Giving a standard demo of Clay is incredibly hard. Because there's nothing standard about Clay. The *whole point* of Clay is that it's flexible, incredibly powerful, and fully customizable. I'm not joking when I say that we *could* spend a couple of hours just walking through all the most popular customer use cases we've seen. This was one of the hardest things to figure out about our discovery + demo process when we were first building out the enterprise sales team. After months of iteration (and a few *huge* busts on customer calls), I figured out a solution that worked perfectly for me on every call. Get people STOKED about Clay. A big part of this was also giving customers control of the call. I started every disco out with: "we've got three options for how we can start - you tell me which one feels best to you" And inevitably, we'd always end up with some general excitement and amazing next steps. I transitioned from sales to education almost exactly a year ago, and I *still* get the occasional message from prospects raving about that demo. So I decided to record it and walk you all through it so anyone can access it šš½
Transcript
Hey, it's Yash. And we're bringing the video content to LinkedIn. And in this video, I'm going to talk about one of the hardest parts of building our initial sales process, which was figuring out what the balance was between discovery and showing people a demo of the software. For a long time, I leaned really heavily on discovery like most traditional B2B sales people do, until I had a call with a potential prospect who gave me very evasive disco. Answers and then demanded in a semi upset tone that I demo the product to them after the 1st 10 minutes on the call Now part of what makes doing a demo of clay so difficult is the flexibility of clay. It's really really important to figure out what the most important thing might be to a customer so that we can actually show them the best starting points that are going to be relevant to them for a demo before we just jump straight into things because we could spend probably hours going through all the different crazy. Those cases of Clay. But if we want to cover a lot of ground and get people excited in just the first 30 minutes, we have to do something relevant to them. As a side note, I also get a lot of different requests for people to just see a demo of clay, and that's also a hard question. So I'm hoping that maybe this video can serve as a good starting off point for most of those people. Because what I eventually realized throughout this entire discovery of our sales process was that the best way to approach this problem for a flexible tool like Clay. Was actually giving the potential prospect the choice up front of how to lead the call. So what that means I did is I started every call with the same opening line. It went something like this. All right, there are three ways we can run this call, and I'm going to let you pick #1 we can start with five to 10 minutes of discovery, and then after that, I'm going to personalize a specific demo based to your niche interests and needs that shows you what Clay can do starting today. Or two, I can give you a very simple or basic demo to start, and then we can pick up the conversation from there. And then, of course, three, I can show you what I would call like a golden demo table that covers a full flow end to end in Clay and probably touches on. 80% of the major functionality of the tool in an interactive and interesting way. Now what's interesting about this is almost everyone chose option 3 and after I asked enough people why, I started to realize why. I think a lot of the point of the first call for at least our tool in our industry is really just to demystify some of the what is clay intrigue and to get customers stoked. They don't need to understand everything bottoms up about the tool or the software. What they need is just to see the potential of something that they can start to apply and get creative bottoms up to their own GTM motion. Once anyone choose their preferred path Of the three, I also said the next same thing up front every time because I would constantly get questions about it. And that went something along the lines of before I get into this demo, there's two things that everyone always asks, so let's get them out of the way up front. Number one, there is no seat based pricing in Clay. Everything is priced on usage. And you don't have to have individual subscriptions to every single tool because we've bundled everything for you. So you just get the one subscription to access the 130 different data providers. Then #2A lot of people think this is a tool for sales reps, and I can tell you with confidence that's not the case. It benefits sales reps and it benefits marketers and customer success. But the most successful implementations of Clay that we've seen are typically a small hit team of go to market engineers or revoked. Teams that automate all that 80% of data grunt work that's plaguing and bogging down sales, marketing and CX. And then after I finished prefacing those two points, we jump straight into the demo. Now for this third golden demo to kick things off, I always sent everyone a one question type form that looked something like this. All it asked for was their LinkedIn profile URL. While people were filling out this form, I would also mention that we have dozens of different sources. And for this demo, I'm only personalizing it to you all on this call. But if we want to cover later on how you build lists of third party data like you're used to doing in Zoom Info or Apollo, or how you bring and sing first party product data, or even start from signals like job changers, find small businesses on Google Maps or Yelp, the possibilities truly are endless. And so we'll walk through this example of my golden. Demo table and for this example we'll use a new teammate at clays LinkedIn profile to demonstrate. So once we put in our LinkedIn profile URL into the type form, we then flip over to the clay table and these people would see live on the call as what they filled out on the form filtered in straight to the table. The bottom line up front is always that we're going straight from just a LinkedIn profile URL's all the way up to a highly personalized e-mail plus LinkedIn connection request that's going to include a full research brief on you as an individual and a custom meme based on your LinkedIn profile. So now if we walk through this table left to right, we see here that first the LinkedIn profiles populate in the far, far left of the table. Then our first set of enrichments are on these yellow columns directly on the right. First we get all the foundational personal information you could ever need to know about an individual. We can see name, title, work experience, education, awards, summaries, all of it. Then after we get that basic information, we add a touch of AI customization and the purple columns that follow with Anthropic categorizing these seniority of these miscellaneous job titles into set categories that we can later score and buckets. From there we move on to the firmographic enrichments over in the green columns, getting data like industry head count and specific team head count. In this demo table, it's an instance of sales and a scrape of the company's homepage for company context. Now that we've done these basic people and company enrichments, we get to see the power of our ecosystem of 100 plus different data providers. We waterfall 10 different providers with validation built in to find the work emails and you can see clearly from this waterfall. That with just one or two of these providers, coverage would be 60 to 70%, but with the full waterfall across all 10 providers, you end up with pretty much 100% coverage across your emails. Now that we've done key enrichments and we've done some waterfalls, we start to move on to seeing how AI generated copy works in clay by using open AI in the following blue columns. First, we take the scraped company web page and company description. Feed that into the short prompt that generates a custom AI. Snippet to use in the final message copy, and it writes just this snippet that's a short line about the company mission and two ICP profiles. Given the character limits that we have for LinkedIn messages, we've got to keep things short. Now for my favorite part of the table. We get to the really fun point, which is the whole point of clay. It's where your creativity gets to shine. In the following blue columns after the AI snippets that we generate from Open AI, we select a random number from one to 100 that's going to correspond to a. Specific meme out of the top 100 memes in the separate table that we have in the same workbook. Once the meme is selected, we make an HTTP API call to access a free meme maker API, and then we rely on Anthropic AI again to generate some custom text from the meme chosen based on the LinkedIn profile of the individual that we're reaching out to so that we can customize this image to this individual. Now the results. Are always really funny we'll check out what we got right here and then now we're getting close to the end just to really flex the power of 1 of the last major functions of clay, clay agent or clays AI web scraper we have a very meta use case we're actually using clay agent to brainstorm unique data points for each person based on the company that they work at and the ICP that that company typically goes after then client has also scouring the web to find. 3 relevant research URLs about the account in question that are relevant to go to market and therefore Clay. Now moving on to our last piece of automation magic. In the following red columns, we have a basic scoring column that uses company headcount, seniority and sales team size to create an initial score that prioritizes people at larger companies in more senior roles with larger sales team sizes. Then we take all this information that we've gathered so far. And we create a Google doc summarizing the key research at both the account and the company level. And just to make sure this doesn't get missed by anyone on the team, we can send that Google doc as a Slack message notifying an individual or the rest of the team that the research doc has been created. Then to wrap everything up in a bow in those last green columns that you're seeing, we first combine all the AI snippets and template text that we've got into a very short, snappy message we can use over LinkedIn and e-mail. And then now that we've got this final message in all of our lead information, we can send all of that data out to LA Growth Machine where it's going to sequence LinkedIn plus e-mail live to the person I'm demoing, which always feels like a little bit of magic for them when they get a message directly. On the call. And then last but certainly not least, just for good CRM hygiene, we check to see if we already have this contact in our Salesforce CRM and only if we don't do we create a new record so we can keep track of everything. And that's the whole golden demo. Part of what I love about this demo and part of what customers love about this demo is that they also get to leave the call with an exciting, tangible asset and kind of a little trophy to go show their colleagues afterwards. Hey, look at this cool random meme that Clay made for me on the first call that I had with them. Hey, look at this research doc and how thorough it is. And the best part about all of these creative tidbits is it breaks the norm. It helps get people in this creative thinking mode about Wow. I didn't realize that was all possible from just one data point. If that's possible, what else could be possible? And it's where those people start to dream about the realm of the possible that we start to get in the next call into the most exciting use cases and also the most relevant ones. This demo has worked so well for people, and part of the reason I'm recording this video is because I still get messages from prospects months afterwards. And while it might be a lot of the software to cover and you're not going to pick up on how to do all of it in that call, it accomplishes the main objective that I talked about at the beginning of this video, which is we're trying to just get you stoked about thinking about what's possible in clay. And then we want you to think laterally and expansively about everything that could be possible so that we collect all the information. And identify the perfect first use cases to roll out onto your team and to get started in a possible proof of concept. Curious what your thoughts are? Let me know. Feel free to drop comments on the thread here or on the video. And hopefully this is the first of many more videos to come. Thanks guys.