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Dave Gerhardt (Founder of Exit Five, former CMO) and guests help you grow your career in B2B marketing. Episodes include conversations with CMOs, marketing leaders, and subject matter experts across all aspects of modern B2B marketing: planning, strategy, operations, ABM, demand gen., product marketing, brand, content, social media, and more. Join 4,400+ members in our private community at exitfive.com.
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:14]:
All right, I'm excited to do this one. My guest on this episode is somebody who's responsible for marketing at a company that I have started to see everywhere. I don't know if that's some kind of bias of mine. I've been, like, liking stuff on LinkedIn, but more people are asking about Clay in the Exit Five community. I see it come up over and over. I'm sure you're happy to hear that. Bruno, give me a quick introduction. Who you are and what is Clay?
Bruno Estrella [00:00:40]:
Oh, yeah. Excited to be here today. I'm chatting with you. So I'm Bruno. I lead growth marketing here at Clay. And Clay is basically a dating Richmond and sales automation product that enables go to market teams like find, enrich, and reach out to prospects in a prospect or current customers as well in a much more relevant way. And if you want to do that scale, you can as well. So, basically a candidate enrichment and sales automation product.
Dave Gerhardt [00:01:09]:
And how long have you been there? When did you get there?
Bruno Estrella [00:01:11]:
So I joined Clay end of last year. So it's coming up about ten months now. Before that, I ran growth marketing at Webflow for five years for a long time.
Dave Gerhardt [00:01:23]:
Five years. Okay, so you're webflow for five years. And then roughly, what, like, size company stage that you talk about? Where is Clay at?
Bruno Estrella [00:01:31]:
So now we are. In terms of full time employees, we are crossing about, like 65, 70 full time employees. When I joined back first week of December last year, we. We were only 20. So we've been growing pretty fast.
Dave Gerhardt [00:01:46]:
That's. That's crazy for you to go in a year like that is. The company must feel like it's, like, reinvented itself, like, you know, every month, right?
Bruno Estrella [00:01:54]:
Yeah. Yeah. I went through a very similar process at Webflow. I mean, I wasn't that early, but I was, like, around, like 50, 60. When I joined, left five years later, we were like, 700. So it was kind of insane as well. But, yeah, Clay is also growing really fast.
Dave Gerhardt [00:02:10]:
Okay. We should get into some of the webflow lessons at some point. I think there's some good stuff there, for sure. And when you joined Clay was 20 people. What was the mission for marketing? Like, you got hired. Marketing can be everything. What have you spent the last year or so doing?
Bruno Estrella [00:02:27]:
So we focused a lot on top of funnel. So how do we acquire new customers through our self serve product? How do we get people to talk about Clay and how do we continue to grow our self serve motion? Clay was starting to see some movement in terms of top of funnel activity in our self serve product. And how do we actually double down on what's working? And we kind of didn't really know what was working. A lot of my initial role is like, figure out what we need to do, how we do it, and then scale top of funnel. So that was like our main target. How do we grow this, the self serve business?
Dave Gerhardt [00:03:03]:
Is that the main funnel today? Like, you want everybody to go? I guess if I look at the website, it seems to be the main thing. Like, you want everybody to go and start doing something in clay for free. This is very much a product led growth type of motion.
Bruno Estrella [00:03:14]:
Yes, very much a product led growth. But the interesting thing is, like, and I saw that at webflow, too, as we grow the PLG motion, naturally you start to see larger companies wanting to adopt this product. Right? So now we actually have a sales led motion happening as well, which is primarily driven by the top of funnel motion that drives a self serve product.
Dave Gerhardt [00:03:37]:
Interesting. So most of those is like, sales led is like, maybe they're not necessarily doing outbound, but you're starting to like, you know, see some good fit people that start for free and then sales will reach out.
Bruno Estrella [00:03:50]:
Exactly, exactly. So we have the, like people are starting to use. The interesting thing is that, like, at the end of the day, everyone uses LinkedIn, right? Like, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter if you are an IC or at a larger company, if you are a founder of an agency or if you're an exec in a company as well. So as people see, like, the top of funnel content creation happening on LinkedIn, they naturally get interested in seeing this product. So, like, for example, even like we, I know, like, I, people tend to say, especially this coming from me as a growth market is like, oh, we shouldn't really look at followers and this as a metric. But, for example, we went from like 8000 followers on our LinkedIn page to 40,000 in the past, like ten months or something. And 30% of our followers are actually people that work in 500 plus companies, you know, full time employee point of view. So, like, the content creation reaches these people, they see the use cases and then they reach out to us.
Dave Gerhardt [00:04:51]:
This comes up a couple times on this podcast, and I don't understand why people, they like to take the edge case of, yeah, followers are a vanity metric. They're a vanity metric. If you build a meme page about being a dad and all your content is like parenting memes, and then you try to sell them B2B software, then, yeah, followers don't matter. But if you've been building up those followers with content and information and education that your ideal customers want, essentially what you have is those 40,000 people or whatever have opted in to see updates from clay.
Bruno Estrella [00:05:25]:
Yeah, exactly. The interesting thing about this is the use cases that people use clay at a larger company are pretty different, honestly, from what they do at a smaller company. Like the companies that you see on our website. We have anthropic in there. We just launched a case study with them as well. They have a massive top of funnel. All the people that are signing up to the product outbound isn't really a motion for them. So they use clay, from an inbound point of view, to enrich people that are signing up to enrich their contact, making sure that they're enriching with things that actually matter for them.
Bruno Estrella [00:05:58]:
So depending on the company, the use cases are a little bit different. It's more like an inbound use case versus, like an outbound.
Dave Gerhardt [00:06:05]:
I want to go back to the top of the funnel. So this is something that a lot of people want to do. Grow top of the funnel. Can we get into some of the tactics, like, other than. Yeah, you post on LinkedIn, like, what's been in the playbook, to actually consistently and repeatedly grow top of funnel. This is an area where, especially if you have a free product, a product where you want to get people to use it, how do you drive predictable, repeatable demand?
Bruno Estrella [00:06:27]:
Yeah, that's a good question. I think, like, I can kind of talk a little bit about how we kind of, like, assess on where we wanted to invest here at clay. I think, like, one problem that I see, especially on growth marketers and marketing in general, if you want to grow top of funnels, that you go from one business to the other, and then you kind of, like, apply the same things and like, oh, we should do Google search or we should do this. We should, like, put a webinar program. But the reality is that, like, businesses are so different and the audiences are so different, and the business models are different, too. So we actually need to assess these things before we do. So that was kind of like the first step that we took, which was like, okay, where do we have really strong product market fit with? How is our business model? In our case, our model was a PLG model. So that kind of starts to inform us we actually need a decent amount of volume to grow a top of funnel.
Bruno Estrella [00:07:20]:
That starts to inform you, I can do an executive dinner to grow a PLG motion, what are the channels that we can then invest in that will give me this volume that I need? And where does our audience live? So, like, really understanding this. And I think the one thing that I wanted to call out here, too, is like, and I think I've seen you talk about this is like, a lot of this is actually like, talking to customers and, like, getting self reported attribution and so, like, trying to understand the actual details there. Because if you were to assess how we're growing based on, like, cookie based attribution tracking, this is just like, it's not going to take away, right?
Dave Gerhardt [00:07:59]:
Sure.
Bruno Estrella [00:07:59]:
So the way that we start to uncover this is that then we understood that we were starting to grow through, like, a user generated content. Motion happening. And the reason behind this user generated content is the product is really flexible. So whenever we get into clay, it kind of feels like an open canvas. There's like this sort. And it can be overwhelming for some people, too. Like, you kind of, you get into this kind of like, spreadsheet format, and then you can kind of pull data anywhere. You can do things that actually matter for your business in terms of enrichment.
Bruno Estrella [00:08:28]:
So what this results actually results in, after you build something, you kind of feel proud of yourself. You're like, oh, shit, I actually built something that I did this thing, you know, like, so the immediate thing is like, okay, let me actually share with others about this. And the last component is that our audience really early on was filled with service providers. So these are freelancers and agencies that they were using clay to serve their clients. And they kind of want to. They need to create content to grow their businesses, right? So they're posting on LinkedIn, they're doing all of that. So us, our tactic was, how can we build programs that enable them to create more content, and how can we invest in them to create more content, and how they invest in these ecosystem to get them to create more content about clay in general. So, like, technically what this means, which is very.
Bruno Estrella [00:09:21]:
And it's like, I think the one thing is like, people are probably listening to this podcast. Like, everything sounds super fancy, but at the end of the day, it's actually like very, like dirty work. It's like, hey, how can you see people signing up? They are an agency. How can you get into a call with you and help you create content around this? Right? Yeah, just to get the movement going. And then you think of like automation and sort of stuff.
Dave Gerhardt [00:09:43]:
Actually just had this experience the other day. Obed had dmed me and we were talking about something. And while we were talking about that, I'm like, oh, he's at Clay now. I'm trying to do. I want to test, like outbound for us for Exit Five. We have a really strong product now. I want to go get a list of, of cmos and b two B. And I was like, I should do this in clay, right? He's like, yeah, absolutely.
Dave Gerhardt [00:10:04]:
And I was like, all right. And he's like, why don't you get on a call with someone? And I'm like, no, absolutely not. I don't like calls. I don't want to get on a call. He's like, all right, I got you. And then literally, like, hours later, I get a message from Scott Tousley and he's like, hey, obed told me you're looking to do some stuff. Like, I can help you. Like, I'll build these things for you.
Dave Gerhardt [00:10:22]:
And I'm just one example of that. And I have a, you know, a small brand in this space, but I think it's like sweating. Who's signing up for your product, who's looking around and, like, doing some of the things that don't scale? And how do we enable this person? Because, you know, if, you know, if I use clay, I'm going to talk about it in some way. And I have audience in B2B. And so, like, I love how you're talking about that being a non scalable thing. The other thing, I'm just taking a bunch of notes as we do this. It made me think of, like, notion in a way. Right? Like, how many people do you see who's like, here's my notion template for x, here's my recipe.
Dave Gerhardt [00:10:54]:
Like, people love sharing that type of stuff.
Bruno Estrella [00:10:57]:
Exactly.
Dave Gerhardt [00:10:57]:
And if you can identify those. So, like, I get it how you, you have a product that gets a lot of user generated content. Yeah, but you mentioned before, like, you need a certain amount of volume. How can one person create enough ugc? It's got to be so many people. How do you make the volume play work there?
Bruno Estrella [00:11:14]:
Yeah, so, and then, like, after a while, we sort of, like, started to realize, okay, what's, how can we enable, how can we make it super easy for them to create content? So the way that we did it was we actually created like a creators program for clay, which is kind of common for social platforms. Instagram has one, TikTok has one. It's a program that enables people to create content. They are associated with the brand. They want to be associated with the product and get some resources so that's initially what we did, which is a program of like, they have to apply, they have to have some sort of content creation motion on LinkedIn already. They have to show that they mentioned Clay on LinkedIn already as well. And they use our product. So we don't really accept, like, it's not really an affiliate program, it's more like a community based program.
Bruno Estrella [00:12:01]:
And then as they join, we give them resources of like, like, for example, you actually just launched one, which is really cool, driven by Tommy on our team, which is like, hey, give us your profile, record this piece of text here with your voice, and we auto generate a screen recording thing over this new feature that we launch on your brand, with your face, with your voice, so you can actually look really good on social. So, like, how can we enable this?
Dave Gerhardt [00:12:28]:
You have to pay that it's not an affiliate program. Do you have to pay them due or are they willing to just do it because they want to be seen as like expert content creators.
Bruno Estrella [00:12:34]:
We give them a. So like a lot of the benefits. Like, we give them an affiliate link, we give them these sort of like pieces of content that they can promote. We promote their profiles on paid ads as well. We give them access to features in our product.
Dave Gerhardt [00:12:48]:
Yeah, that's such a killer play now with thought leader ads on LinkedIn. Like the fact that you can get so much more out of that. It used to be very ephemeral. Somebody writes a LinkedIn post and it's awesome. But the shelf life of a LinkedIn post is like 6 hours now. You can request to sponsor that post and it's like you've created this amazing organic ad unit that now you can go put dollars behind. That's a really good idea.
Bruno Estrella [00:13:11]:
Yeah, exactly. And like, so we have this sort of like ladder of programs that we built. One, we have this creators program, which is like people are getting started in clay. They want to talk about a product and we enable them to talk about it. And then we have like a selective group of clay experts. And these are like freelancers and agencies that build their businesses on top of clay. And we have internally here, like, we have to make sure that these people are millionaires. You know, we want to build like a bunch of millionaire agency founders that provide clay services.
Bruno Estrella [00:13:44]:
And then we have the top rev ops agencies that are now adopting clay as well. This is more of like an enterprise motion that they work with really large clients. So that's sort of like how we've been building this motion. We have this sort of creators, which is the people that we really enable to talk about Clay. Then we have the service level, and then we have, like, kind of, like, the enterprise motion as well.
Dave Gerhardt [00:14:04]:
Okay, so that's one play. I love that. I've always believed that, like, the best or not always, but since I've been in this game, and from what I've seen, I think the best marketing is always in b two B. It is education. It's information. Like, how do you make people smarter at their jobs because of what you're doing? And how do you enable them to do that? It's not always about ads to get a demo and try our product. And when you have a product like clay that people can actually use, that's the perfect playbook to go and do that. Let's show our product.
Dave Gerhardt [00:14:36]:
Let's show how people use it. Let's incentivize them to do that. Let's make them smarter. Let's make them stars. And, like, they can teach other people. And then also, it allows you to have this, like, content army of people who don't even work at your company. You can build a really big moat there. I see this come up a lot in the Exit Five community, and I don't know if you've done this, but I often see, like, hey, we want to work with influencers.
Dave Gerhardt [00:14:59]:
This is somewhat related. We want to work with influencers in our space, but I don't know where to find them. How would you help someone answer that? I have a strong opinion on this, but I want to go second.
Bruno Estrella [00:15:10]:
Yeah, it's tricky. Like, especially if we're thinking about b two B. Like, the one thing that I learned on B2B influencer marketing is that a lot of these people, they actually have jobs. So it's not like it's a influencer on an e commerce store that you can pay on Instagram, that you're going to promote this thing and put it out there.
Dave Gerhardt [00:15:31]:
Yeah, just, like, post a picture, like, in a bikini on the boat, drinking the seltzer and selling.
Bruno Estrella [00:15:36]:
Exactly, exactly. It's very different. It's like. It's much more like a deeper partnership. Most of the time, you need to get people to understand the product. You need to show value to them. Like, hey, there's something that you can use. And, like, the way that we've approached some of these is, like, we reach out to them normally through LinkedIn and be like, hey, I feel like there's, like, an overlap between our audience and yours.
Bruno Estrella [00:16:01]:
And the way that we've done this before is like, let's actually build something for you that will drive your results for your business using our product. Because then it's much easier for you to talk about it versus like, people can sense whenever it's like a 100% paid post. But that's how we've been approaching it and it's been pretty successful because then, so we work very closely with them. We literally have a call which like, what's something in your business that you need help with in terms of growth and how can we help you? And then we build clay tables, we work together with them, we launch and get results. And then whenever they go talk about it, they're like, okay, this thing is for real. This thing's legit. So it's very different. And it takes some time to this, like, this enablement session takes some time, but I think that's how we made it work.
Bruno Estrella [00:16:48]:
Curious to hear your thoughts too, Dave.
Dave Gerhardt [00:16:50]:
Well, I feel like people ask this and they expect there to be some magical database. And you go in this database and you search for your industry and they surface you this list of influencers. And I feel like the only way to really work with influencers is even if there was that database, you have to know who they are, you have to know what they talk about, you have to know what their audience is like, and then you have to meet them in the middle and then match the content to that audience. And then the other thing is like, even if that did exist in b two B. I think people just have it wrong. You don't need people with massive. I bet if I looked at some of the people in the clay creators program, you've probably driven like tons of pipeline from someone that has like, you know, 6000 LinkedIn followers, right? You don't need to be MrBeast, you don't need to have millions of followers for this to be meaningful. I had Natalie Taylor on the podcast a while ago, and she runs marketing at capsule.
Dave Gerhardt [00:17:50]:
And like, they did something smart, which is like, they found like ten or 20 creators on LinkedIn that were making videos for their company. And I'm making up a number, but it was some small dollar amount where like instead of paying one person a huge amount of money, they found 20 people and they pay, they say, hey, can we pay you $500? And we want to do this micro influencer campaign. And she didn't find that from some database. She found it because she's on LinkedIn. She knows her customers, she knows who they follow. You're not going to get this list. And then, by the way, even if you did get that list. What would happen is everybody would reach out to those same people.
Dave Gerhardt [00:18:23]:
And so I think you have to be curious about the platforms, you have to be curious about the channels. The people on your team should be deep on social understanding, who's talking about related topics to your brand, and then you can find them. There's no really shortcut to getting a list of influencers to go and work with.
Bruno Estrella [00:18:40]:
Yeah, 100%. And that's why I think the one thing that you mentioned is something that we do pretty well, which is like what's the content that you're creating? Who's your audience? What is something that will be relevant for them? And how can you build something that uses play that it's also relevant for you because then whenever you have all of these touch points and you have all of these areas correct, you can kind of build something that makes sense. And I think the other thing too, that like no one really talks about is there's the part of actually finding and launching the content. The other piece is actually like measuring results. And I think people often forget how they buy things. I think that's something that I've kind of noticed. Like whenever you in the see that you're measuring results, you forget how do you make decisions? And most of the time you don't click on ads, you don't think about these things. You see people talking about it, then whenever you have the need to go ahead and purchase it.
Bruno Estrella [00:19:35]:
So it's really tricky. Like if you want to do this type of influencer marketing, if you want to treat it as a less touch paid search channel, because at the end of the day, it's top of funnel and people forget how they make decisions. And whenever they are actually looking at ROI, they don't actually think about this way. Just something that I've kind of noticed over time too.
Dave Gerhardt [00:19:56]:
What else has been a contributor to top of funnel? Are you spending a good amount of money on paid channels? What else can you do to drive volume?
Bruno Estrella [00:20:05]:
We're not spending that much on paid channels. On paid search, we spent like a pretty low amount considered to how much we could. We've been mostly focused on these programs that I mentioned and also SEO. We're starting to invest quite a lot in SEO, mostly because of like we have so much data and we can actually build some really cool things using our product. And so we've been investing on some SEO motions that can drive like a top of funnel to our site as well. But at the end of the day, our audience lives on LinkedIn SEO is another channel that we have control over the levers and we can do this. But yeah, these are the core two channels that have been focusing quite a lot.
Dave Gerhardt [00:20:46]:
Tell me about SEO and whats working now. It seems like the search landscape has changed a lot. Whats the overall approach to how youre putting this channel into play? Its much different than it was ten years ago where you just would try to rank for a bunch of keywords. Or maybe it's not, I don't know. I don't have a lot of experience here. What's the SEO playbook?
Bruno Estrella [00:21:06]:
Yeah, the few things that we have been doing is the one thing is because we have clay in the background, we actually use clay to build specific tools for SEO. So if people need to find specific company head count numbers. So basically the tech stack is good for me because it's clay on the back end and webflow on the front end. So we actually build the tools within clay and then we export it to webflow. So we have had some, like, we built some email finding tools, we built calculators the way that we're seeing now. And also like, we're actually building some articles as well that are more bottom of the funnel articles that whenever people are making, looking for reviews, looking for pricing data on some companies. But we're mostly focused on these two bottom of the funnel from a editorial point of view and tools and programmatic SEO using clay and other.
Dave Gerhardt [00:21:59]:
Got it. But bottom of the funnel is not necessarily, is it an SEO play? Are you looking at like keyword volume and then deciding, you know, this is a low search volume but high intent? Or is it more just like, this is product marketing content that we want to exist?
Bruno Estrella [00:22:15]:
No, we're actually looking like both because like, we didn't really have anything, you know, so, like, a lot of the times it's like, okay, we actually need to rank from a product marketing point of view on these, but a lot of the times is like, okay, we actually, there's a really strong intent on this keyword here. On this cluster of keywords. We should be the one, we should be popping up here from an editorial and product marketing point of view. So, yeah, that's like one area that we've been investing.
Dave Gerhardt [00:22:40]:
And then just from an overall SEO standpoint, are you doing this in house? Are you doing it with an agency? And then I'm just curious as to know, like, where do you start and what are you looking at? Is there like a list of keywords that you care about and you're constantly looking at like, how do you build a strategy here today?
Bruno Estrella [00:22:57]:
So we have some content that is in house, and we also work with an agency. And the thing to think about for us is, like, one, what are our core use cases of our product? Right. I think it always starts there. Like, what is the core use case? Is there an opportunity to leverage this channel for a use case? Let's say, for example, in our case, outbound. Right. What's decision making process for someone whenever they want to buy an outbound tool? What are the types of keywords that signal that they are on decision mode? Then you start from there most of the time.
Dave Gerhardt [00:23:32]:
I like that. It's like, start with the first principles of, like, how do people buy this type of thing? And then you're working backwards from there.
Bruno Estrella [00:23:40]:
Exactly, exactly. And then it's the same for outbound. In our case, it's the same for inbound. Like, what are the things that they are looking for from, like, an inbounda? The same for data enrichment. So, like, you have your product, your core use case of your product. Right. What's the decision making process? And you start from the bottom of the funnel up just so we can start to get some traction. You can kind of get some conversions going, and then you can start from there.
Bruno Estrella [00:24:03]:
But that's usually the process that we take when it comes to, like, SEO strategy.
Dave Gerhardt [00:24:07]:
And did somebody do this in house?
Bruno Estrella [00:24:09]:
Yeah, I was doing it at first. You know, like 20 person startup. Like you do you. Pretty much.
Dave Gerhardt [00:24:15]:
That's how it should be. You get hired to run marketing. You got to do all the things in the first year and then you can hire.
Bruno Estrella [00:24:20]:
Exactly. So. But then we hired an agency, some of the guys that I worked in the past and I trust, and then we're assigned to scale this.
Dave Gerhardt [00:24:27]:
Now, we've talked a good bit about the funnel. This is great. People are going to love this. Specifically about the creator program, the approach to SEO. Something that's top of mind for me that I want to ask you about is differentiation. It's top of mind because there's just so many companies out there today and everyone sounds the same. And even if you don't, your buyer is going to want to know, well, how are you different? And I think for a while in b two B, everybody obsessed over trying to create a category or try to be the platform for x. You're in a crowded market, right.
Dave Gerhardt [00:25:04]:
I think people would perceive the competitors to clay, you know, things like maybe Zoom info, maybe Apollo. I'm not in this world deeply, so there's probably other tools that I'm missing. That's got to be a key ingredient to this, right? It's not enough to be like, hey, we have a good product, it's free, go sign up for it. I'm sure people at some point are asking, how are you different? What's been the storytelling exercise that you've gone through to get that out of clay?
Bruno Estrella [00:25:28]:
I think.
Dave Gerhardt [00:25:28]:
I think I struck a nerve. I got a smile.
Bruno Estrella [00:25:30]:
Yeah, it did. Yeah. It's like, it's a super crowded space. Zoomify is a public company. Apollo is really big, too. And then we have all the actually AI focus tools that are coming up as well. So this is actually something that we talk all the time and a lot of the work is on positioning and product marketing. But I think for us, there's a few things that we can do, and I think one that's very clear for us is how it's our brand.
Bruno Estrella [00:26:00]:
Like, every b two B product looks the same, they run the same ads, they sort of like, use the same type of website template, kind of. But, like, if you look at clay, we're pretty different in terms of our brand. We're kind of, like, always borderline kind of weird when it comes to brand. And we do this very intentionally. Like, we don't want to be looking and feeling the same from like, a visual standpoint. That's like one piece, the other one is like sharing the use cases of showing how play is actually different because you're right. Every time we talk about. And it's something that we have actually.
Bruno Estrella [00:26:37]:
I've actually seen a web flow, too. Whenever you're trying to theoretically explain what Clay does to people, they immediately think of what you just said, like, oh, it's just like Apollo. Oh, it's just like Zoom info, but it's nothing because, like, one example that I was just chatting with the customer and they sell software to dentist offices. So how would you do outbound to, like, dentist offices managers? There's no way without Clay. And the way that we do it with Clay, because we integrate with Google Maps. You can pull Google Maps data, Google my business. You see the website and then you ask, alright, yeah, I have to say, like, do these people have, do they have invisalign? Do they do teeth whitening? You know, do they do root canals? So you can actually enrich these things with things that matter for your business. Because, like, I think one thing that we say quite a lot is, like, every business is different.
Bruno Estrella [00:27:36]:
Data enrichment is the same for the past 30 years. You know, like, this is like how Clay is different. Like, it's actually the creativity that you can bring to a non creative, historically non creative area of go to market. So that's why we've been trying to show more and more of these use cases. But it's tough. It's something that. It's actually really hard. But, yeah, we've been trying.
Dave Gerhardt [00:27:57]:
How involved are the founders in that vision, and how much does the product play into this for you and the marketing team?
Bruno Estrella [00:28:06]:
Pretty involved. They're very involved. And like, this thing that I mentioned, which is like, this is more of a creative tool. It's something that we talk about very frequently as a product and as a marketing team, too. And these decisions come with things like, we could theoretically dumb down the product a little bit to make it easier to use and sort of keep it within a box. But the problem is that you hurt creativity and you heard flexibility. So the things that I mentioned to you, for example, this example that I just mentioned in Google Maps, will end up being heard because it's not a core use case, but everything that we built as a product needs to enable flexibility and creativity. And every time we launch in a feature, let's say, for example, we just launched signals and triggers.
Bruno Estrella [00:28:58]:
How do you ship this thing in a way that will be easy for people to use? Some different types of use cases, and how can we make it more flexible? And from a marketing perspective, how can we showcase this, like, these different types of use cases? So it's very ingrained on our marketing, and the founders play a big role in this. The tricky things that I'm sure, like, you probably ran into is that, like, the vision is like, all the way out there, but, like, if I put this in our website, people don't give a shit. Oh, it's a creative tool for growth, you know, like, yeah, what does this actually do? Right?
Dave Gerhardt [00:29:36]:
Yeah, I think the vision. Yeah, I don't think the vision, I don't think it could be like the main story, but I think if you have a strong vision, it can become part of it and it does matter. And so it's like, yes, people might come to you because you solve a specific use case, but in how you might compete, I think. Go back to the differentiator thing. Right.
Bruno Estrella [00:29:56]:
I.
Dave Gerhardt [00:29:56]:
In how you might compete versus Zoom info or Apollo or whoever else. I do think there is some element of, like, somebody who's going to buy your product might want to know how you see the world and how you see things differently. And it's like, oh, yeah, Clay is solving this for me today, but I can see where this is going. I always talk about when I was at drift, we had an awesome company vision and we were focused on building like the conversational marketing platform. And right today we only did chat, but in the future, and we didn't even have these products yet, we could stand up on stage and tell them in the future. You could imagine what that means. So imagine we did sms, imagine we did video, imagine we did this and it's like, okay, cool, I see. So I'm going to buy for this use case today, but I'm going to buy into the company.
Dave Gerhardt [00:30:41]:
And I think that helps in creating more of a movement and getting people to engage with the company when they see where you're going, right?
Bruno Estrella [00:30:48]:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That's what we tried to communicate first. We were very focused on outbound. You can do clay with outbound. Then we started to launch some features that enable people to do inbound really well. How can you do inbound and clay? And then we're going to branch into how can we improve retention with Clay? How can we improve expansion with Clay? And within this sort of outbound and prospecting world, how can we integrate with other channels like LinkedIn ads or with Facebook ads? Because we already have the data, we already had the personalization. We should be able to enable people to actually go deeper into other areas.
Bruno Estrella [00:31:30]:
So we're starting, we kind of start.
Dave Gerhardt [00:31:32]:
Somewhere before we wrap up, tell me about the team. So the company's grown from 20 to 60. You joined, you're building out a marketing team. What are the things look like? How many people on the marketing team? What do people do right now?
Bruno Estrella [00:31:44]:
Yeah, so we have on the marketing team, we have someone on product marketing. Her name is Mishti. And we have someone on content, it's Scott. Who reached out to you, Dave. And then we have someone on brand who leads our brand team. And under that we have different types of people driving each segment. Like on growth marketing, for example, we have someone focused on our programs, which is like a core piece of how we grow. We have on lifecycle, we have people on web, we have people on SEO and some of these products as well that I mentioned to you.
Bruno Estrella [00:32:20]:
But yeah, the core pillars are product marketing, content growth marketing and brand.
Dave Gerhardt [00:32:25]:
Cool. Okay, that's good. That's helpful. And brand, is that creative?
Bruno Estrella [00:32:29]:
Yeah, it's both creative and web as well.
Dave Gerhardt [00:32:32]:
And what functions? Like what agencies? You don't have to say who they are if you don't want to, but what agency roles have you brought? Like, what are agencies doing for you?
Bruno Estrella [00:32:42]:
We actually just have an SEO agency. We do a lot of things in house, especially on the brand and creative point of view, because it's such a core piece of differentiation for us that it's difficult for us to outsource on our website. We have some people that came from Webflow, which is really strong. We've been investing a lot of in our web presence. We actually don't have a ton of agencies. We do a lot of things in house.
Dave Gerhardt [00:33:07]:
Is that on purpose? Have you been burned in the past, or did it just kind of shake out that way?
Bruno Estrella [00:33:12]:
I think one thing to mention, we do work with some contractors, people that we trust, and we worked in the past and can deliver. Yeah, I think it wasn't necessarily on purpose. It's really hard. I think it's kind of hard to scale sometimes. I think you really have to know which agency to work with and for which, like, a very specific problem that you need. And I think whenever you're so early as a company, the problems are so ambiguous. Right. Things are so, like, you don't have enough data.
Bruno Estrella [00:33:45]:
It's like, things are kind of hard. So I think a big proponent, like, we do it first. We know how this thing works. We know the inputs to grow, and then if we think it's like it's an agency. Oh, we actually use an agency for paid search as well. But as soon as we really understand the input really well, then we can decide if we want to keep it in house or hire an agency with people that we trust. But it's just mostly because I need to understand exactly the mechanics here.
Dave Gerhardt [00:34:13]:
Yeah, I forget who we talked about. This came up recently where the idea of, like, whether you're hiring in house or an agency to do it first and then spend there, like, before we go right to hiring an SEO agency, can we do a little bit of this in house to prove that there's something there? We're doing this big event at Exit Five, and I initially was like, oh, we have some budget, we have some profit, whatever. Why don't we just do this the easy way and go spend 50 grand on an event agency? And Dan was like, no, no, no. And he's the cheap one, right? And he's like, no, that's such a terrible decision. He's like, we should do this as a team. And so we have this event coming up. All five of us have contributed in some way. And then now we're going to have done this event.
Dave Gerhardt [00:34:59]:
We'll have learned. We know if we want to go bigger or scale next year, we can then make a more informed decision. And I think me as a marketing leader, I made a bunch of mistakes in hiring either people or agencies when my first instinct to solve a problem was to hire for it. Verse. I think the real way is to do a little bit of it to get better knowledge of, like, yeah, man, I've never managed a paid agency before, and let's just go right to this. And now we're spending 100 grand a month from zero. That's a rest of for failure. Now we've done it a little bit, and now we can scale that up.
Dave Gerhardt [00:35:29]:
I think that's a much better option. So it makes sense where you're at.
Bruno Estrella [00:35:32]:
Yeah, exactly.
Dave Gerhardt [00:35:34]:
Okay. Hey, this was great, Bruno. Thanks for hanging out with me. Yeah, I gotta go get my clay action on a little bit. I've been given some orders of some emails that I need to send, so I'm gonna go get in there. Everybody can go and check you out. We'll link to you on LinkedIn. Go and connect with Bruno on LinkedIn.
Dave Gerhardt [00:35:49]:
Follow along what they're doing with Clay. And I think you're. You're at the tip of something interesting that's happening in b two B, which is this creator led marketing. Right, where, like, let's let the people who use our product be the stars of our marketing. And it's been interesting to follow, and I'm excited to continue to watch what you do. Thanks for hanging out with me on the Exit Five podcast.
Bruno Estrella [00:36:07]:
Yeah, thank you, Dave. It was awesome.