Why I Started Clay Hacker

I initially found Clay when I started looking into Generative AI tools that could write (actually) personalized, unique emails at scale.

Clay was exactly what I was looking for, but it wasn’t easy to learn as I dug in more. In addition, prompting is a separate and equally important skill.

It took me over six months to become proficient in using Clay and prompting for doing outbound sales at scale.

Finally, after a lot of self-learning, testing, and tweaking prompts, I started to get responses from Fortune 500 companies like this:

Over the following weeks and months, I will share everything I know about Clay and AI to get more responses like the one above.

This includes:

• Starting to use Clay as an AE.

• Teaching other AEs how to use it.

• Challenges we ran into.

• How we scaled it to our sales org.

Beyond Clay, there are other challenges, such as figuring out how to integrate with your CRM and email sequencer. Then, there’s email deliverability to avoid spam and optimize open rates.

If this is relevant to you, I am excited to have you on this journey to start crushing outbound sales again.

Who Am I (Why Should You Listen To Me)?

My first experience doing cold emailing at scale was with mail merges in Google Sheets around 2012. Not many other people were doing it yet and it was great.

Then, over the next decade, the increasing automation and generic messaging flooded inboxes. Eventually, these tools and the same old data providers stopped working.

As the company I work for has come off its Series C and has evolved into a multi-product company, it is urgent to self-source more pipelines from outbound and identify prospects for our new product.

Inbound leads are still there but cannot scale and support the transformation and growth from a single-product Series B company to a multi-product Series C company.

So the question recently became, how do we use AI to target the right prospects, get quality contact data, and create custom messaging at scale?

The answer quickly became Clay’s built-in Generative AI capabilities with ChatGPT and others.

Also, to be a top performer, crush your quota, and get car-sized commission checks, you need to leverage outbound sales correctly to break your comp plan. That’s my goal.

Upcoming Topics

Over the following weeks and months, every Friday, I’ll share everything I’ve learned about using Clay and AI for outbound sales in SaaS.

Some of the topics we’ll cover:

• Clay basics

• Working with formulas

• Building Company tables

• Prompting best practices

• Optimizing credit usage in Clay

• Improving open and response rates

• Automating strategic research with 10-K’s

• Writing custom emails at scale with ChatGPT

• Finding prospects and creating People tables

• How to scale Clay from one AE to your sales team

• Using Clay for inbound-led outbound (it’s not new)

• Avoiding spam & getting in the inbox (email deliverability)

• Assigning tasks to Claygent (the best SDR you’ve ever had)

• Finding prospects with LinkedIn posts for relevant keywords

• Identifying prospects that use specific tools and tech stacks

Did I miss anything that you’re struggling with or want to learn? Please reply to this email, and I’ll cover it soon.

Q&A If You Are New To Clay

Q: What is Clay?

A: Clay is a SaaS platform that enhances personalized outreach through comprehensive data enrichment. It maximizes data coverage using over 75 enrichment tools and its AI agent, Claygent, and then employs Generative AI, such as ChatGPT, to create relevant outreach at scale.

Q: What do you mean by ”AI”?

A: Clay allows you to utilize Generative AI, such as ChatGPT, and Claygent is an AI agent that can be assigned tasks for research.

Q: As an Account Executive in SaaS sales, why should I choose Clay Hacker to learn Clay?

A: While there are many excellent Clay training options available, most of them focus on the platform broadly for RevOps, Marketing, becoming a Claygency, or other use cases. Clay Hacker was created explicitly for Account Executives by an Enterprise AE to self-source outbound sales opportunities.

Q: Do you offer live instructor-led training?

A: We will soon. Contact me at [email protected] if you are interested now.

Q: How do I sign up for Clay?

A: You can sign up for free here.

Q: Are Clay and Clay Hacker affiliated?

A: Clay Hacker is owned and operated by SaaS Stars LLC, a Clay affiliate partner. Clay Hacker earns a small commission if you sign up for free using our link and upgrade to a paid plan.

Additional Resources

Clay Automation: https://www.clayautomation.com

Clay University: https://www.clay.com/university

Clay’s Slack community: https://clayhq.typeform.com/slack

Preview For Next Week

Watch out for Clay Hacker every Friday

Where are you struggling with Clay? Reply to this email.

Maybe you’re just starting, trying to use Claygent for research, writing emails with ChatGPT, or scaling to a team.

What type of content would be most helpful (written tutorials, videos, live coaching, a library of prompts, pre-built tables, or something else)?

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.