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Happy Holidays, GTM Engineers!

Before I get into this week’s Clay guide, I wanted to share a personal story. (Feel free to the Clay part if you’re not interested. No hard feels!)

I was pretty close to rock bottom last Dec 2023. Unemployed. Confidence shattered. Completely uninspired and questioning what I want to do next, or if I even wanted to be in tech sales, or work for anyone besides myself. Two companies didn’t work out in a very short period of time. One was just the wrong choice. Wrong values, and I felt misled. The other was supposed to be the next rocket ship, but a new VP of Sales stepped in.

“There’s some people who rise to the occasion under pressure, and others that crumble and fail. You’re one of the later.”

I’ll always remember those comments and others, but it was really that last that hit low and hard. What an inspiring leader!

Then I was fired. No reason. But, It was very clear I didn’t fit their persona.

It was the 2nd big failure that year after departing from the previous Series A startup. The company was going to be the 3rd Unicorn that I had joined early on at the Series A stage.

Mentally, I felt hopeless, anxious, angry, and all around really low. It was the worst depression I had experienced. This was all exacerbated by being a new Dad and feeling the need, more than ever, to provide for the family.

Months went by. I talked to 40+ companies. None really excited me. The ones that progressed would bring me to the final presentation stages. Then pass. 2 short stints is close to a career killer in sales. No one believes you can sell anymore.

I really didn’t know what to do. Taking any job, especially one that I wasn’t excited about would surely make everything worse. Career has always been a big component of who I am. Maybe too much.

Then I started writing a newsletter - GTM Foundry. (No longer writing this because I switched over to writing Claymation.)

I start posting publicly on LinkedIn about my experience interviewing.

Clay had been on my radar for over 2 years. (I was a customer and had always wanted to invest in the company as an Angel Investor.) Through posting on LinkedIn, Varun reached out and we reconnected.

Then everything changed.

I found my tribe.

I was excited again.

And, fast forward to today, and my world and outlook couldn’t feel or look different.

But, this isn’t just about Clay. I realized there were several key components of life that were super important to me, and had ultimately been missing:

• The right tribe - this was Clay.

• An outlet for creativity - this was creating Claymation.

• A change - this was moving from Boston to Brooklyn

• The pursuit of new skills - this has been diving into the world of Clay + no code automation

It’s amazing what change, taking some action, and writing can do for you in a year…

2024 was a comeback year and I feel back on track.

• Claymation grew to 1,500+ subscriber

• I became a GTM Engineer and learned Clay

• Learning Clay & writing about GTM Engineering led to webinar & podcast invites. I even started recording a Podcast at Clay. (More to come on this)

• One of those webinars led to joining Companyon Ventures as a Venture Parter (an advisor to their portfolio companies). This was especially exciting to me because my long term goal is to move to the investment side of tech.

• Brooklyn became a new place to explore with the family. Suddenly, everything was new again. It also scratched a long time itch of wanting to experience NYC as a resident.

• So many new connections & friendships popped up just from the move.

• I started to become a ‘voice’ on LinkedIn and followers grew from 8,000 to 12,000 in 6 months.

• I’m having a blast at Clay and truly believe in our mission to change GTM.

• I started another newsletter (The Augmented Seller) with a good friend, Oscar Moore, that focuses on helping sellers augment their skills/process with AI.

Most importantly, I’m happy, enjoying this new journey, and grateful for change.

If you’re not happy at your company, culture sucks, or your manager is an @$$, it’s just not worth it.

Now, back to regularly scheduled content.

How to Build a Clay Slack Bot

Creating a Slack Bot for Clay Alerts is really easy. Slack is a native integration.

I have 2 key channels where I get alerts:

• #alex-copilot - this is where I get all of my Named Account alerts for intent. Who visited what pages. What stage they are at. Enriched data.

• #claymation - I send a webhook of subscribers to Clay, emails are enriched to LinkedIn, Title, Company, and then sent to Slack as an alert.

This is how you can setup your own alerts.

Step 1: Add Slack Enrichment

Go to the upper right hand corner to “Add Enrichment” and you’ll find a couple options:

Choose “Send Message to Channel”.

Now you can start filling in the form to define what channel and data you want to send:

Step 2: Define Data to Send