The B2B Content Playbook That Made Clay Famous | Conquête

Description

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Clay is everywhere in B2B right now. Bruno explains exactly how that happened.

In this extract, Clay's marketing lead breaks down the content machine behind one of the most talked-about B2B tools of the last two years: how they turned a flexible, self-serve product into a community that creates content on its own, why they funnel everything into LinkedIn, and how they structured an internal creator program where every team member speaks to a specific persona.

He also gets into something most B2B marketers avoid: the tension between building a horizontal, unopinionated product and still needing to position it clearly in the market.

→ Why Clay's product flexibility is what made organic content possible in the first place

→ How they built the Experts and Creators Programs to incentivize community content without paying for it

→ Why authenticity beats volume when everyone can generate AI content

→ How they matched internal creators to audience personas on LinkedIn

→ Why staying unopinionated as a product is both the hardest and most powerful positioning decision they made

WHERE TO FIND BRUNO: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brunoestrella/

WORK WITH CLAY : https://www.clay.com/

WHERE TO FIND JORDAN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jordanchenevier/

WORK WITH BULLDOZER: https://bulldozer-collective.com/

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WHAT IS BULLDOZER?

Bulldozer maximizes marketing & sales performance for SMBs and Scale-Ups across their entire funnel. Our hybrid agency/collective model gives us access to the best talent on the market and allows us to act on every performance lever for our clients (Outbound, Paid, SEO, ABM, RevOps, Data…). In 4 years, our strong social media presence, talent pool, and 360° vision of growth have fueled rapid growth and attracted 250+ clients (Aircall, Qonto, Doctolib, Hexa…).

Our ambition for the years ahead is bold: design and operate world-class growth strategies and become a global leader on the topic by 2030.

To work with us 👉 https://bulldozer-collective.com/

--

Hébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

Transcription

Speaker #0
Everybody I speak to in B2B and every company I work with, they all heard about Clay. How do you manage this whole thing?
Speaker #1
Clay came in with a product that's self-serve. The main thing that people want is actually brand association with us. They learn Clay, they create content and distribute the content. Everything that we do funnels into LinkedIn. That's why I think people have this impression like, holy shit, I'm seeing Clay everywhere and everyone's talking about them. AI in general is sort of like... unlocking content creation like never before everyone can create content today the downside of this is like no one is actually authentic so people more than ever they want to hear from people they want to see content that's like clearly not ai what we did was we focused a lot on people bruno
Speaker #0
um it's been i think Two, three years you were in Clay, correct?
Speaker #1
Yeah, like two and a half years.
Speaker #0
So since you arrived, I think everybody heard of Clay. I mean, everybody I speak to in B2B and every company I work with, they all heard about Clay. They want to work with Clay. They are Clay users, et cetera, et cetera. And so I feel that you've managed. internally to really be everywhere and make sure that people talk about you and so you've got this playbook this content playbook with the founders or uh speaking online you speak online people from a team etc etc creators agencies how do you do that like how do you manage this whole thing i know it's a wide question this is this is basically the thing i want people to understand Yeah,
Speaker #1
no, I think the... there are two sides of this right like the side of people uh in our community posting about us or people in general that are not associated with clay posting about play and then our actually uh the content that we create the one on on clay specifically that other people are posting about us is more of like it's if you look at the actual the market and the product the the market within like go-to-market tools and sort of like... and data automation and all these things. Before Clay, like before 2023, most of the products in there were these sort of inflexible products that had like a sales-led motion and what kind of like... And Clay came in with a product that's self-serve, very, very flexible and horizontal. So people could then actually build on top of the product. The product actually unlocked a lot of creativity. And then what that enabled is actually people being able to create things like go-to-market workflows and stuff like that, that they would never be able to create before. And the reason why I'm saying this is because it starts there. That's kind of the foundational layer. Because then as people build these things, a portion of them are service providers. they have freelance businesses or they have agencies and or they are individual contributors in a company and they want career progression or business progression if they have a business and clay kind of enabled these people to showcase things that they were building and showcase to the market that they were very very innovative in general so we kind of saw so like initial signs of this and to be fair this is also like before clay i was at webflow for five years and i saw a similar this is this sort of playbook is kind of similar on design tools and develop developer tools and um and also like in some productivity tools as well with like notion yeah notion is a good example of that notion and air table early days as well and then webflow frame or a Figma. That, the creativity and flexibility of the product enable people to showcase. The thing that it's tricky is like, okay, you as a marketer, how do you actually have control over these things? And for us, the way that we found that we can actually control some of these things is by creating programs on the community that actually enable these people, that incentivize people in a soft way to actually create content. And the reason why I say in a soft way is because most of these people, like, you know, they don't want this was a learning that we had. They don't actually want like, oh, post this and I'll give you X, you know?
Speaker #0
Like basic sponsoring. Exactly.
Speaker #1
The main thing that people want in that case is actually brand association with us. Because we had this initial, it's a product that was innovative in the market and people wanted to be associated with this. So for us, how can we build a lot of... programs that give this sort of brand association which will then generally increase the output of content that they create so we created the experts program which is now the solutions solution partner program we created the creators program for people to get started and then we created a lot of educational related sort of programs for people as well so they can like Learn flea. The education piece is the core element here. Like they learn clay, they sort of understand the value of the product, they get invested in this brand, they create content and then distribute the content on a specific channel. So that's like the part of how we try to get community and the ecosystem to continue to post about us. Then there's also the actual content that we create that you mentioned, like our executives are... employees and the the thing that we kind of noticed like early is ai in general is sort of like unlocking content creation like never before everyone can create content today so the the downside of this is like no one is actually authentic uh and so you so you need to actually so people So... More than ever, this trend happened even before Clay and Yano. They want to hear from people most of the time. And they want to see content that's clearly not AI. So for us, what we did was we focused a lot on people. But the way that we actually structured this is, and I think every company can do this, to be honest. Like for Clay, We have two sides of the business, which is the self-serve side and the sales-led side. The self-serve side has a lot of startup founders, a lot of agency owners, and some marketers, like the first marketer in a startup. And on the sales-led side of the business, we typically have ops, like rev ops, marketing ops folks as the end user. And CROs and CMOs as the final kind of decision maker there. So we kind of selected specific individuals in our company that match, that have that profile. And then actually put a lot of resources for them to create content on LinkedIn that is relevant for that audience. So, for example, we have... For the ops persona, we have Everett in our team creating content, which is our head of go-to-market engineering. For the founder persona, we have Varun creating content. For the marketing persona, it's me creating content. For the CRO persona, we have Karan, who's our CFO and CRO-ish, creating content as well. And then for SDRs... we have our our head of sdr that we just hired and then we put actual like writers with these people that they meet on a weekly basis like oh i have this this experience that i had in the past here's what i want to write about and they kind of go back and forth and they post so we we we focus a lot on people to create content uh on on on on social channels and the main thing here is that everything that we do funnels into linkedin um you Because we keep seeing that it is the channel that people spend time after, like as we talk to customers, as we hear about, how did they hear about us and stuff. So everything that I just said funnels everything into LinkedIn. That's why I think people have this impression like, holy shit, I'm seeing Clay and everyone's talking about them.
Speaker #0
Yeah, sure. All right. I've got a lot of questions because it's really, really interesting. So. Going back to what you were saying before, Clay, you know, you had companies that were either focusing on the small freelancers. Or the big player is enterprise level companies, blah, And I think what you did well is that you showcase the kind of flexibility that you can have with if you are a freelancer. But still show that the impact that you can have on the business is really high level.
Speaker #1
Yeah.
Speaker #0
And also one thing that I was telling you before we just recorded, I had... conversations with your team and uh for example nancy i remember her she she told me that you don't want to be opinionated as a product yeah and and i think this is something really interesting because you know going back to what you were saying figma and notion and blah blah you know all these productivity tools and uh creativity tools yeah they have to be unopinionated because then you have to offer the full flexibility blah blah law. But when you work on the GTM in a team, for a company, etc., you kind of know the playbooks. Still, you decided not to be opinionated, to have the flexibility of the freelancer plus the impact. So, you know, managing everything there is kind of weird and really original. And I think this is what brings such success for Clay.
Speaker #1
Yeah.
Speaker #0
But so in terms of marketing, how do you play with this? Because again, people expect you to be opinionated because you do GPM and blah, And at the same time, you decided not to be.
Speaker #1
Yeah. This is actually, I think, having a horizontal and flexible product like this. What you're describing is the difficult part. From a marketing perspective. Because...
Speaker #0
And the exciting part.
Speaker #1
Yeah, exactly. And the exciting part. Like, I think the difficulty comes from, like, a positioning point of view. You know, like, okay, the product is so flexible. People are building, like, insane use cases. Like, some people build use cases as the back end of some tools, you know, like, that they generate. Some people use this for outbounds. Some people use this for... inbound and so how do you actually position the product is is a challenge um but at the same time it's also like exciting like you said because clay is so flexible that can actually serve specific problem areas really well you know like even from like a marketing perspective we have the ability to verticalize clay quite well to different industries because because of the flexibility of the product like for example you can get data points that if that if you were targeting a dentist office you would never be able to get you know uh because of the flexibility of the product so there is like challenges on the on the actual like positioning side but i think for us the way that we kind of approach it is sure the we're we're not opinionated uh on how you go and actually build. Because I think the thing in here that people, I think GTM tools kind of like failed. And you look at the GTM tools that actually took off, they are pretty flexible, like Salesforce. You know, it's actually like a flexible product. There's so much you can do there. Because I think the main thing is like, every business is different, you know, like. The data point that you're looking for to actually identify your ICP and try to target the right people. Ideally, there are very specific things that you want to find about that person that would give you 100% confidence that, okay, this is actually the right ICP for me. And you need a flexible product that enables you to actually find that specific thing. And most of the, like you said, most of the other products in go-to-market, there was a playbook that one type of company was successful and they built a product around that playbook. And it's typically around a channel on how you implement things, what data you leverage. But the reality is that there's always a life cycle of a specific tactic, right? Which is like...
Speaker #0
I agree.
Speaker #1
Like where you start here and then everything is so effective. And then over time, everyone adopts this thing. Everyone like us, like every marketer adopts this and we exploit the effectiveness. of that channel so you need like a an environment like a product or a tool that enables you to keep pushing the boundaries okay this thing it worked for a while now it's not working anymore what else can i do you know and like that's kind of the whole thing that we tried we try to say like you need this flexible infrastructure and this flexible uh tool to keep pushing the boundaries so you are always ahead i think the best companies kind of that we've seen in doing go to market are the ones that are pushing and trying new things as much as frequently as possible so that's kind of like how we've been trying to sort of position and and how we see value play do
Speaker #2
it just do it dreams be dreamed yesterday you said tomorrow so just do it Make your dreams come true Just do it

Description

He also gets into something most B2B marketers avoid: the tension between building a horizontal, unopinionated product and still needing to position it clearly in the market.

→ Why Clay's product flexibility is what made organic content possible in the first place

→ How they built the Experts and Creators Programs to incentivize community content without paying for it

→ Why authenticity beats volume when everyone can generate AI content

→ How they matched internal creators to audience personas on LinkedIn

→ Why staying unopinionated as a product is both the hardest and most powerful positioning decision they made

WHERE TO FIND BRUNO: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brunoestrella/

WORK WITH CLAY : https://www.clay.com/

WHERE TO FIND JORDAN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jordanchenevier/

Our ambition for the years ahead is bold: design and operate world-class growth strategies and become a global leader on the topic by 2030.

To work with us 👉 https://bulldozer-collective.com/

--

Hébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

Transcription

Speaker #0
Everybody I speak to in B2B and every company I work with, they all heard about Clay. How do you manage this whole thing?
Speaker #1
Clay came in with a product that's self-serve. The main thing that people want is actually brand association with us. They learn Clay, they create content and distribute the content. Everything that we do funnels into LinkedIn. That's why I think people have this impression like, holy shit, I'm seeing Clay everywhere and everyone's talking about them. AI in general is sort of like... unlocking content creation like never before everyone can create content today the downside of this is like no one is actually authentic so people more than ever they want to hear from people they want to see content that's like clearly not ai what we did was we focused a lot on people bruno
Speaker #0
um it's been i think Two, three years you were in Clay, correct?
Speaker #1
Yeah, like two and a half years.
Speaker #0
So since you arrived, I think everybody heard of Clay. I mean, everybody I speak to in B2B and every company I work with, they all heard about Clay. They want to work with Clay. They are Clay users, et cetera, et cetera. And so I feel that you've managed. internally to really be everywhere and make sure that people talk about you and so you've got this playbook this content playbook with the founders or uh speaking online you speak online people from a team etc etc creators agencies how do you do that like how do you manage this whole thing i know it's a wide question this is this is basically the thing i want people to understand Yeah,
Speaker #1
no, I think the... there are two sides of this right like the side of people uh in our community posting about us or people in general that are not associated with clay posting about play and then our actually uh the content that we create the one on on clay specifically that other people are posting about us is more of like it's if you look at the actual the market and the product the the market within like go-to-market tools and sort of like... and data automation and all these things. Before Clay, like before 2023, most of the products in there were these sort of inflexible products that had like a sales-led motion and what kind of like... And Clay came in with a product that's self-serve, very, very flexible and horizontal. So people could then actually build on top of the product. The product actually unlocked a lot of creativity. And then what that enabled is actually people being able to create things like go-to-market workflows and stuff like that, that they would never be able to create before. And the reason why I'm saying this is because it starts there. That's kind of the foundational layer. Because then as people build these things, a portion of them are service providers. they have freelance businesses or they have agencies and or they are individual contributors in a company and they want career progression or business progression if they have a business and clay kind of enabled these people to showcase things that they were building and showcase to the market that they were very very innovative in general so we kind of saw so like initial signs of this and to be fair this is also like before clay i was at webflow for five years and i saw a similar this is this sort of playbook is kind of similar on design tools and develop developer tools and um and also like in some productivity tools as well with like notion yeah notion is a good example of that notion and air table early days as well and then webflow frame or a Figma. That, the creativity and flexibility of the product enable people to showcase. The thing that it's tricky is like, okay, you as a marketer, how do you actually have control over these things? And for us, the way that we found that we can actually control some of these things is by creating programs on the community that actually enable these people, that incentivize people in a soft way to actually create content. And the reason why I say in a soft way is because most of these people, like, you know, they don't want this was a learning that we had. They don't actually want like, oh, post this and I'll give you X, you know?
Speaker #0
Like basic sponsoring. Exactly.
Speaker #1
The main thing that people want in that case is actually brand association with us. Because we had this initial, it's a product that was innovative in the market and people wanted to be associated with this. So for us, how can we build a lot of... programs that give this sort of brand association which will then generally increase the output of content that they create so we created the experts program which is now the solutions solution partner program we created the creators program for people to get started and then we created a lot of educational related sort of programs for people as well so they can like Learn flea. The education piece is the core element here. Like they learn clay, they sort of understand the value of the product, they get invested in this brand, they create content and then distribute the content on a specific channel. So that's like the part of how we try to get community and the ecosystem to continue to post about us. Then there's also the actual content that we create that you mentioned, like our executives are... employees and the the thing that we kind of noticed like early is ai in general is sort of like unlocking content creation like never before everyone can create content today so the the downside of this is like no one is actually authentic uh and so you so you need to actually so people So... More than ever, this trend happened even before Clay and Yano. They want to hear from people most of the time. And they want to see content that's clearly not AI. So for us, what we did was we focused a lot on people. But the way that we actually structured this is, and I think every company can do this, to be honest. Like for Clay, We have two sides of the business, which is the self-serve side and the sales-led side. The self-serve side has a lot of startup founders, a lot of agency owners, and some marketers, like the first marketer in a startup. And on the sales-led side of the business, we typically have ops, like rev ops, marketing ops folks as the end user. And CROs and CMOs as the final kind of decision maker there. So we kind of selected specific individuals in our company that match, that have that profile. And then actually put a lot of resources for them to create content on LinkedIn that is relevant for that audience. So, for example, we have... For the ops persona, we have Everett in our team creating content, which is our head of go-to-market engineering. For the founder persona, we have Varun creating content. For the marketing persona, it's me creating content. For the CRO persona, we have Karan, who's our CFO and CRO-ish, creating content as well. And then for SDRs... we have our our head of sdr that we just hired and then we put actual like writers with these people that they meet on a weekly basis like oh i have this this experience that i had in the past here's what i want to write about and they kind of go back and forth and they post so we we we focus a lot on people to create content uh on on on on social channels and the main thing here is that everything that we do funnels into linkedin um you Because we keep seeing that it is the channel that people spend time after, like as we talk to customers, as we hear about, how did they hear about us and stuff. So everything that I just said funnels everything into LinkedIn. That's why I think people have this impression like, holy shit, I'm seeing Clay and everyone's talking about them.
Speaker #0
Yeah, sure. All right. I've got a lot of questions because it's really, really interesting. So. Going back to what you were saying before, Clay, you know, you had companies that were either focusing on the small freelancers. Or the big player is enterprise level companies, blah, And I think what you did well is that you showcase the kind of flexibility that you can have with if you are a freelancer. But still show that the impact that you can have on the business is really high level.
Speaker #1
Yeah.
Speaker #0
And also one thing that I was telling you before we just recorded, I had... conversations with your team and uh for example nancy i remember her she she told me that you don't want to be opinionated as a product yeah and and i think this is something really interesting because you know going back to what you were saying figma and notion and blah blah you know all these productivity tools and uh creativity tools yeah they have to be unopinionated because then you have to offer the full flexibility blah blah law. But when you work on the GTM in a team, for a company, etc., you kind of know the playbooks. Still, you decided not to be opinionated, to have the flexibility of the freelancer plus the impact. So, you know, managing everything there is kind of weird and really original. And I think this is what brings such success for Clay.
Speaker #1
Yeah.
Speaker #0
But so in terms of marketing, how do you play with this? Because again, people expect you to be opinionated because you do GPM and blah, And at the same time, you decided not to be.
Speaker #1
Yeah. This is actually, I think, having a horizontal and flexible product like this. What you're describing is the difficult part. From a marketing perspective. Because...
Speaker #0
And the exciting part.
Speaker #1
Yeah, exactly. And the exciting part. Like, I think the difficulty comes from, like, a positioning point of view. You know, like, okay, the product is so flexible. People are building, like, insane use cases. Like, some people build use cases as the back end of some tools, you know, like, that they generate. Some people use this for outbounds. Some people use this for... inbound and so how do you actually position the product is is a challenge um but at the same time it's also like exciting like you said because clay is so flexible that can actually serve specific problem areas really well you know like even from like a marketing perspective we have the ability to verticalize clay quite well to different industries because because of the flexibility of the product like for example you can get data points that if that if you were targeting a dentist office you would never be able to get you know uh because of the flexibility of the product so there is like challenges on the on the actual like positioning side but i think for us the way that we kind of approach it is sure the we're we're not opinionated uh on how you go and actually build. Because I think the thing in here that people, I think GTM tools kind of like failed. And you look at the GTM tools that actually took off, they are pretty flexible, like Salesforce. You know, it's actually like a flexible product. There's so much you can do there. Because I think the main thing is like, every business is different, you know, like. The data point that you're looking for to actually identify your ICP and try to target the right people. Ideally, there are very specific things that you want to find about that person that would give you 100% confidence that, okay, this is actually the right ICP for me. And you need a flexible product that enables you to actually find that specific thing. And most of the, like you said, most of the other products in go-to-market, there was a playbook that one type of company was successful and they built a product around that playbook. And it's typically around a channel on how you implement things, what data you leverage. But the reality is that there's always a life cycle of a specific tactic, right? Which is like...
Speaker #0
I agree.
Speaker #1
Like where you start here and then everything is so effective. And then over time, everyone adopts this thing. Everyone like us, like every marketer adopts this and we exploit the effectiveness. of that channel so you need like a an environment like a product or a tool that enables you to keep pushing the boundaries okay this thing it worked for a while now it's not working anymore what else can i do you know and like that's kind of the whole thing that we tried we try to say like you need this flexible infrastructure and this flexible uh tool to keep pushing the boundaries so you are always ahead i think the best companies kind of that we've seen in doing go to market are the ones that are pushing and trying new things as much as frequently as possible so that's kind of like how we've been trying to sort of position and and how we see value play do
Speaker #2
it just do it dreams be dreamed yesterday you said tomorrow so just do it Make your dreams come true Just do it

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