Clay

Leading the business teams at Clay. 

We are building a complete GTM development environment where teams can turn any growth idea into reality. We serve more than 10,000 customers — including OpenAI, Canva, Google and Anthropic.

Co-Founder & Head of Operations

89 Christopher

89 Christopher is a $2M fund backed by Sequoia Capital and Bloomberg Beta. I started this fund with my best friend Nitin Gupta because we wanted to work together on something, thought this would be fun, and knew we could help founders.

Our fund is named after the address of our 300 sq. ft, 6th floor walkup, shoebox apartment we shared in New York when we were 22. It was in this apartment where we began our journeys working in the startup ecosystem. 

We can uniquely solve a handful of important problems all companies face: 

Compensation: Nitin built the benchmarking product at Pave and is the first call for dozens of founders when it comes to employee + executive compensation. 

GTM: Clay operates at the edge of all things GTM and having built all the business functions at Clay from scratch, I help founders with tactical advice on hiring, marketing, sales, team structure, planning, etc.

General Partner

Newfront

When Newfront merged with ABD, I managed the integration and developed the initial product roadmap/strategy post-merger for the employee benefits, 401k, and wholesale teams (>$100mm in revenue).

Director of Operations

When I was hired, Newfront was a fast-growing, tech-enabled insurance brokerage startup focused on P&C insurance. They wanted to expand to employee benefits, and I built and led that business unit from scratch to tens of millions in revenue.

GM, Employee Benefits/Health Insurance Business

Candid™

When I was hired, Candid had an e-commerce business and wanted to start a retail operation. My job was to build as many stores as possible, as quickly as possible. Of course, I had no experience in retail, site selection, real estate negotiations, store design or construction. But I learned quickly. 

We went from 0 to 27 retail stores in 20+ markets in 14 months, which drove more than 60% of Candid's revenue. Ultimately the business struggled with its unit economics, but I had a great time, grew a lot and met some amazing people.

Head of Expansion

Google

As many of you know, the Clinton campaign lost in 2016. I was surprised, confused and poor. I somehow got this job, via cold email per usual. I thought it would be a good fit because it was at the intersection of geopolitics which I knew and liked, and technology which I didn't know but thought I might like.

Long story short, it wasn't for me. I didn't feel challenged and struggled with the usual big company things. I used my extra time to intern at nights as a prep cook at the restaurant Dirt Candy for a few months, but then I met my now-wife and wanted to spend time with her :)

I was fortunate that my best friend and roommate was a VC and introduced me to the world of startups, which felt surprisingly similar to political campaigns. After the 2016 loss, I wanted to learn how businesses work and develop tangible skillsets. I knew that I learned best by doing, and felt a startup was the right place to do so.

Special Projects & Communications (Jigsaw @ Google)

Hillary for America

Traveled with Secretary Clinton throughout the general election — serving as a deputy to our traveling communications director, managing the 60+ traveling press corps and executing on communications crises as they arose (frequently!).

Traveling Press Aide

Served as the principal spokesman for Hillary Clinton during the South Carolina, Florida, Pennsylvania and New Jersey primaries. Developed and executed a comprehensive press and earned media strategy — including TV, newspaper, and radio — for Clinton and high-profile surrogates across the four states.

Won South Carolina by 48 points
Won Florida by 31 points
Won Pennsylvania by 12 points
Won New Jersey by 27 points

Statewide Press Secretary

Special Assistant to Communications Director

Office of Hillary Rodham Clinton

When I was 18 I was singularly focused on politics and passionate about Hillary Clinton. I wanted to work for her, so I cold emailed her top advisor 10 times. Eventually he responded and begrudgingly agreed to meet for coffee. But before he went downstairs, he asked his assistant to interrupt in 5 minutes because he correctly diagnosed that I was "a crazy kid." In any event, the first 5 minutes went so well that I got the job. To this day, working for Hillary Clinton was one of the great adventures of my life.

Communications

Varun Anand

I asked our Head of Finance if I could spend $60,000 to take five enterprise CRO prospects to the Super Bowl. He did the ROI math and it's not looking good for me.

Karan Parekh actually walked me through the numbers on camera - deal size requirements, probability lift benchmarks, estimated ROI, and why our bet at the US Open was 10x smarter.

Some of what we get into:
- How to calculate the real cost per ticket 
- Why a 15-20% increase in close probability on even $400k ACV deals doesn't justify the spend
- My land-and-expand counterargument (which I thought would win him over)
- Our portfolio approach to event marketing budgets and when we measure individual bets vs signal for scaling

In the end, Karan gives a surprising reason why even if all five CROs convert, the Super Bowl isn't worth the $.

This type of conversation happens every day at Clay. It's how we balance making aggressive creative bets with financial discipline. Whether we're debating a $5k executive dinner or 50-yard-line seats at the most expensive sporting event on earth, Karan's reasoning is keeping us honest.

Yes, he just killed my Super Bowl dreams. But he is (probably) right!

P.S. My schedule just freed up for February 8th, 2026. If anyone is looking for a +1 to the Super Bowl, DM me.

P.P.S. Any other marketing questions you want us to debate? Drop them below👇

This year Clay invested over $1m in billboards.

That kind of marketing spend without clear ROI makes finance people nervous.

But we make a TON of marketing bets like this at Clay, big and small. So here's a look into how Karan Parekh, our Head of Finance, guides our marketing motion without demanding perfect attribution and killing our creativity.

Some of what we cover:
- How brand and performance marketing are linked and why B2B companies invest in brand too late 
- How we use attribution modeling, customer-defined attribution, and incrementality analysis to measure the unmeasurable 
- What marketing works as you move from Series A to scale-up to public company (and why Figma nailed it) 
- Guerilla marketing tactics from Clay's early pre-PMF days

At the end, we share the strategy behind our recent billboard campaign and real examples of how we're measuring impact and ROI. 

Karan is brilliant and I'm very excited for more of the world to get to know him. Anything you want us to discuss next? Let us know! 👇

P.S. We have no idea the ROI of this video.

Next week I am kicking off a 3 week European tour.

Why? Because Clay is expanding to Europe!

This is a MASSIVE market opportunity for us. Europe is already 20% of our revenue and we only have a tiny but mighty team on the ground. That changes now. We are actively hiring for sales, success and support roles in London.

On this trip, I'll be hanging with users in every city, as well as speaking at Web Summit, Slush, and SaaStr AI, and meeting with founders and GTM teams at companies like Lovable, Legora, Miro and Granola. 

Here's my tour schedule:

- Lisbon (11/12 - 11/13)
- Amsterdam (11/14 - 11/15)
- Helsinki (11/19)
- Stockholm (11/20 - 11/23)
- London (11/25 - 12/2)

I am HYPED about connecting with Clay [Clubs] and kickstarting our European expansion. I'll be posting updates and learnings along the way, with plenty of selfies.

I'm hosting or attending 11 public events, I would love to meet you there.

Link to register (and full event schedule) in the comments. 👇

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Karan told me Clay was a terrible idea and I shouldn't work on it. Two years later, he quit his dream job to become our Head of Finance. The night before he accepted his offer, we shared a bed and bonded till 3am. He was the last invite to my wedding. There were three emotional dinners every time he failed to give his notice. This is the story of how I recruited him:

In 2023, Karan had the perfect setup as a hedge fund manager. 9-5 hours, incredible pay, unbelievable culture and returns. And I was looking for the smartest person with a financial skillset who makes every decision better.

In this video, we tell the full story of how we found that person in Karan:

- Why I had him build our financial model as a "favor" when we didn't even know if our Stripe data was revenue or bookings
- The 3 times he said he'd give notice and couldn't pull the trigger (and the 3 intervention dinners I orchestrated with different teammates)
- What happened the night he slept over at my house before attempt #4 - shared bed, emotional wreck, late night pillow talk

I wanted to share how messy, long and emotional exec recruiting processes can be. And also show how wonderful they can feel when you get it right. The trust we have makes everything easier and faster, and it is SO MUCH FUN to work together. Even when we disagree, we resolve conflict almost instantly. I hope you see that energy in these videos, and find this for yourself too!

At Clay [Club] Amsterdam, a top-secret yacht broker to the rich and famous showed me a wild Clay use case I've never seen. He can't be in this video for privacy reasons. But here's how it works:

Use Case #1: Know Your Customer

Imagine you're shopping for yachts. You're perusing, hanging out, drinking champagne, acting rich. And then you go to the broker and say, "I'm interested." But he doesn't know you from Adam. You could be anyone off the street. Are you even wearing a Rolex? Is that a Loro Piana sweater or Old Navy? How does he know you're worth his time?

Well, this is where Clay comes in. You provide brief info through a web form, which kicks off a Clay workflow to find unique data points trying to answer one question: are you going to buy a yacht?

Data points like: What's your net worth? Where do you live? How close is your address to a marina? What are the house prices in your area? What's the average income in your area? What companies did you work for? Do you sit on any boards? Does your region have a boating culture?

Then they're connecting it back to the CRM to see if there are any mutual connections and assigning a lead score. Finally, they WhatsApp the salesperson within seconds to share whether this stranger is a qualified lead.

Use Case #2: Newfound Wealth Signals

Then they built signals to catch people right when they get rich:

- Company IPOs
- Acquisition events (for employees who just cashed out)
- Estate/trust unlocks that become public
- News mentions
- Even lottery winners

The moment these triggers fire, they're in the inbox selling yachts. 

Use Case #3: ABM for Yacht Teams

Turns out yachting is a B2B industry. Call it YaaS (Yachting-as-a-Service). News to me too.

Super yachts and mega yachts... buy smaller yachts. One for groceries. One for diving. One for fishing. Some owners have a yacht in the Mediterranean and another in the Adriatic.

So they're running ClayBM campaigns on yacht teams—targeting captains, first mates, the yacht support team—to sell them MORE yachts. Your yacht needs a yacht, apparently.

I learned all of this in 30 minutes at Clay [Club] Amsterdam from a guy who couldn't be on camera because his buyers are royal families and oil barons. Very hush hush!

Pretty cool to find unexpected Clay use cases in the most niche industries!

P.S. Thank you to Patrick -- co-founder of Claygency The Kiln and more importantly my EuroTour companion -- for stepping in and talking this through with me :-)

The people have spoken. Clay is coming to Paris! We're adding a late-breaking stop to the Euro Tour.

We'll be taking the Chunnel next week from London to Paris, which I thought for the longest time had windows like an aquarium to see the fishies.

The momentum from this tour has been more exciting than I could have imagined. I just toured offices in central London yesterday. We're going all in!

Come join us for two more exciting events in Paris. First, I'm talking about GTM in the Age of AI with Gabriel at Dust, and then hanging with the Clay [Club] to talk Top GTM Trends for 2026 with our hosts Jérémy Grandillon and Bill Stathopoulos.

Would love to meet you in person!

Register in the comments. 👇

P.S. Some people have been commenting that our Fireside Chats have been "unhinged" and "the most fun I could have had on a Saturday at noon". Come see what all the fuss is about!

I just spent a few hours in Amsterdam with my friend Salar, CEO of Monumental. They're building AI-powered robots and software that autonomously construct masonry walls on-site. And we realized something crazy: Clay and Monumental have the same go-to-market motion. 

When Salar started, everyone told him construction tech doesn't work. His words, not mine. But in a way they were right. Contractors don't have budget for tech.

So, instead of building their GTM around selling contractors AI robots and fancy software, they sold brick walls. 

Contractors already have budgets for brick walls and market pricing already exists. Monumental just shows up with robots instead of masons. If the tech fails? They bring in human masons, eat the cost, and still deliver the wall.

We do the same thing at Clay.

Early on, we'd pitch the dream to CROs and CMOs on all the crazy AI automation Clay could do. We were faced with skepticism. So instead we led with selling data.

These GTM leaders needed data, they already had pre-allocated budget, and we could improve their data quality and prove it quantitatively. Then once we did that, we showed them all the incredible things Clay could do. We showed them our version of robots that can lay bricks. 

Two completely different industries with the same playbook.

With AI it's easy to get caught up selling the dream. And if you don't hit those high expectations, you're setting everyone up for disappointment. Better to start with a wedge for a pre-existing problem and budget, earn trust with quick wins, and build the magic from there.

Last week in Helsinki I went ice dipping in the Baltic Sea with the founders of Google Maps (Lars Rasmussen) and Dust (Gabriel Hubert). I lasted all of 5 seconds. It was fun, it was invigorating, and has absolutely zero relevance to any of you but I wanted to bring you in on this energy!!

P.S. I know some think Clay takes our marketing a bit too far on here, but we draw the line at nipples on LinkedIn. So Peter had to get creative with this edit.

WHAT A DAY AT SLUSH! Yesterday we did some LIVE growth hacking on stage with my dear friends Eileen O'Mara (CRO of Stripe and happy customer!), Luciana Lixandru (Sequoia) and Jane Alexander (CapitalG). 

Let me share one with you. One SaaS founder is building a product to turn WhatsApp messages into a CRM. His problem was they're getting lots of leads but people aren't showing up for demos. What does that scream to me? He's got an ICP problem! Those people don't truly have pain! If they did, they wouldn't be ghosting him.

Well who could be his customers? It's likely small businesses. I suggested he use Clay and prospect local companies with Google Maps, scrape their websites to see if they use WhatsApp, and then check their Google and Yelp reviews for people who are complaining about long response times. Have that table run on a schedule and reach out to the owner minutes after the review gets posted. I promise you that person will show up to a demo!

That was a lot of fun to do on the hottest tech stage in Europe, trying to solve real growth problems for founders figuring out their product-market-fit. 

Now I'm off to Stockholm to continue my European Tour. 

Excited to meet the teams at Lovable,  Legora, and hangout with the local Clay [Club]. If you want to meet up, register for the Stockholm events (some later today!) in the comments. 👇

Just had a very fun fireside chat with the RevOps, revenue marketing and product marketing teams at Adyen, the $43b payments juggernaut based in Amsterdam and very happy Clay customer :-) 

We had a great hour-long conversation on a range of topics including the Clay journey, GTM engineering, our culture, marketing ROI, and the future of GTM. 

But certain questions stood out. Why? Because I hear some variation in every event I host for startup teams across Europe and the US. Questions like: How do org structures evolve in AI? What skills should ICs be prioritizing in the age of AI?What are the common denominator qualities that the cutting edge teams all share?

Here's how we think about it:

We see the best GTME teams operating like product and engineering orgs. They iterate and experiment quickly, power through a queue of tickets, and rigorously automate through every revenue function. Teams look less like assembly lines now and more like GTM engineers building systems that help sellers focus on selling.

The best teams are increasingly technical and use Clay and other tools to build sophisticated workflows that automate QBR deck creation, build event invite systems, and weaponize conversational data into ABM, Salesforce updates and prep notes. This shift matches with the tide we see moving to more flexible data warehouses as the system of record, with GTMEs orchestrating many workflows from there through Clay. 

Massive thank you Evelina Petrova-op den Kelder for hosting! We're so happy to be a partner to you and excited to keep working together.

Wow Lisbon what a whirlwind! Two panels at Web Summit, an amazing dinner with our friends at Coverflex and an epic cruise with Clay [Club] Lisbon. 

I'm always so struck by the community we are building. I met so many people on the cruise who have forged deep friendships through the Clay [Clubs]. We can take Reyhan Khan as an example, who's made lifelong friends with Rafael Guerreiro 🚀 and Olivier 🧪 Tytgat through this community. 

At the Coverflex dinner, I finally was able to meet Pedro Azevedo who has been pushing the boundaries of what's possible in Clay for years. I had such great convos with Luis from Amplemarket about what we're excited about in GTM tech, Ollie Cheal from 1Password on the latest security practices, and Norberto Guimaraes a legend who pushed me on authentic marketing and the limits of our jobs data. 

We had such a good time that when I left at 12:30am, half the folks were still hanging! Big thank you to Miguel Santo Amaro 🇵🇹🇮🇹🇪🇸 for gathering this special group.

Just got to Amsterdam, where we have another [Club] event, a fireside with Andrey from Miro and lots of meetings with our customers here :-) 

P.S. Thank you to Andrew Johnson for capturing the this picture of my custom Clay sneakers.

Had two great sessions yesterday. One on the main stage at SaaStr with Amelia Lerutte and then with Paul Adams at Intercom. One question kept coming up: what is behind all our crazy marketing, like Kung Fu and blunt rolling videos!?

Well it comes down to our people of course. And their unique backgrounds that makes the creative magic.

Let's start with Peter Kang, who runs Clay's rapidly-growing social media presence. Peter was an investment banking analyst at Barclays and worked in finance at Clubhouse. But on the side he ran a TikTok about SPREADSHEETS with 200k followers!! How rare is it to find someone with an analytical mindset but a proven creative track record?!

And then there's the inimitable Jessica Jin, our chief schemer in permanence. If you've seen something crazy we've done on LinkedIn, it was probably her brainchild. I can't go into too much detail about her background or LinkedIn will suppress this post. But if you're curious you can look up my past posts on her. The short safe story is that she organized absolutely hilarious nationwide protests and had no B2B tech experience before her scheming began at Clay. But political organizing is marketing.

This is the whole point of the interview process. Learn everything you can about someone and see how you can translate their skills to what you need. That's where the real alpha is in hiring.

Just arrived in Paris today and absolutely pumped to wrap up the EuroTour with baguettes and croissants! 🥐

Evan Dunn

Pixis

Head of Growth

Warmly,

Advisor

Punch GTM

Cofounder, Chief Scientist

GTM Partners

GTM Ambassador

Rep.ai

Head of Marketing

Syncari

Director of Growth Marketing

Airwallex

- Deployed PMF Testing Framework to identify lowest-friction industry/company-size fit for Airwallex’s SMB offering. 
- Led SDR team of 1 (on a PIP) to 5 meetings per day per SDR using validated cold calling. 
- Managed channels for multiple product launches in the US, including
- Identified major revenue leakage points in top funnel traffic and collaborated with global marketing org to resolve.
- Responsible for US strategy and execution of web, paid, SEO, content, social, SDR. Reported skip-level to CEO.

US Growth Marketing Lead

Convoy Inc

- Cross-functional role leading web strategy (56% growth in traffic), advertising (225% growth in qualified leads), and SEO (233% growth). Their current flagship page for acquiring carriers even two years later is "Load Boards Introduction" - see Media. 
- Built project management infrastructure for entire marketing org (35 FTEs). 
- Double daily carrier signups to free app with a simple tweak to on-site widgets.
- Led organic and paid search to become 2 highest contributors of sales opps behind sales outreach. 
- Led advertising strategy and execution, earned 3X budget increase into a $1.2M portfolio. 
- Managed massive 800-page website cleanup project, bringing site audit score to 93%, preparing site for Core Web Vitals update, coordinating 5-person vendor team and 4 dotted line reports. 
- Developed and implemented tracking and funnel frameworks, in collaboration with Marketing Ops and Sales. Pioneered multi touch attribution modeling.

Senior Digital Marketing Manager

Resonance AI

Led company-wide product strategy for Resonance AI, culminating in a massive product launch and the first real customer traction. Oversaw product vision, roadmap, weekly planning and prioritization, as well as product marketing and branding. Honed focus from multi-vertical to single-vertical (media) and infused productive discipline into dev team.

VP Product

Led customer communications as the load-bearing link between product 	development and sales, including customer-facing materials, product demos and co-marketing partnerships. On consultative engagements, directed a team of business 	analysts in support of our customers’ ambitious growth initiatives.

Director of Customer Success

Led consultative efforts with multiple Fortune 1000 customers to support and train digital marketing teams. The wide array of project types included go-to-market 	strategy, sales collateral development, marketing optimization, multivariate testing, competitive intelligence and brand strategy. Created most of these capabilities from scratch.

Digital Marketing Practice Lead

In my own free time

Wrote and performed original Spoken Word poetry to dozens of different crowds of 10 to 500 audience members, in an effort to engage the community in difficult but important conversations; competed in 2012 Grand Poetry Slam in Seattle; organized and emceed Poetry Slam community event in May 2012; speaker at arts workshop; performed as artist advocate for documentary on sex trafficking in Seattle; performed at 2009 "Take Back the Night" event at Univ. of Wash. raising awareness of sexual assault.

Performance Poet

Lean Growth. Agile GTM. Test-and-Learn. Revenue-centric Marketing & Growth Leader with success leading demand, paid, web, PLG, content, & sales dev, through rapid & robust experimentation. Led AI product strategy & dev.

Avid Experimenter. GTM Scientist. Conversation-First Marketer.

Jason Bay dialed TitanX numbers live.

And it made for some good moments 🤣 

One prospect said "Aaaaah" and hung up.

Another picked up in what sounded like a call center, couldn't hear anything, and asked to be removed from the list.

A Google Voice voicemail turned into an actual pickup mid-message. The guy was... not thrilled.

Classic cold calling chaos.

But here's what actually matters:

30 dials. 9 pickups. 1 meeting booked.

That's a 30% connect rate.

Jason's own words: "I've never talked to this many people in like a 45-minute period."

He also admitted he was unprepared for how many conversations he'd actually have. Didn't pre-research enough people because he didn't expect to reach this many.

That's the problem we're solving at TitanX.

Most reps spend hours dialing into the void.

When you're actually having conversations? Everything changes.

Your talk track gets reps. You learn what's landing. You build momentum.

Jason went 0-for-4 conversions early on and was feeling it. Then he booked a meeting and said his first thought was "how can I land another one?"

That's what real connect rates do for your team.

Full video link in comments. Shoutout to 30 Minutes to President's Club for awesome content.

Head of Marketing @TitanX. Create Conversations. Always Be Experimenting. AI + human expert on ABM, inbound, demand gen, pipeline creation, cold calling, SEO, paid media.

The team is at Pipeline Conference right now. 14 meetings booked today so far, though some are from Reese Kerlin and Catherine Park still hitting the phones that normal boring way. 

But for pattern interrupt, here's what we chose to do:

1. AI generated printouts. Yes. Real paper. From trees. Probably uses less tree than the AI queries to get the output.

The logo, company name, a 1 to 1.5 page letter from Joey, and a closing page with a branded custom QR code to our website all produced using Clay to DocsAutomator with some AI queries referencing:

➔ tech stack from job descriptions via Sumble
➔ estimated SDR/BDR headcount
➔ calls with TitanX if any (sanitized for sensitive information)
➔ estimated ACV
➔ SDR/BDR, GTM Eng, RevOps/Sales Ops/Marketing Ops job descriptions
➔ data waste analysis

Are some of the estimates off? Sure. Are there likely some errors? Yeah. A couple of the letter elements didn't insert at all.

But it's a handout that no one else is handing out.

2. GroundTruth for ads within 1 mile of the hotel everyone is staying at.

3. LinkedIn Ads to the city for our GTM functions at accounts that we know are attending. Already had a couple hits from those.

Would've loved to do more but this was a 3 day turnaround. Cheers to Fedex Office for printing 76 unique documents within 48 hours.

We booked just under 30 meetings in one day at Pipeline Conference last week.

And Sam Byassee got lawn-darted.

Success vs Enthusiasm in Different Outbound Modalities (Channels).

AKA what does it FEEL like to be part of winning outbound, given the typical SDR activity set.

AKA the nerdiest video I've done yet.

tl;dr:
📧 Email: Success ↗ | Enthusiasm →
 📱 Social: Success ↗ | Enthusiasm ↗
 📞 Phone: Success ↗ | Enthusiasm ↑
 🤖 AI: Success ↗ | Enthusiasm ~

Some people wonder if TitanX works long-term. 

"Will I run out of high intent numbers?"
"Is my TAM big enough?"

Let's say your TAM is 2,000 accounts. A very modest TAM. 

First, TAM = Total Addressable Market - the universe of potential buying organizations. It should never be measured in contacts. But of course you can estimate number of contacts at each account you want to speak to. This, however, should INCLUDE the number of contacts who can meaningful provide intel or influence deals in your favor or who manage the person who is your decision maker, or are managed by them. 

It's important to remember that if you sell to anyone in GTM, then GTM operations and finance are often influencers. If you sell to anyone back office, then IT and finance are often influencers. If you sell to anyone senior/dir/VP level, then a few C-suite titles are influencers from top down, and the team below them are influencers from the bottom up.

Second, remember you can pivot TAMs. You can build a new list of companies and pitch a new product. Anyone in non-verticalized ("horizontal") b2b SaaS (meaning you sell to a function e.g. HR, finance, IT, ops, data/analytics, sales, marketing), for instance, has a massive TAM. Way too big. Anyone in vertical SaaS has a rather limited TAM.

Third, TAMs evolve. New companies become part of your viable account list all the time, some companies sunset. Are you tracking them that actively?

Ok, so let's say your TAM is 2,000 accounts.

Decision Makers: You can name 3 possible titles that are likely decision makers, and each account has 1 to 2 of those people. 2K-4K contacts.

Champions/Sponsors: These people run small teams of 1 or 2 given the size of the org, and each DM reports to a more senior person. That's 2-3 more; 4K-6K more contacts.

Influencers/Referrers: And those DMs work collaboratively with two other departments, so there are 4-6 additional contacts worth speaking to. 8K-12K more contacts.

Obviously, start with your DMs.

But already we've got 14K-24K contacts. 

Let's say you have 3K high intent contacts in there. If you speak to 30% of them in the first 3 months of outbound, you can speak to those who don't book AGAIN in 3 months. Meanwhile you try the other 2K that you didn't speak with again in months 2 and 3. Speak to those you connect with AGAIN in a few months. Log who they're using instead, when the renewal is, when to follow up, who owns the relevant program/tech/decision.

Even with a limited TAM, there's a couple full time headcount of work here to be done building relationships and conversing with it. 2000 accounts. And if your founder really believes that's all there is in your future, you have other problems.

This is a rather isolated buying group, maybe something like a small HR org in 100-500 employee companies, or a small accounting team. It could easily be expanded by looking at smaller orgs, or larger orgs. 



P.S. These numbers are from Outbound Operators (Ryan Reisert / Ronen R. Pessar).

There is a substantially different FEELING for SDRs who are hitting quota reliably, vs. those who are not.

No "team culture" matters if there is no "culture of success" - everyone can smell layoffs coming when perks and happy hours and gimmicks are the bandaids taped over underperforming teams.

It's a miserable spot to be in.

Below is November to date: 24 meetings booked from Reese Kerlin and Catherine Park, on the phone alone.

They booked 30 from the phone in all of October.

Not only that, but meetings booked to qualified opp jumped 33% from Sep to Oct.

There is no chance they don't keep improving - they have more conversations than teams 5x their size.

This is the momentum effect of a successful playbook.

It feels different.

It feels good.

What I wish I had done with my $1M paid media budget back in the day...

(TLDR; MARKETING SHOULD FUND SALES TECH)

The budgeting mentality in sales orgs vs marketing orgs is soooo weirdly different.

CMO: "what's the cost of this tech?"

CRO: "what's the cost of this tech per headcount?"

Is that good? Is that bad? Not sure. But wildly distinct.

With SDR orgs underneath sales, this has some weird effects:

E.g.
CRO "We need a centralized tool to get signals for our SDRs"
CFO "What's that cost per SDR?"

This is one of the many reasons that marketing should be funding sales tooling. No I'm not crazy. Yes I've worked in big ish companies before with lots of sales and marketing money.

Once I had a $1M paid media budget. 

If I had taken even the smallest sliver and put it over into quality data vendors (very different list back then vs now) and validation (yes like TitanX) and a good dialer, as well as (today) a couple pieces of a signal stack (Sumble API, Clay, Trigify, Usergems, Common Room, Warmly, whatever is bespoke to the industry (those are the best signals)), I would've still had a massive paid media budget 

AND

I would have been funding high velocity pipe creation. 
Quotas would not have been an issue. 
It would free up time for creative SDR experiments like video chat on target accounts landing on high intent pages on the site or in deal rooms. 
It would have meant conversation volume that I could analyze and use to tune ad copy and email copy and blog content.
The list keeps going.

The other reason marketers should fund sales tech is
GTM is GTM.
It all runs together.

Success at the top of the funnel aids all other top funnel efforts. (Rising tides, lifting ships, yup)

Cold calling creates a ton of awareness, with the highest recall possible.

(Recall is a metric B2C folks use to measure the impact of ad campaigns where there is no clear CTA to a purchase - email and ads have way lower recall than a conversation)

And the third reason:

CROs don't really have budgets other than people X pipeline. Which is why they budget per headcount.

They have no real tech budget. And if given, given very begrudgingly. Usually owned by RevOps, who also have almost no budget other than vital tooling.

Marketing is for top funnel innovation. Marketing should hire GTM Eng type roles. 

And Marketing should fund sales tech, at least as it concerns SDRs.

ROCS. 

Gerry Hill and Chris Beall thought of this metric.

I'm still puzzling over the implications.

But I think I'm in love. (Yes when you work in GTM design long enough, you do fall in love with the right metrics).

First: how much does a conversation cost you?

Second: how much money do you make per conversation held?

The first question is simple to calculate, yet most don't. Cost of tech+team+time involved over a day/week/month/year, vs. how many (qualified) conversations the team has over a day/week/month/year. If you're REALLY honest, you include top funnel + awareness marketing spend here as well (ouch).

What we've seen at TitanX is that it can range anywhere from $200 to $2500. 

Per conversation. 

Just for SDR time+tech.

Most are north of $800 per conversation. 

(So yes, buy better headsets for your sales team, they're cheaper than 1 convo).

And also if you do calculate this, it gives demand gen something to aim for in terms of ROAS calc. Especially if you can answer the second question.

Return side: how many qualified new business conversations to get to an opportunity, then calculate down to revenue. 

The result is a truly scalable SDR org.

Can you imagine what that level of clarity FEELS like?

Confidence in hiring. Confidence in direction. Break down ROCS by vertical, SKU, team, rep even - and you know exactly where to double down and where to shore up.

Of course this assumes distributed work among a team of SDRs, which is not so much the domain of email/social any longer and more fit for the phone. But that's a debate for another post.




...Build your house on ROCS. (Couldn't resist)

Been messing around trying to get AI longform video ad makers to play nice.

I think we're pretty close to something here. Time to run it in the retargeting set?

Disclaimer: this AI is obviously not a lawyer.

"Intent data" gets a bad rap. Mostly deserved.

But it makes sense: we all want to filter our market down to "who is most likely to buy."

But like with all words, we've got to narrow down what we mean by "intent."

I usually break intent into three categories:
- 1st party (web and owned engagement signals) = always good, they existed before your linkedin feed got taken over by them
- 2nd party (review sites) = sometimes great
- 3rd party (topical intent) = meh, usually a waste of $$$

But a better framework might be: Behavioral vs Topical.

The real problem with third party intent, which Jason Bay pointed out the other day is one of the biggest scams, is trying to tie the topic of web content, to the identity of a human reader of that content, to the possible behavior/disposition of a business. 

That's a lot of logical (and logisitical) fancy footing.

Instead:
- who is naming your competitors in their tech stacks (fan of Sumble for this)?
- who is active on linkedin? filter for linkedin outreach
- who is active on the phone? That's what we call TitanX Phone Intent

We don't tell you who is likely to buy. 

But we make it reeeeeal easy to ask them.

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