Here is How to Do MUCH Better Outbound with Clay

Look at your inbox.  If it’s like mine, it’s full of pitiful, limp-wristed outbound sales and link-building emails with the most feeble attempts at personalization.  Here is a recent example. (I just search by inbox for “Quick Question” or “Collaboration” in the subject line and find 100’s)

Others don’t even bother with the personalization or targeting criteria with a “no BS” approach.  PS. I can also find 100’s of cold emails in my inbox by searching “No BS”.

So, where am I going with this?

I’ve cluttered plenty of inboxes myself over the years.  So, we as SEOs, growth, and salespeople, need to do better.  Much better.

We need to go back to the roots of marketing:

1. WHO: find who can benefit from your solution
2. HOW: tell them how you can help them specifically
3. WHEN: reach them at the time that they need your solution

If done right, receivers of your email blast should be thankful to see your email and eager to speak with you.

As an example, if you could know that I just purchased a new house — you’d probably have a better chance or selling me new furniture — and even better if you know my new house was midcentury modern and then offered me a catalog of midcentury modern styles.

So how do we know these details about our ICPs across our TAM at scale?

That’s what this post is about….

Last night, I attended a Clay Community Meetup hosted by the crafty Jordan Crawford of LinkedIn influencer fame and the founder of Blueprint GTM.

If you’re unfamiliar with it, Clay is software that enables scaled personalized outreach through better data enrichment.  It enables sales people and marketers to turn campaign ideas into outreach in minutes.   This is possible with Clay’s 75+ enrichment tools and their own AI agent, Claygent (powered by ChatGPT or Claude). Then, you can also use AI to craft the perfect outreach by inputting dynamic fields from your research into the message.

Ok, that was a mouthful but outbound with Clay is intensely powerful.

Let’s explore a few of the ways people are achieving their targeted marketing dreams with Clay:

Examples of Amazing Outbound Campaigns

Construction Safety AI Tracking + OSHA Violators

• The Company: AI-powered safety monitoring for job sites.  Think trackers on workers to see when they’re driving forklifts too fast or other unsafe activities.
• The Prospect: Construction and manufacturing companies.
• The Insight: Prospects that have recently been hit with an OSHA violation fine are feeling the pain and motivated for a solution
• The Approach: Using Clay, the company scraped the OSHA website which lists violators.  They then reached out to them to sympathize with their violation and offer them a solution to avoid it from ever happening again.

Schools + Hall Passes

• The Company: Digital hall pass software for schools to ensure students have time windows and other parameters on their hall passes.
• The Prospect: Schools
• The Insight: Schools that still use outdated paper hall passes.
• The Approach: Using Clay, scrape the student handbooks of schools at scale to extract which are still using paper hall passes.  Then outreach with a message highlighting the benefits of moving to digital and explicitly pointing out the likely headaches of each school’s current paper pass program.

Customer Data Platform + Startups with Free Solutions

• The Company: Customer Data Platform provider.
• The Prospect: Startups that had been issues a free 2 year customer data plan by the company’s competitor as part of an accelerator program.
• The Insight: Startups that had grown would be hit with a huge bill once their free 2-year period ended.
• The Approach: Using Clay, generate a list of startups that had received the free competitor plan as graduates of the accelerator.  Message them several months before their offer ended to warn them, and offer the company’s similar but much more affordable solution.

A lot better than “I loved your recent blog/post – want to meet?” or “Congratulations on your funding – want to meet?”

In these campaigns, the company is actually reaching prospects that can greatly benefit from their solution at the time of the outreach.  When and who makes what to say a lot easier.  Needless to day, all these campaigns crushed it!

So how can we crush our own outreach campaigns?

How to Gain the Inspiration for Amazing Outbound Campaign Ideas

Where did the “insight” come from in the example above?

Simple.  Ask customers why they bought.

In other words, do complete customer and sales team interviews to extract the different scenarios and reasons why people bought.  All the insights in the examples came from these interviews.

Jordan suggests these types of questions in your interview, which you should do for the customers and for the people on your team that speak with the customers most.

• What do they care about (motivations)
• What are they doing now?
• What did they do before you?
• What else did they consider?
• How did they consider it?
• What were the results?

And going 3 why’s deep.

Example:

What do you about?

• I want more sales leads

Why?

• Because we just hired 2 more sales people

Why?

• Because we just set our new annual goal and we need to grow revenue by 30%

Why?

• Because we just launch a new product for the X market and need to promote it

How to Craft Spectacular Outbound Audiences and Messages

Once you have your insight, you just need to find a way to build that list.  This is where data imports and web scraping come in.  You could have a sales person dig around and do the research but that doesn’t scale and the cost of the personalization may not match the boosted performance of personalization.

This is where Clay comes in.

It has a learning curve and also takes some creativity, scrappiness, and resilience to get the audience list that you want.  But with so many data sources, AI, and powerful web scraping you have plenty of options.  AND Clay has a waterfall feature, so you can check one data source, and if it fails, a second, third, fourth, or fifth data source provider can attempt to source it.

Since Clay has plenty of training videos and a generous free tier, just jump in and start using it.

But to wrap your head around Clay I’ll lay out some of the fundamentals…