The Rise (and fall?) of Clay
If all outreach is "personalized," is any?
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If you’ve been living in a cave for the past six months, or just haven’t been living in a LinkedIn marketing influencer echo chamber (same difference, right?), you may be unfamiliar with Clay. No, not the AI-powered personal CRM, although that one looks pretty sweet. This IS RoboCMO, so I’m talking about the B2B Clay - the one that positions itself as the lynchpin of any scalable, personalized outbound marketing strategy. And is it ever!
I’ve never seen the LinkedIn marketing community go so bananas for a product. Not a day goes by without a new video, produced by Clay users (not employees) showing off yet another amazing sourcing, enrichment, and delivery workflow they’ve built in Clay. It may be the greatest B2B PR campaign of all-time.
“What the hell is Clay?” you ask. It’s an outbound marketing product that allows you to create tables of companies, people, really anything. There are three core features:
All-in-one traditional data enrichment
Clay allows you to bring in data about companies and people from a ton of different data providers. Instead of paying for annual licenses to some combination of Apollo, Clearbit, Builtwith, Prospero, etc… you can access them all and just pay for usage. You can also design waterfall logic for any column, so that you can find, say, a business email by first checking source X and only check sources Y and Z if needed (saving you tons of cash).
AI Data Production
Your tables aren’t limited to SaaS data sources. You can also tell Clay to perform Google searches and return the results in a row (e.g. return the top 100 urls that rank for the search “Austin, TX plumbers”). Or to have Chat GPT write custom emails or call scripts for each row using other columns in your table as source data (“craft an intro email based on the company description in row X, the person’s job title in row Y, and these three value props from my company”). Or prompt the AI “Claygent” (your 007-esque web scraper) to do almost anything you want based on info it can find on the web and in your tables. Claygent is wild.
Destination-agnostic output
Once you’ve built your tables, you can action that data by pushing it to your CRM and all the usual suspects for email sequences. But you can also push it to LinkedIn outreach tools, AI voice tools, and really anywhere that has an API.
But why read about it, when you can see it? It’s difficult to scroll LinkedIn these days without being bombarded by people showing you how to do more awesome stuff with Clay. Here’s just a small sampling:
Mike Ellis on how to automate personalized email outreach to prospects based on the content of their websites and social profiles.
Patrick Spychalski (Clay) on how to use RB2B and Clay to setup automated, personalized emails to your website visitors.
Josh Whitfield showing you how to use Clay and Bland AI to make customized AI voice calls as email reply follow-ups.
Or dig into an hour long greatest hits collection of power users most impressive workflows.
Clay is really in its own category. The flexible, “make a table/column for anything” nature of the product, the ease of integration with any other tool in your stack, and the way it allows users to easily harness AI to do their dirty work on autopilot make it uniquely suited for outbound marketing campaigns.
A few weeks ago, I wondered aloud on LinkedIn whether Clay enabling so much personalization of sales outreach might just erode the effectiveness of personalization altogether. If every sales email I get includes context from my website or LinkedIn profile, do any of them stand out? Do I, the recipient, care that they are AI-generated?
I think personalization has generally held two types of value to prospects. Some times you receive outreach that shows the sales rep has spent time learning about you. They share information that (until now) could not be gathered without them having spent time specifically researching you or your business - thoughts on your social posts, connections you have in common, or some quip about your alma mater’s basketball team. The fact that they have spent that time signals to you, the prospect, that the salesperson believes you are a great fit to be their customer, presumably because their product can provide you with an unusual amount of value. We’ll call that type of personalization ‘Signaling value.”
There’s a second type of personalized outreach I’ve received where their salesperson speaks directly to my specific use case for their product and the value it would provide. They’ve dissected my landing page and shown how they can improve it. They’ve done a quick demo of a feature the product, finding data on my prospects. Let’s call this type “Showing value.”
Signaling value is going to be worthless very soon, if it isn’t already. In a world where I can have Claygent craft an email with contextual jokes about the city, school, and recent posts of every prospect, that kind of personalization will signal nothing, and prospects will know it.
Showing value will continue to be…valuable. But the bar is going to get way higher. Cute little AI-edited videos that feature my name, my pain points, and how your product addresses them aren’t going to cut it. Sooner than later, I will open my inbox to recordings of customized product demos, ready to watch. No forms. No suffering through multiple “qualifying” sales calls to sniff the actual product. More “Your company is a great fit for our product. Here’s what it would look like if you bought it. I’m here to answer any questions when you’re ready to talk.” Companies that embrace that level of openness and time to value realization will crush their cost of acquisition and dominate the market. Those that don’t will only survive if they have a product so good that customers are willing to go through the now unthinkable sales process of the pre-AI era.
I, for one, can’t wait.