Clay's $100m ARR Sales Machine

Welcome to the first EVER edition of Cold to Close. Thank you for subscribing to this newsletter, where I’ll be dropping weekly breakdowns on my personal story and the secrets behind tech’s biggest sales teams.

In this first edition, we’ll be doing a deep dive on Clay and the sales motion they’re building as they continue to scale past $100m ARR.

If you are in sales, you know Clay. They scaled from $1m ARR to $100m ARR in a 2-year span, secured 10,000 customers along the way with the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic and Canva, and are currently valued at $3.1B.

The craziest part is that they got most of this growth without a large sales team, without spending millions on advertising, and without having a heavy reliance on sales.

So in this deep dive, we’ll be going over what got Clay their early success, and how they’re building a sales motion as they look to dominate the category they created.

The single biggest factor for Clay’s growth in my opinion, is they created a whole category for their product to fulfill.

When Clay first came to market, it was seen as a “blank slate” tool. There were so many things it could do, but it was all up to the user to get the most out of the tool from the get-go. To help with this initial confusion, Clay put their own people inside accounts to help with deployment.

These initial people ran reverse demos where they'd be solving the prospect's problems in real time. In fact, Varun, one of the founders of Clay, did this hundreds of times with their early customers.

But when it came to naming these people, they didn't want to call them salespeople, so they called them go-to-market engineers or GTMEs.

In 2024, when Clay was starting to gain more traction, everybody was asking, "How is sales changing with AI and the advancements?" Traditional outbound had been shunned, and AI had come in and completely disrupted the market.

Everybody was looking for what was going to be the next thing. What did people settle on? Go-to-market engineers.

Through 2024, there were fewer than 10 postings a month for go-to-market engineers. In 2025, this number jumped over 205%, with over 400 roles posted at a median salary of $160,000 USD. Now there are over 100 go-to-market engineering roles going live every month.

Dozens of “Claygencies” (clay outbound agencies) grew to $1m ARR, helping sales teams, from founder-led sales all the way to Fortune 100 companies, implement Clay as their solution to the disconnect between AI and traditional sales.

Clay didn't just come up with a product and push it to the market. They aligned with the narrative that AI is changing sales, got all of their team posting about it, then created the solution to fix that narrative, and put their product right in the middle of it.

This created the foundations for their sales team, as they now have thousands of accounts already using Clay. The sales team can focus on further expansions into these organizations.

In fact, the playbook worked so well they're doing the exact same thing again. As they're hiring their initial sales team, instead of calling their reps SDRs, they're ClayDRs.

How they position a ClayDR is as a traditional SDR who doesn't have to do any of the manual work because that's owned by Clay. Again, this plays into the narrative that AI is changing sales. These aren't traditional reps, and Clay is the solution.

They even have their team from sales to marketing to CX posting eveyrday to build Clay’s own inbound marketing engine, this is the core reason the company page belw up to over 161,000 followers in less than 2 years.

They aren't just trying to sell Clay as a product to their prospects. They're trying to sell the shift that AI has brought, and that people need to approach sales and their traditional methods differently. Selling a narrative is always stronger than selling a product and that is the foundation of their world-class sales motion.

Now we know the narrative Clay has built as a foundation for it’s salespeople to work off, let’s move into how they’re actually finding the right people to come in.

Becca Lindquist the worldwide sales elader at Clay, joined the 20SALES podcast with Harry Stebbings (incredible listen for anyone too) and went in depth on the hiring process.

Everything from choosing the right reps, how to run the interview and red flags to look out for, this is my interpretation of her pOV based on that discussion, my own research into their hires, and knowing the team well.

Clay is looking for drive & expertise. Even though a large sum of their sales team comes from non-traditional backgrounds, a good chunk are multi-year tenured reps.

Becca explained in detail that the best sellers have Vertical domination. in their career they don't bounce across different industries. They really focus on one.

They learn the specific language, pain points, buying cycle, stakeholders, and all of the specific nuances that you can only learn from being in a space for years.

They’re also looking for reps who have actually sold into the size and segment before. For their enterprise team, they’re bringing in reps from some of the biggest companies in the world like Salesforce and X.

These are reps who have booked millions in pipeline with F100 companies; having reps who already understand the landscape is a huge advantage.

Finally, they want drive, ex-athletes, sports . Now this is one that is much harder to spot on paper, but it’s essential.

You can have all the right skills and potential on paper, but if you don’t have the drive you’ll never fulfill it.

The points above are most of what really matters when it comes to hiring the best people, but there are a few other core traits that top sellers have and Clay is looking for in their potential hires.

Curiosity. When hiring reps they want people who are curious in all aspects, about learning new skills, about their customers business, about the market and what is changing. This is how they get divergent thinkers with new ideas to test and is why they let their team test new tools freely.

Attention to detail. Again they only want people who care to check for their small details. Infact in their Founding AE job description asked candidates to hide the word "croissant" in their application email as a filter for people who actually read carefully, this is taken into the role too.

The Red Flags

When it comes to red flags, Becca has a very simple list of three:

They can’t take feedback. When hiring for sellers, on the interview she’ll run a mock roleplay, give the rep feedback and if they brush it off, get defensive or argue back, instantly she knows they’d be a headache down the line.

They can’t think critically about someone else's business. For this when she gives a new seller a list of inital accounts, she’s looking to see if they can do the research to create a relevant POV on why Clay makes sense for that company. If the rep defaults to spray and pray then there is an issue.

They can't rank accounts or actually understand who's a fit. This is more common and sales 101, but so many reps are great at interviewing, but not the best at selling. She does this task to weed out the great interviewers from the great sellers.

Now you know what to look for and what to avoid, when you find the right fit how do you know who to actually hire and when?

The process is a lot easier than you my think. First off Clay is always hiring at-least 2 at a time, of cours ein hyper growth this is easy, but even at a start up this same principle should be applied.

When you bring on 2 reps you can see if 1 is great and when you bring on two reps, it instantly creates a more competitive culture where the reps will be pushing each other and also trying to share new tips and tricks that are working for them.

More importantly, it allows you to spot whether it's a process issue with both of them not doing well, or if it's a hiring issue with one of them not doing well. Always hire two at a time

Another great reminder is you should be bringing your team in person where possible. When someone is new there is so much they can learn from being around the team.

A great sales team always has a great culture. You can hire the best sellers in the world but if you put them in a negative environemnt you’ll see them all fail. So, what is the team at Clay you need to make sure they have a great culture from the get-go?

The first thing is they aim for 60% of their people to be over 100%, and 80% of people are happy when they're making money and hitting quotas. If you're in an organization where less than 50% is hitting quota, that means more reps are missing quota, so naturally the mood of the team will be down.

Again, the best salespeople will always be motivated by seeing others win and knowing there's money to be made. Make sure you set realistic targets. Clay's model is very simple: they're not as aggressive as 11 labs at the 20x OTE target. They keep it at 7.5x

This is on the lower end, especially with the modern AI companies having more aggressive targets. Again, it means that more people are hitting their number and making money, which improves the culture of the overall team and performance as a byproduct

Becca says it best: she wants 100% to be making good money, but people hitting 110% should be making really fucking good money.

If you're a rep reading this, you're probably thinking, "How can I apply this to my role today to actually get value?" There are a few core things you should take away:

This is a story about Clay and what they’ve achieved but if you use these 3 tips today I can guarantee you’ll book more meetings and have a bigger impact.

Again, this was the first-ever edition of Cold to Close so let me know your raw and unfiltered thoughts.

Appreciate you reading this far, and I’ll see you next week.