Welcome Back

In version 1.3 of Clay Hacker, you’ll discover:

1. Scaling Clay to your sales team.

2. Challenges of scaling and how to tackle them.

3. What would I do if I were starting an outbound sales team tomorrow?

4. Preview for next week

Congratulations to Clay on being named one of Forbes's Next Billion-Dollar Startups.

When I first discovered Clay, I knew it was special. So, I started learning it on my own, proved it at my company during a pilot, we purchased it, and then I started Clay Hacker. This is good validation that everything is on the right track.

To recap from last week, I covered creating personalized emails with ChatGPT in Clay, exporting contacts and data, integrating Clay with CRM, and enhancing cold email open rates.

Now, we’ll look at scaling this to the rest of your team.

If you haven’t signed up for Clay yet, you can for free here.

Scaling Clay To Your Sales Team

After starting with Clay yourself (as an AE, SDR, or sales leader) and finding what’s working for you, you are ready to scale this to the rest of your sales team.

There are a few ways to do this and some pros and cons, which I’ve outlined below.

Copy your tables and share them with the rest of the team

Clay makes it easy to share and duplicate tables. So, if you want to quickly roll out what you’re doing to the rest of the team, this is a quick option.

Each salesperson can manage their own Company and People tables, adjust them as needed, and export them to your CRM and/or outbound sales tool.

The pros of this are that it’s quick to share tables, it's easy to send them to other reps on your team and “scale” them, and it gives each salesperson independence.

The cons are that now all your reps are running their plays independently, everyone is importing and updating contacts into your CRM, and it’s hard to track, especially your Clay credits.

Centralize

The recommended way (by Clay) is to centrally manage Clay by your GTM team, including sales or revenue operations.

This centralized person or team can take the Clay tables that work effectively, associate the account and contact owners from your CRM and Clay, and run these across your sales team.

The pros of this are that it’s centrally managed and efficient. Prospects are fed directly to your sales team in your CRM with pre-written emails or responses from your centrally managed inbox in Smartlead.

The cons are that it is now a standardized engine, which can limit creativity and testing. Maybe sales reps want to run a specific table for an upcoming event they are going to or other custom plays based on their target accounts.

Hybrid

I recommend a hybrid model after exploring the decentralized and centralized approaches to adopting Clay for your sales team.

It would be best to have sales or revenue operations take over Clay's day-to-day operations. By having them take over, they can automate tables for best practices that are working and continuously execute them. Examples of these types of tables include:

1. On-going prospecting to target accounts.

2. Triggers for target accounts that Clay finds and kicks off outreach for.

3. Inbound led outbound against website visitors and free trial sign-ups.

4. Finding new prospects for account expansion for current customers.

Your sales or rev ops team can set up folders for company-wide tables and then set up folders for each sales team and then each sales rep. See below.

The pros of this are that you get the efficiency of running proven tables by your operations team while allowing access to those who want it for testing and creativity. You also encourage innovation and create a pipeline of new ideas.

The cons are that sales or rev ops must manage Clay, including credits. There are currently no user-based access controls or limits you can apply to users, so credits are accessible to everyone. However, this should be coming soon.

You will see that a hybrid model is best when you weigh everything. You can automate and scale what works, allowing sales reps to test. After all, creativity is 100% a competitive advantage.

Challenges Of Scaling

The main challenges with Clay are the learning curve and integrating it with existing systems.

Few resources are available yet, and integrating Clay with existing systems typically requires sales or rev ops.

That’s why the hybrid model mentioned above is best.

In this model, Clay is managed by your sales or revenue operations team to automate and scale successful processes, delivering results for your sales team.

Then, you can allow sales reps who want to take advantage of this freedom to test, be creative, and find new ways to get results.

When sales reps find new creative outreach ideas that work, your sales or revenue operations team can scale and automate them.

For those who want to learn about Clay, the best resources beyond Clay Hacker right now include:

• Clay University

• Clay’s Slack community

• Clay Automation

Starting An Outbound Sales Team Tomorrow

If I was starting an outbound sales team tomorrow, this is what I'd do:

1. Set up Clay for automated prospecting and email copywriting.

2. Connect OpenAI to Clay to leverage ChatGPT without using Clay credits.

3. Set up Smartlead for better deliverability and a master inbox for visibility across your team.

4. Automate account and lead scoring to hit the bullseye every time with Clay’s row scoring (more on next week).

4. Automate inbound-led outbound to prospect companies that visit your website, sign up for free trials, event leads, and more.

5. Automate prospecting across key personas to free up your sales team’s time.

6. Automate key triggers at target companies such as prospect's LinkedIn posts, job hires, promotions, and product/press releases.

7. Automate account expansion campaigns for current customers based on 10-K data.

8. Run event-based campaigns to schedule meetings at your next conference instead of hoping and waiting for people to come by your booth.

9. A/B test everything.

10. Provide air cover through cold calls, LinkedIn messages, and account-based marketing.

Preview For Next Week

Watch out for Clay Hacker every Friday. In the meantime, follow us on Twitter and Linkedin.

Remember that we not only want to use Clay to automate finding new prospects and writing emails, but a significant advantage is using its data and AI capabilities to improve our research and find the right prospects.

Next week, I’ll get into more detail about:

1. Why Claygent is your secret weapon for prospecting.

2. Supercharging your research with Claygent.

3. Spotting your best accounts in minutes.

4. Identifying your top prospects.

Thank you for reading,
Clay Hacker 

P.S. If you haven’t signed up for a Clay account yet, you can do so for free here.