🏎️ Increasing Speed to Lead w/ Clay

👋 Hey, Claymaker!

If you didn’t catch it, I shared an Apple Siri + Clay demo on a Clay podcast that I hosted. Yup, now you can kick off Clay tables and searches via voice. 🤯

Now there’s a couple Claybooks up. The arcade style, follow along guide, are super helpful to learn Clay. I have 2 up so far:

• Extract data from hundreds of 10-k reports in minutes

• Get warm introductions to target accounts from mutual investors

But, for this week’s post, I’m going to show you how to increase speed to lead.

Here is the challenge:

1. Lead comes in

2. Lead is ‘scored’, though I still see many struggle with this

3. Lead is passed to SDR/AE

4. Maybe some research is done? Maybe not? Probably not…

5. Lead gets followed up on days later… and it’s generic…

Let’s automate all this with Clay.

This post will be high level and will follow up with a more in the weeds post later.

Why Speed to Lead Matters

Response rates. Response rates. Response rates.

Lead Stats from Chili Piper

Lead Response Time (+ 12 Speed to Lead Statistics That Show Why It Matters)

And, some more data to better see this visually (borrowed from Clay’s blog post):

Overview of How Clay Integrations Work

Below is a general diagram of inputs and outputs.

Similar to how software developers have a Software Development Lifecycle, development pipelines, automations for deployments and so on… I see Clay as having similar attributes as an Enrichment Pipeline.

Ok, need some better terminology for that.

There’s a couple of different options for Inputs:

1. Company & People search within Clay

2. Native integrations to start searches (Ex. find accounts out of StoreLeads)

3. List inputs from CRMs

4. Clay’s Chrome extension

5. Webhooks (Ex. sending data from a web form for inbound leads)

   1. Send anything in a JSON format here

There’s almost infinite outputs / locations:

1. Update CRM

2. HTTP API - to connect to virtually any service that has an API

3. Native integrations

4. Slack

5. Automation tools like Zapier & Make

6. Email sequencers

7. Slack

Ex. I recently built an automation that used Make.com to update my Google Contacts with enriched Leads.

This provides a TON of flexibility and extensibility for GTM Engineering.

Improving Speed to Lead with Clay

Super common use case for our customers…

One example, step by step:

1. Inbound lead comes in via Web Form

2. Lead is sent in JSON format to a Webhook in Clay

3. Pre-defined table enrichments automatically kickoff

4. Lead is enriched with research to help personalize email

5. AI email is generated

6. Data can be sent out via:

   1. JSON format

   2. Native integration w/ Salesforce or HubSpot

   3. Native integration w/ Email sequencer

7. Email is sent back to contact within minutes

In visual form:

Read More on Clay’s Internal Implementation

Around The Kiln

Newsletters I’m Reading:

• The Sellers Daydream - learn how to have better sales conversations from stories from ancient times. A fresh take. Memorable. Enjoyable to read.

• GTM w/ AI - Discover new AI tools, their case studies, and what it means for GTM.

• The GTM Strategist - All things GTM strategy. Lots of awesome infographics, case studies, and breakdowns.

• Clay Hacker - Up and coming Clay newsletter with great walkthroughs.

Salesforce Package Now Available

Click “Launch Enrichment” and Clay tables will kick off, enrich, find all the right people, and upload all of them and research back into Salesforce.

This basically automates the entire list building + research building that SDRs do.

Now they can reinvest the 1-2 days / week they spend on unnecessary tasks.

Time to Do Discovery DURING your DEMO

It’s a pretty bad experience to just do discovery upfront and then demo. Integrate the two. Have a couple of short demos to pull up. Freestyle.

Change it up.

For real, focus on having a conversation and sprinkle those questions in.

Career Advice You Never Got Podcast Launches

By fellow, GTM Engineer, Ashley Artrip. She is awesome. Give this a listen.

Also, where has this been my entire career?

Tune in to the first episode.

✌️ until next time. hope you find all this helpful. Sharing is caring

Need help with Clay? Shoot me a message: [email protected]

And, grab these 3,000 free credits….