Huge fan of Clay + the team. Here’s my brutally honest take on Clay and the GTM tech space as a whole: There’s been a focus on being the GTM “system of action/execution” but I actually think the only durable moat (and therefore valuation) comes from being a GTM “system of record” (contrary to recent AI marketing..) Clay’s shift to being a living/breathing dataset of contacts/accounts (audiences) is the right direction but I’m not sure it’s a durable enough move yet. Here’s my thinking Check the valuations of the most successful GTM tech companies: Salesforce: ~$198B Hubspot: ~ $12B Gong: ~$8B Clay: ~$7B Zoominfo: ~$1.2B Clay is already just as valuable as all the other leaders except Salesforce… so how does Clay grow into (and keep growing) its valuation? The best way to answer that is to ask what is different about Salesforce (and what Hubspot tried): If we abstract away specific use cases.. Salesforce’s business model is similar to lots of the largest enterprise tech companies (Datadog, Atlassian, Databricks, ServiceNow, etc.): They 1) create/ingest and/or transform and then store a historical record of domain-specific data for a certain function of a business, and then 2) enable that business to act on this data. The key here is #1. A platform that houses proprietary data that drives business operations is incredibly difficult to replace. Although Salesforce is a clunky product they’ve done extremely well executing on this. It would cost the biz I work for (Grafana Labs) millions in switching costs to leave.. very easy to replace our forecasting tool / sequencer but not the source of truth that powers them.. In contrast, Clay doesn’t own our proprietary revenue operating data and doesn’t own enough workflows to have a high cost of change yet. I can very easily: - Switch to a cheaper data provider/enrichment - Keep Contact/account data in CRM/Supabase/Snowflake - Continue to have reps use Claude/GPT for daily UI - Integrate with a best in class sequencer/dialler via MCP for execution As a result, newer/lower cost competitors are chipping away use cases and Clay’s valuation is at risk of stagnating unless they continue to become more of a system of record + harder to replace. As long as Clay is reliant on a data warehouse + CRM it’s probably vulnerable to orgs to moving their “action” layer elsewhere/in-house. So IMO the only path is to steal more CRM/database use cases over time: - Tie in opportunities + progression, forecasting, etc. - Take on Supabase/Snowflake for activity recording and other data storage - Add business-specific transformations to signals (i.e., actual definition of champion based on previous buying role / product usage) - More flexibility on company-defined logic/AI rules These are just a few examples but would begin to move Clay towards the one tool CROs couldn’t replace and help them continue growing their valuation. What do folks think?

“sales reps don’t generate demand” is one of the most repeated takes in GTM and I think it’s wrong. good sellers do this all the time. here’s how: first off, generating demand = establishing a net new desire that compels someone to take action. humans are all inherently motivated to move up Maslow's hierarchy of needs (physiological → safety → belonging → esteem → self-actualization) and will take action to move upwards on the pyramid (greed) or avoid falling down the pyramid (fear). even in a b2b setting, all human decisions are driven by fear (losing their job, etc.) or greed (a promotion, bonus, etc.). you can’t change how afraid someone is of losing their job or how much they care about income/corporate achievement (aka champion identification 101), but you can introduce new information that gives someone a net new way to satisfy their inherent fear or greed, causing them to take an action they otherwise wouldn’t have. And top reps are really good at this: 1. identifying where a business is today and where it could be 2. finding who’s at risk of moving down their pyramid of needs if this gap isn’t addressed (fear) or who can move upwards (greed) if it’s addressed 3. showing them this potential future state, and 4. presenting it to them in a way that the risk/effort of execution doesn’t outweigh the fear/greed-related benefit. take a sales leader: their greed is higher attainment, organizational wins, recognition (more money, better career). their fear is missing plan, getting fired, or reputational damage. take a CRO at 120% of their plan. they have no active "pain" but if you can demonstrate a real flaw in their tooling/strategy and how your solution can take them to 150% with a reasonable level of effort.. they’re going to want what you’re selling. That's new demand you've generated.

$80K base with “$400K OTE” That’s a first 💀

Anyone in my X network sell AI customer service? Ideally selling to businesses that mainly do B2C

Launching this today was either the worst or best marketing decision in Porsche’s history Comments are absolutely killing me

Btw, a huge challenge AI GTM tools face (+ why they struggle to get rep adoption over Claude/ChatGPT) is that it's f***ing HARD to build a frontier-grade general purpose harness. Almost impossible to compete on UX with harnesses built by orgs throwing billions at the problem. That said, what I think could be the meta approach (haven't seen many people talk about this) is ChatGPT/Claude plugins with native in-chat widgets. In the post below's image you'll see: - App w/ full integration into ChatGPT's sidebar - Natively designed interactive in-chat widgets that can take actions (i.e., add contacts to app's database) - Exposed proprietary dataset + tools under the hood This solves several problems with vanilla Claude/GPT: Ease of auditability, control over AI-generated messaging, and persistent context Rough start but will try to get it in a spot to demo soon.

One of my biggest pipe gen unlocks recently has been not having to open LinkedIn Sales Navigator to find prospects. I used to spend hours in Sales Nav every week to because it was the only source of truth for real-time contact data. Now that time has been effectively compressed to zero. With the @clay MCP (+ other options) you can call the "Find People" function directly from Claude/ChatGPT. The nice thing about Clay is that finding people is completely free and it only costs tokens to enrich them. Since finding people is free, I can do things like pull in 68 contacts across all of Discord's engineering team, have an agent select the top 12 (instruction I gave), decide if I want to add more or not, and then push them all into a customized sequence. Crazy looking back on how much things have changed compared to even 6 months ago.

AI has actually changed the *buying* of software significantly more than it's impacted the *selling* of software. Funny given how much attention is placed on using AI to sell. So far, the biggest change is just that you're dealing with more informed buyers.

What an honor @thedealdirector

A tale of two images Impressive @brendanjshort.. did you place a bet?

If your outbound email 'observation' isn't one of these 3 things you're better off scrapping it: 1. Evidence a company is actively trying to solve a problem (i.e., a LinkedIn post about an explicit bottleneck). 2. Evidence a company could care about solving a problem (i.e., announcing an initiative that could be accelerated by solving a certain bottleneck). 3. Evidence a problem could be present (i.e., a clunky/expensive incumbent solution). Anything else comes across as slop.. because it is..

As a rep at Grafana: the negativity towards sellers at "playbook" companies is insane to me. I can't speak to the integrity of every leader that comes from a playbook organization but this general assumption that reps at playbook companies can't be technical seems completely unwarranted + uneducated. You think reps that are successful at playbook companies got there by enforcing MEDDPICC? Of course not. To be a good seller ANYWHERE, you need to be technical, consultative, adaptable, and know your product in and out. But you also need to know how to generate pipeline, qualify deals, run a complex cycle, build a business case, multithread, forecast accurately, etc.. those are all critical skills. Look at what happened at OpenAI. They kicked out the incumbent sales leadership and brought in "playbook" DNA for a reason. My take: The technical-only seller has an easy time when deals are all inbound, the buying is engineering-led, and the role of "GTM" is literally a glorified support rep that answers technical questions in external slack channels during evaluations. Eventually, the music slows down, and you need to be able to generate urgency, navigate large enterprises, do outbound, forecast, and win competitive cycles. I think that's exactly what happened to OpenAI and forced them to make the switch. For what it's worth: If it was me hiring, I'd want the technical, consultative startup seller who can ALSO create demand and has the process discipline of someone trained at a playbook organization. Both skillsets matter.. I don't see why it's popular to treat these as competing philosophies.

Imagine Benioff didn’t start Salesforce and instead became a sales exec The “Benioff” mafia would be running all of enterprise GTM

If there was one thing investment banking taught me, it was that the quality of your slide decks communicates the quality of your entire organization. Buyers might not consciously realize this, but it absolutely impacts how they perceive your company, your product, and your team. If you're using AI-generated .html pages, you're not going to make it. You'll lose to my meticulously formatted Google slides 10/10 times

Has anyone’s company actually nailed automating AI-generated/assisted sales decks? I.e., proposal, new business meeting, POC go/no-go If yes, how does it work?

Codex has become a great product but putting this guy on my screen even when the app is minimized is taking things too far.