Welcome Back

In version 1.1 of Clay Hacker, you’ll discover:

1. Welcome back (and why John Barrows says reps who learn to use Clay and AI will be in the top 20%)

2. Clay Hacker poll

3. Getting started with Clay as an AE

4. Creating a Company table

5. Finding people at your companies (Creating a People table)

6. Applying effective outbound strategies to Clay and AI

7. Previewing next week in Clay Hacker

In last week’s newsletter, I shared more about why I started Clay Hacker, my journey in outbound sales, upcoming topics in Clay Hacker, a Q&A, and additional resources if you are new to Clay.

A few days ago, I saw a post by Adam Robinson on LinkedIn, in which he and sales legend John Barrows discuss the future of sales.

They both predict that AEs learning to use Clay and other AI tools will become the “Iron Men” (and Women) sales reps and be in the top 20%.

This is because these reps understand and will learn to use AI to make them more productive and enhance their results.

The challenge is that Clay and AI are difficult to learn and even harder to enable at scale, and there isn’t much thought leadership out there.

John Barrows describes Clay Hacker’s mission: to help sales reps learn Clay, AI, and other innovative tools quickly, become Iron Men (and Women), and maximize their earnings.

If you're motivated and ready to learn, let’s jump in.

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

Clay Hacker Poll

Getting Started With Clay As An AE

To get started, sign up and explore the free version of Clay. You’ll have thousands of free credits (you can check this on the top right) to play around with.

The simplest way to understand Clay is through the concept of Tables. Tables are essentially AI-powered spreadsheets, and each column can have its own formula, ChatGPT prompt, AI agent that goes out and returns information, and more.

There are two types of tables: Company and People.

You’ll create a Company table by creating a blank Table, adding your list of target companies, or using Clay’s search to find companies.

Either way, you can add columns to identify unique data to prioritize accounts.

Then, you can do a People Search to laser target the right prospects and instantly personalize thousands of outbound emails at scale.

Creating A Company Table

To get started, create a new Company table. As an AE, I add 10-25 of my target company names and their website URLs.

As mentioned above, you can also use Clay’s company search to identify companies that fit your criteria.

Then, enrich the company data with Clay. Below is an example of a Company table with five insurance companies to which I added the names and websites. Then, I used Clay to enrich additional information such as their website URL, company description, and location.

After enriching the companies with the typical information, you can create additional columns to gather unique data for prospecting purposes, prioritize accounts, and personalize your email messaging at scale (more on that coming).

For example, suppose you are creating a Company table. In that case, you can create a Claygent column (an AI agent that you can assign tasks to) and instruct Claygent to find unique information about this company, such as whether their 10-K report specifically mentions challenges your company solves. Then, summarize this data in another column to make it human-sounding and include it in your emails.

Finding People At Your Companies (Creating A People Table)

Once you have a list of companies in your Company table, click the Actions button on the top right and select Find people at these companies… in the drop-down menu. This will open the Find People screen below:

This People Search will be connected to the companies on your Company table. Similar to LinkedIn, you can use this search to find prospects based on high-level information such as their job title, experience, and location.

You can get more specific using keywords in their LinkedIn profile and industry certifications, and exclude specific job titles that may appear incorrectly (e.g., you want to target Directors of Sales Enablement, which will be a targeted list, but not every Director of Sales, which will be a bloated list.) If you need more help finding people, here’s a video.

Once you have identified your list of prospects, click the blue Import button on the bottom right and select Import to new table in the drop-down menu.

You have now created a People table. You can add columns to enrich these contacts with high-level information and use pre-built enrichments in Clay to find more unique information.

You can also create additional columns to assign tasks to Claygent, which will instantly perform the research duties of a traditional SDR, and create a column that pulls in this data.

For example, you can use Claygent to find each person's most recent LinkedIn post or find out what the most recent conference they attended was. You can then add a column to summarize this information and create a human-sounding sentence or paragraph with ChatGPT, which can be included in every email to personalize them at scale.

The goal is to use this unique data and information to prioritize accounts, laser target the right prospects, and instantly personalize thousands of outbound emails at scale.

For videos on how to do this, check out Clay University or their YouTube page (many Loom videos are already out there).

Applying Effective Outbound Strategies To Clay And AI

There are two main ways Clay and AI provide value for outbound sales:

1. Automate and scale what’s worked in the past to save time and improve efficiency

   1. For example, identify an outbound opportunity you’ve created manually in the past, understand the company and people criteria that made you successful, and what data you used in the messaging. Now, you can do this at scale in a fraction of the time.

2. To unlock new opportunities, start doing things you never could before because they were too manual-intensive.

   1. For example, use Claygent to instantly research which conference thousands of prospects attended last or will attend next, and use this in your messaging.

Automate and scale what’s worked in the past

This week, we’re looking at automating what works now to do it at scale and increase results immediately. By doing so, you can exponentially multiply the productivity of your outbound sales team.

The key is automating and scaling what works. Automating and scaling what doesn’t work still won’t work at a higher volume.

Find an example of a cold email or sequence that has worked for you or your company. This could be completely cold outreach or involve reaching out to people for events, industry certifications, LinkedIn posts, job changes, job postings, and other types of trigger events.

Identify all of the custom details you will need to research, both at the company and personal level, for this to work at scale across hundreds of companies and thousands of prospects. Then, incorporate this into the tables you’ve built.

Now, you can automate and scale the same effective, manual prospecting and outbound sales that are proven to work.

What if I don’t have any examples to use?

If you don’t have any examples of emails that have worked, here are seven irresistible cold email templates from Gong.

Some common cold email approaches include using loss aversion or making a bold statement.

Also, below are a couple of real-life examples that have worked with insight into why and how to apply these to your outbound approach:

This cold email example works “because it was hyper-personalized and relevant, but also short and easy to digest. Probably most importantly, it was fast, rapid-fire, and multi-channel in a way that built on every touch rather than repeating them.”

This second cold email example shares a recent experience that breaks down the art of engagement from both the prospects’ and the sales reps’ perspectives.

You can use these examples to start testing different types of messaging, trigger events, and personas. Always be testing!

The Magic of Clay

All of this is saved to a table, making it repeatable and scalable.

Now, you can instantly prospect at scale while saving hundreds or thousands of human hours.

You can even go further and connect Clay to a dynamic list in your CRM to create an in-bound led outbound motion:

1. Inbound lead comes in

2. Company automatically moves to a dynamic list in your CRM

3. Clay automatically prospects against this dynamic list

4. Clay automatically prospects other people at that company

5. Clay automatically writes multiple emails to these people

6. Clay pushes this back to your CRM and/or email sequencer

7. Your CRM and/or email sequencer automatically add these prospects to a sequence

Now you have fully automated in-bound led outbound and sit by the pool while meetings come in 😀 

Preview For Next Week

Watch out for Clay Hacker every Friday.

You do not want your emails to sound like the example below that I received this week. It is obviously written in ChatGPT with poor prompting and no proofreading.

For the record, I am not involved with the intricate nature of pet care.

So, for next week, we will dive into how to write, automate, and send human-sounding emails that are personalized at scale using the people and data in your Clay tables. Topics for next week include:

• Creating personalized, human-like emails with ChatGPT

• Exporting your data (including contacts with email addresses and phone numbers) from Clay

• Integrating with your CRM and outbound email platform

• Enhancing open rates with Smartlead. Since switching from Hubspot to Smartlead, I have gone from 15% to 50% open rates to management-level prospects at Fortune 500 companies —see screenshot below.

Thank you for reading this week’s newsletter. Please respond to this email if you have any questions or feedback.

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.