Item: Clay
Rating: 9
Author: Wesley Van Duin

Overall Satisfaction with Clay

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I'm going to split my answer in three separate segments. So one very obviously outbound, so unfortunately I'm going to say unfortunately, because most of our requests we get are, "hey, we want more meetings," "hey, we want more revenue." So I feel like the way our customers are still aware of the problem is like, "hey, our problem is okay, we don't have meetings, we don't have leads. Okay, you help us with that." We don't really do any mass outbounds. What we really do is signal based marketing. So we kind of help them identify the total addressable market, these are potential signals to monitor, and we help them set automated sequences around that. So not really any mass outbound, but more qualitative output there. So that's one thing we do. Second thing we do is more inbound focused. So "hey, we get a lot of inbound leads, but yeah, we're not really routing them effectively. We don't really know that much about them." Push them to play, enrich everything we want to know about these companies, rerouted to the right sales rep. And lastly, CRM cleanup here, you want your data to be clean. So that's more the rev ops part. So those three elements is what we particularly do.

Pros and Cons

Pros

I think what Clay does really well is make it really easy for someone who does not necessarily have sales experience or marketing experience or data experience to play around in Clay to do some enrichments, to combine data sources that it sounds really complex, right? Combining data sources and keeping a reliable level of data. I think that sounds really difficult, but it's actually super easy to begin with. So I think taking that barrier away, that's such a strength with the combination of having a nice clean interface for people to work with.

Cons

Mainly how technical it can be and that creates a bit of an uncertainty with some people. Like, "Hey, am I doing this right? Is this efficient? Am I doing it well?"
I feel like a lot of companies would benefit from the HubSpot integration feature, which is on the most expensive plan. We do have some customers that are on that plan just for that integration, but they use only a fraction of the credits, but there's a bit of this balance there. So if that would be more of almost like a phone subscription maybe that you could say, okay, I want this feature, but I don't want that many credits, or I want not the HubSpot integration, but then I'll get more credits. I think more flexibility there would be a great improvement.

Return on Investment

Without Clay we would probably have our agency, but not with the level of sophistication we have right now or really one of our USP that we are certified by Clay. That's how we get a lot of inbound leads as well. So that of course leads to a very healthy ROI. If we look at inbound.
I think negative as terms in negative ROI, I think this is a nice one to touch on. Expectation management for tooling such as Clay is extremely difficult because people see a lot of stuff happening on LinkedIn from the top 1% of Clay experts and they look at us and "hey, we want the same thing," basically. That's quite a challenge. So that's really a good conversation to have with your potential client as well. Like, "Hey, I know, tell me what you've seen. We're going to see what we can do if that's reasonable or not." Set realistic expectations there and don't expect to go from zero to 100 within a very small time window. So that was something we had to learn. We had a lot of unrealistic expectations for what we can do. We can improve your business, but we can't do it with a factor of X or in a period of eight weeks.

Usability

I'd give it an eight because it is really user-friendly. On the other hand, there's still some improvements to be made and just how technical it can be. It can scare off some new users. There's also feedback I'm getting from clients or people who play around with it. They do find it a bit technical here and there, and then you have this json and this and that, so it starts to look a bit like coding sometimes. So maybe that if that gets made easier for example, then it'd be a nine or a 10 of course.

Alternatives Considered

Honestly, not really any alternatives. I would find it really difficult to think of an alternative because if you have the right pick, basically the cost of switching for me is just too much to look further. So I'm really happy with what I'm getting for my money basically. I haven't really tried any alternatives. I wouldn't even know any alternatives to be honest.

Key Insights

Do you think Clay delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Clay's feature set?

Yes

Did Clay live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Clay go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Clay again?

Yes

Other Software Used

La Growth Machine, lambs list, Smartly

Likelihood to Recommend

Would give it a nine out of 10 basically because really an advocate for the platform because it does make your work easier, more fun and more impactful against a fairly reasonable cost. So well suited either for companies that have very large sales teams that do a lot of manual things, there's a lot of impact there. Companies willing to experiment quickly, willing to learn quickly, willing to make mistakes quickly. I think that's also a very healthy organization type to try a tooling such as Clay.

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