them and qualify them with clay, maybe even draft a message and then it's like back to sales to do the actual selling. So I think that's the most common one we see, but it's also, it could be in your growth team or like growth marketing team, depending on just how a company's own org is set up.
So in Rippling, for example, their growth team is using clay to run experiments. So they have a very cool, like experimental, hacky almost culture where, the growth team will try all sorts of things. Like one of the things they have done successfully with Clay is run physical gifting campaigns. One of the biggest pains in doing that is figuring out what office location. Where do you send the gift? And so they figured out some really cool stuff with Clay and Clay's AI agent to kind of reasonand figure out where employees were located near offices. And that worked really well for them and they scaled that experiment, but that sat within their growth team.
So it depends.I think the raw ingredients are, Clay gives you a bunch of data and the ability to manipulate it and use it to do whatever growth use case you want. And so I would think about it more in terms of like, what are you trying to, what matters to your business? What are you trying to optimize? Are you spending up outbound? it inbound enrichment? Do you need like better materials for sales, like meeting prep docs and like landing pages? Are you trying to do like growth marketing campaigns? It really depends
Emily Kramer, MKT1
Yeah. Well, I think it depends because everyone can use it. Everyone can use more data about either customers or prospects or partners or whomever it might be. There's so many ways to use this.
This brings me to the next topic,you've evolved your positioning and vision. You now describe Clay as a GTM development environment,
So I'd love for you to talk a little bit about how your positioning, vision, how you describe Clay has evolved over time.
Mishti Sharma, Head of Product Marketing
Yeah, I think a lot of the initial traction we found, Bruno was talking about this, was really through the outbound use case and outbound agencies finding a huge amount of value in what Clay did, talking about us on LinkedIn, evangelizing us, using us to serve more clients and serve them better.
But as time went on, obviously, Clay has always been a flexible tool, and we just started seeing more and more use cases cropping up where people were using us not only for outbound but for inbound or for some of the things I talked about like generating landing pages, generating meeting prep documents, really like lots of different use cases that did not fit within that outbound sphere.
Particularly a lot of our bigger and our first enterprise customers were companies that didn't necessarily need to do a lot of outbound. So for them it was a lot more about they needed the data in their CRM to be reliable and always updated, and they needed much deeper research in there that traditional data providers couldn't get them. So they were very interested in ClayGent.
Or they had huge inbound lead pipelines. And so what should they do with that? I think just as our product and customer base broadened and matured, we just started seeing all of these different ways that people were using Clay that were much beyond that initial positioning of being the best tool for AI powered, personalized, outbound at scale.
And so that's, that has sort of definitely led into the development environment framing where we're just saying that again, like Clay is one place where you can source any kind of go-to-market data. So we're giving you integrations with more than a hundred providers for firmographics, technographics, contact information.
Letting you search multiple providers at once through waterfalls to get better coverage than you would have before. AI agents has been huge. So using Claygent to basically replace a lot of the manual research that offshore BPOs or virtual assistants or SDRs were having to do to research clients. So get that data foundation and then do anything with it. Manipulate it in Clay, connect it to your Webflow, your email sending tool, your CRM.
We're telling the story a lot more as, here is the playground and here are the primitives we're giving you. And we want to show people a bunch of examples of very powerful things that other teams are doing.
I think we've always seen ourselves as a creative tool for growth, but it's, feel like we're landing that now with this picture of everything you can do with the go-to-market development environment.
Emily Kramer, MKT1
Yeah, I love that. But what's interesting here is you're trying to paint this picture of you can do anything in clay. But one of the reasons that I think you were so successful or continue to be so successful is that you didn't try to go after everyone with everything. So Clay can be used by everyone in a company, but you didn't. And for many things, the recruiters can use Clay. And I know they did early on and they still do, but you don't necessarily speak to them in your, in your positioning.
So how do you balance being this and saying our vision is to be this GTM development environment with having clear focus, clear wedge, niching down in who you're targeting, so it actually comes across that you still have a real pain point, for real people and you're not going too broad and like peanut butter, spray and pray, choose your metaphor. How do you balance that?
Mishti Sharma, Head of Product Marketing
So this year we're definitely focusing a lot. If you look at our existing customers a lot of them are kind of top tier scale ups, like OpenAI, Anthropics, Notion, Rippling, Ramp. RevOps Orgs within those using us for really powerful recurring use cases like CRM enrichment, inbound lead, and processing inbound leads, things like that.
I mean, It's been an exercise of looking at our different kind of audience segments and like where we really want to focus. And this year, like we are really focusing a lot on that. Go-to-market systems, rev ops team within those kinds of companies. Not to say we don't care about other teams or we don't care about other use cases, but I think, yeah, that's definitely like the clearest evolution has been from outbound agency owners to this audience.
ButI think it's always going to be like both. Slowly we'll add like more personas and use cases that we focus on too.
Emily Kramer, MKT1
Bruno anything to add there just on kind of like from a growth marketing perspective, how you really approach this?
Bruno Estrella, Head of Growth Marketing
I think for us is we need to understand where we win very easily in the market. right? And how big is this market and how can we land there? And then after we land there, how can we expand the use cases?
And for us, we win within data enrichment. Because if you were to compare how other companies would do data enrichment before, they would buy ZoomInfo, they would buymaybe Apollo or like other tools.
The typical workflow is lyou buy this tool and when you buy tools like this, you buy a specific set of data points that they give you, right? But whenever you try to, let's say I try to find your email, Emily and I don't find within that provider that I had this like one year agreement with, I'm kind of stuck there.
So data coverage becomes bad. What other companies would actually do is, okay, I have this deal with ZoomInfo. Let me actually get another deal with Cognizant or 6Sense, which becomes really hard to manage from both from a capital point of view and also just from a tech stack point of view. So basically what they would do is actually do the waterfall enrichment internally. in very manually way.
Emily Kramer, MKT1
Very manually, like they'd go from one tool, they'd have to build their own waterfall essentially. Or switch tools.
Bruno Estrella, Head of Growth Marketing
Exactly. For us, we deal with all of these, all of the providers. We have more than a hundred types of data partners. So you, as someone who's looking for data enrichment, you only need to create one account, pay either self-serve price or enterprise price, depending on their volume. And then you have leverage, you have access to all of these tools, all of these data points.
SExample, Anthropic, which Mishti was saying, they more than three X their data coverage when they shift from that old approach to this new approach, because they have much more access now.
Then the other point is a lot of, so what we're talking about here are things like the structured data points, right? Like email or phone number or industry or tech stack, but what Clay gives access to now, in addition to all of that with the hundred providers is when you layer AI on top of all of this data context, that's when you actually can add data points that matter for your business.
So you can ask AI to visit that website and tell you if that company is B2C or B2B, tell if they are SOC2 to approve or not, tell you what are the other what are the companies that they mention on their case studies.
So I actually like to personalize and add data points that matter for you to make a decision. And because all of that, we are starting with data enrichment as an industry and it's a massive industry. Many companies are making millions and millions in revenue. And so we start there. We win most of the time because of our competitive advantage.
And then as the customers land and they explore Clay, they realize the power in what they can do. For example, and once some of the questions are here on the chat are like, is Clay different than these legacy providers? And I responded as flexibility and power.
Emily Kramer, MKT1
You responded very diplomatically, which I appreciate.
Bruno Estrella, Head of Growth Marketing
I'll give an example, was chatting with a customer and they actually sell software to dentist offices,
Emily Kramer, MKT1
This is so weird, I gave a talk yesterday and someone gave an example and they randomly said dentist offices. So I don't know, dentists are really having a moment with marketers.
Bruno Estrella, Head of Growth Marketing
Really? Yeah. But yeah they sell to dentist offices. And if you were to try to get data from data, typical data providers on dentist offices, you'll never find because it's not really like what they, what they make money off of. But because we integrate with, for example, with Google maps, they search for dentist offices near me. They bring the dentist offices into Clay using Google My Business and they have all the websites in there. And then they use AI or Claygent our AIagent to tell, hey, visit this website and tell me if they partner with Invisalign. Tell me if they do root canals, tell me if they do teeth whitening, all of these data points that actually matter for you to make a decision. So that's when I say flexibility and power is like what we really strive for. And so we land with a typical data provider when we win because of coverage, but then people start to realize what they can do. And that's when we actually start to expand the use cases. Exactly.
Emily Kramer, MKT1
So In some ways it's classic land and expand, but in a lot of ways it's not. Because I think that companies are so afraid to narrow down what they say.
Let's just use the homepage as an example, what they say on their homepage. They're trying to sell the whole damn thing. And you really narrowed, even though you have one of the most flexible and powerful tools available for go-to-market teams, if not the most with a hundred different data providers and integrations coming in, you narrowed down.
I love that story because this is one of the things I tell founders all the time. Find a niche, really narrow. And I think more so than lots of companies who say they land in explained, You did that really well. You're definitely creating a new category, but you still fit into a budget line item as a data provider. So no matter who buys it within the go-to-market organization, you fit into a line item.
So this is the other problem when people have super horizontal platforms or our new categories. They don't narrow it down enough to fit into a budget line item. You can fit into a budget line item and then expand and show the power and expand across the organization.
Bruno Estrella, Head of Growth Marketing
Yeah, and I think this is especially challenging when you're a marketer and especially when you're a smaller startup and you're dealing with the founder vision, right? And this is something that Mishti and I, we like, especially like earlier on, we're like, this is too, this is too visiony. We need to sort of like make specific, specific copy and call out to what Clay does today and who is it for today. Because sure, like you can do so much.
Emily Kramer, MKT1
Yes.
I've created a lot of content. I've written a lot of things. Some of the things people love the most is my stuff on internal marketing because I think every marketer deals with this.
So any advice on how you got them to realize we need to be more focused on a narrower pain point to get people in the door.
Bruno Estrella, Head of Growth Marketing
I think like For us, it was something that was sort of natural that they realized. A backstory on Clay. Initially, Clay was like an even more horizontal product. It was a spreadsheet that you would integrate with everything.
But then when we started to focus mostly from like a go-to-market point of view on data enrichment, that's when things started to grow. So they all know that focus is a big thing.
But when it comes to like marketing and copy and everything, we always bring back to this, guys, remember when we were too broad? Here's where we should focus now. When you're dealing with founders, you have to sort of be like, we know that the vision of the company is this. We know this like where we want to go. Here's where we need to start now. And here's where we're starting now will lead us to where we want to be as a company. in the next few years. exactly, exactly.
Emily Kramer, MKT1
Yes. map the evolution for them. Map it for them today, tomorrow. I like to do that a lot when I'm helping companies with positioning or with vision.. Here's it today and here's it tomorrow.
Founders they have to pitch the company to investors and investors care about vision and market size. And people that are buyers care about today's pain and solving it. And if it speaks to them as personally and very personally. If you ship your pitch deck, which is how I describe it, or ship how you're selling to investors, you're going to miss the mark with today's buyers.
Bruno Estrella, Head of Growth Marketing
Exactly. Yeah.
Emily Kramer, MKT1
And I think explaining that even to founders can be super powerful.
When you're mapping out positioning and you're mapping out vision, they're not the same thing. Also understanding why founders do this like they're not trying to be annoying, they're just trained to sell the vision and sell the market size. So you have different incentives. So I think recognizing that can be super helpful.
Mishti Sharma, Head of Product Marketing
A couple of our early enterprise customer stories are just like the perfect evidence for this evolution where clearly they started with data enrichment as their wedge and their immediate problem. We were able to win them quickly because they saw that they could triple their enrichment coverage with Clay versus using a single provider on honestly simple stuff like contacting, contact information, emails, phone numbers, firmographics, very basic stuff.
And then they slowly start seeing the vision of, wow, you can do so much more. Like, how can I use AI to go much deeper with enrichment. or blah, blah, blah? But Just having a couple of those stories on hand, I think, helped people visualize that progression and why we need to focus on winning one area first before people think more in a more complex way.
Emily Kramer, MKT1
I think what else you've evolved on is your go-to-market motion. And I think this becomes more and more common as more B2B companies at scale. They have hybrid motions, they have self-serve and they have sales. You all have successfully kind of moved into that. You have SMB customers,solopreneurs, you have huge companies, you've been talking about OpenAI, you have Rippling, Vanta, Canva, all of these as huge customers.
Bruno, I'd love to get a sense of just like, how you've layered in go to market motions and what people should know about doing that or any snags you hit?
Bruno Estrella, Head of Growth Marketing
So I think like as we grew within SMBs, and especially within agencies, but as we started to grow within startups in general, or in agencies, our core UGC loop of people generating content about us helped us get into in-house teams.
Our core go-to-market motion within agencies, they helped us get into in-house teams. And people with in-house teams, they started to get visibility into Clay. And as they go and left to join other companies or if they build another, they went ahead and started their own business, they brought Clay with them. So this is like the core, how we actually got started here.
As we started to land on these larger teams. For you to actually land on an OpenAI of the world or a Rippling of the world, people, one, the use cases tend to be a little different too. As an SMB, you probably need to do a lot of outbound, right?
But as an OpenAI or Anthropic you probably don't need a ton of outbounding. You have so much inbound. So you need to use Clay as more like an orchestration and data enrichment tool for your own inbound workflows. So we started to understand, OK, for us to land into these companies, we need to have a one off sales led motion. That's where the GTM engineering thing came up.
Where we need people that are very deep into our product, they can also sell. So we still have, I think that's like one mistake that I see product like companies do, because when you see self-serve and sales led, right, with enterprise, enterprise is this massive shiny object where like net revenue retention rates are amazing. So there's like a tendency of like shifting 100 % here and forgetting about the self-serve motion. The challenge is whenever you do that, the self-serve motion is basically driven by your ecosystem and community. And if you shut that down, your top of funnel will hurt a lot.
Emily Kramer, MKT1
Yes, they work together really well, we're starting to see it's not really one or the other. It's which do you start with and which do you layer in. And making sure you kind of have pull for one before you do the other. And it's really hard to build both up at the same time. So I see that too.
Bruno Estrella, Head of Growth Marketing
Exactly.
Emily Kramer, MKT1
I do want to take people's questions. There's a question. This should be a pretty quick one. A few people want to know, what is your MarTech stack at Clay. What else do you use besides Clay?
Bruno Estrella, Head of Growth Marketing
We use a lot of Clay. for email. For email We use inflection for email marketing which works well because of our PLG motion. We use Sigma for data reporting. What else? What else are we missing? Webflow.
Mishti Sharma, Head of Product Marketing
Salesforce.
Emily Kramer, MKT
If you weren't using clay for most things, I would be concerned.
Emily Kramer, MKT1
I've seen a lot of questions in the chat about how do you compare to this or that tool.
But what's actually super interesting is that a lot of your competitors are your complements because they literally feed into clay. But how do you tow that line between being complements and competitors and has that made things harder for you? And how do you think about that?
Mishti Sharma, Head of Product Marketing
We actually have a very healthy relationship, I think, with our data providers. So I think it's a win-win because obviously our customers get access to a bunch of sources in one without signing multiple different contracts and going through months-long procurement for every single source they need.
On the other end, though, our providers, we just launched with HG Insights, who doesn't do this with any other company besides Clay. They've been enterprise only. You need an enterprise contract to access them.
But why are they interested in partnering with us? Because we open up an entirely new market segment for them, where they can get access to lots of startups and SMBs that are interested in their data, will pay for it through Clay. And then a lot of the times, and we encourage this, try different providers through Clay. Find what works for you. And if you want to go hard on one of them and you're really scaling, then go direct, negotiate your own contract, and feel free to use your API key in Clay.
We're very transparent with people and just give them the power to do what works for them. And we're not trying to cannibalize or like take away business from our providers. So I think it's actually really cool, mutually beneficial kind of partnership.
Emily Kramer, MKT!
I think people obsess over competitors too much. And I think sometimes competitors can be your compliments and competitors also can help you build the category. So other players in the same space help you grow.
Your diplomacy here is actually real. It's not just them trying to be like, we love everyone. That's part of the strategy. And so I think that's refreshing and I hope that's refreshing for other people here.
Emily Kramer, MKT1
Last one, What's next for Clay What features or functionalities are you planning to develop in the future?
Mishti Sharma, Head of Product Marketing
Yes, I actually, I did answer this briefly in chat, but I described us as like source data, manipulate it, put it somewhere, export it or use it anywhere else you want. In the data sourcing aspect, we already integrate with a bunch of external third-party data providers and we have our AI agent. We're basically working a lot this year on completing that picture. We already have some intent signals, like you can track job changes and promotions, things like that on Clay. But we're going a lot deeper on our intent data offerings. And we are also adding the ability to connect your first-party data to Clay so your own customer data system. We really want Clay to be a place where you can do inbound, outbound, retention, expansion. Those latter two, we're working a lot on opening up the ability to serve. So that's some stuff coming up.
And then also just working a lot on our AI agents, deepening people's ability to use those, doing a lot of stuff that benefits our enterprise customers, like using client scale for recurring large scale CRM enrichment. But I think the intent signals and like first party data is the most exciting.
Emily Kramer, MKT1
Amazing.
So we covered a lot of stuff. To summarize, ecosystem, using third parties to grow, works really well when you have a flexible tool that can be used in tons of ways. And it works really well where you really align incentives, not just rev share, but actually thinking of them as part of your team.
We talked about how you've evolved both your positioning and vision over time. You've evolved your go-to-market motions over time.
You're experimenting with roles and what go-to-market teams of the future look like.
And so all of this is a culture of experimentation, iteration, and not copying other companies' playbooks, which is my least favorite thing that companies do.
You all have this amazing product. And as a marketer, when you have an amazing product, you can do so many more interesting things.
You all could have played this much differently with your products and being more combative with potential integration partners and thinking of them as competitors and all of this stuff. And instead you really embraced the community and the ecosystem. And I think that's only helped. There's so many takeaways here for marketers.
If you're interested in trying clay, there is a free version where you can get a number of credits and just jump in there and play around and, try something simple.
So to that end, Mishti and Bruno, what are some of your favorite enrichments that people can jump in and do immediately?
Bruno Estrella, Head of Growth Marketing
I am personally a huge fan of ClayAgent which is our AI agent, because even before Webflow, I actually had an outbound agency. We used to hire a bunch of VA's to try to find specific data points. And with ClayAgent you can ask for things that are very relevant for your business. So I would recommend ask ClayAgent to do research for you on like things that actually matter for your business. It's like an eye opening thing.
think this and also if you've done any sort of list building in the past, waterfall in general is something that like that was like my big moment too for Clay when I first started like like two years ago, which was like, oh my God, I can actually leverage all of these providers at once. So yeah, I think these two are like my top ones.
Actually I need to say another one. AI formulas is something that like, it's honestly so good. Like If you struggle with like Excel formulas. or having to figure out how you would remove a link.
Emily Kramer, MKT1
You don’t have to relook up what a VLOOKUP does every time and how it works….
Mishti same thing.
Mishti Sharma, Head of Product Marketing
I second all of Bruno's, also our Google Maps integration, think, is super fun because there is no way to find local businesses that aren't on LinkedIn, barbershops, auto dealers, hotels. And with Claygent and the Google Maps integration ,I think people are able to do such cool stuff, people who are serving small and medium-sized businesses as their target audience
Emily Kramer, MKT1
Thank you so much for joining. You all are doing such amazing things. Follow both of them on LinkedIn. Follow Clay. Try Clay!
Bruno Estrella, Head of Growth Marketing
Thank you.
Mishti Sharma, Head of Product Marketing
Thanks.
I rarely watch webinar recordings but couldn't help but sit through this one – great stuff!