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So much of what people are writing about right now is how they are reading about how others use or how they’re “tinkering” with AI tools.

IMO, too much reading and tinkering without taking action is like reading a book on how to play soccer instead of playing it yourself. Or reading a book on business instead of trying to build one. You get stuck in paralysis analysis.

Eventually, you just need to ship and iterate on the fly to move the ball forward.

Part of my ethos behind GTMBA is to break this barrier - consider this my first post of many of how I’m using AI (via writing and videos) to take action and complete common GTM workflows, similar to the sales co-pilot article I wrote in January.

I had issues with the video upload for this article, so for this one it will be just text. Moving forward, expect some videos like we did last month.

I caught up with my friend Todd Busler, CEO of Champify, who said this - “everyone keeps talking about how they’re tinkering with AI and Clay, but what have the results been?”

It’s a fair point - however to clarify, there are quite a few things Clay does well that doesn’t necessarily lead to booked meetings:

• It helps with top of funnel awareness in a thoughtful way, which eventually leads to meetings

• It helps with account planning through Perplexity and Claude in one table

• Helps to connect common investors in a book of business

• It helps with account research which allows me to take thoughtful action faster at my publicly traded companies

• So much more

It helps save me so much time in my GTM workflows. More posts to come on those specific use cases.

Today, I am going to be showing you all how we worked with a client of a devtools company book 25+ meetings with Clay and spike their product usage. I’ll explain what we did/the results briefly, and then a video at the end which you all can see how I best do this live.

Info on our client:

• Sells to startup AI companies (75% of YC are AI startups, so YC as a growth channel was perfect)

• Has a PLG motion and a customer can sign up without a taking a meeting (increases a positive CTA surface area of luck)

• Sells to a technical buyer (devs hate being called, so them preferring email/LI is even better for this)

Now, let’s jump in.

If you sell to startups, do what you can to get on the YC deals page.

The companies we typically advise at GTMBA are early-stage (sub 1M in revenue), and they’re just looking for traction. Early customers. Feedback for their product. General awareness. Test & iterate.

I can’t think of a better place that people will take a bet on your product than in YC, in which they’re trying (actively in a cohort) to do the same thing are will be open to trialing out a new product.

To apply for the YC deals page, apply using this link here. The concept is that they’ll be open to you being on that so long that your typical ICP is a startup, and you are willing to give free usage of your product to help their startup community thrive.

Once you’re on the YC deals page, use Clay thoughtfully reach out to founders to let them know of this recent deal.

For those that aren’t using Clay as your sales co-pilot tool, you’re behind. Go learn it now and you’ll thank me later. I wrote more about that here.

5 Step Process:

• 1) Scrape the relevant companies using the Clay Chrome extension and YC company directory

• 2) Get these into a Clay table (and further scrape using Clay’s amazing capabilities)

• 3) Enrich the Clay table (get the founders/company LinkedIns, emails, normalize company name/first name, etc.)

• 4) Creating messaging and different CTAs that someone can “check into” to signal different parts of the funnel (click link, trial product, book meeting, etc.)

  __________________________________
  
  Subject: New YC Deal For {BATCH XXX}

  
  Body:

  Hey {FIRST NAME},

  
  It’s been cool to read about what you are building at {COMPANY NAME} and your story with YC in the {BATCH XXX} batch.

  
  Given your stage [some line about a problem similar companies see, maybe even reference a customer linked to a customer story].

  
  We’d love to help share those learnings and give you some free usage of [our platform], to [explain what it would help them do].
  
  If interested, feel free to [CTA - download GitHub repo] or [book time here using my Calendly link and I can explain more of what we’ve seen].

  
  Here as a thought partner should you need it around [xyz].

  Best,

  Name @ Company
  ____________________________________

• 5) Set meetings, build general awareness, have people start using your product in GitHub, create mindshare, etc.

The Results Were Incredible:

Outreach:

• ~670 startups identified from YC W23/S23/W24/S24 batches that were relevant to our client

• 1,150 founders' emails and LinkedIn profiles scraped

• 1,143 emails successfully delivered (99% success rate —> Clay’s enrichment capability is amazing)

Engagement:

• ~77% email open rate

• ~12% click-through-rate

• 50+ sandbox testing

• 25+ meetings booked

• 10+ deals closed (lower ACV range avgs 5-10k for this, but was still a huge success)

Resources:

• Clay and La Growth Machine (can use any sequencer here that integrates with Clay) tools used for customized messaging

• Approximately $100 in Clay usage (1/3 of monthly credits), and we were already paying for LGM

• Couple hours of my time

Boom - as simple as that. First of many article we’ll put out there of how to use Clay/other tools to supercharge how you all go-to-market. I plan to launch a video of how we did this in a future post, but just had some uploading issues and didn’t want to delay the ship of this one.

We’re working with some early-stage AI companies on GTM advisory - for those who are interested, please reach out to [email protected] or [email protected] - would love to chat more!