Clay hot takes: growth marketing and dating are basically the same

Odds are, if you’ve ever used any mobile dating app, you’ve gotten your fair share of cringey messages sliding into your DMs:

• Heyyy ;) 
• U up?
• Knock knock…
• I must be a snowflake, because I've fallen for you.
• Did you fall from heaven? Cause…

Our inboxes at work are full of them, too: 

• Dear [First Name], I recently came across your profile and was impressed.
• Don’t miss this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
• I know you're incredibly busy, but I promise this will only take a minute.
• This isn't like anything you've seen before. I guarantee it!
• Got 5 minutes to talk on the phone? 

Just like no one wants to receive another boring, canned opener on a dating app, no business wants to receive messages from sales reps and growth marketers that don’t know anything about them. 

In fact, modern dating and GTM processes have a lot in common. They’re both fundamentally funnels: your job is to find leads and convert them into dates with the hope of building a lasting relationship.

In either case, dating or sales, it’s just objectively better if you:

• Know what you’re looking for
• Target that in great detail
• Craft personalized messages to indicate genuine interest in someone and help them see why you picked them as a potential good match

Unfortunately, it’s still really difficult for most singles and sales teams to solve each of these. Dating apps provide mostly superficial information about others, with their profile text limits and few demographic filters. How can you target people you’re into when you don’t even have enough data to create meaningful filters?

In the case of sales, people have to rely on a few big providers like ZoomInfo to capture basic information about prospects. Unfortunately, information is often incomplete and outdated. 

The key is data enrichment. You need to find someone who fits your minimal viable criteria for an ideal date or customer—and then use that information as a relevant reason to reach out.

How Clay helps GTM teams “date” better

Clay’s mission is to help B2B growth teams find their people. 

A growing company’s most critical job is quite similar to that of a successful matchmaker: build repeatable processes for forming relationships that last the test of time. In other words, it’s to find long-lasting customers.

Fortunately Clay can act as a matchmaker for growth teams. We’re your best option for data enrichment and replace all the manual research and copywriting involved in crafting personalized outreach messages with automation. 

Now you can find your people sooner at scale, which is pretty important for a growth marketer whose purpose is to find as many customers as possible (vs. the dater who might only have a few serious relationships in their lifetime). 

Find accurate matches with the best data available

Dating apps are like a black box in many ways. They primarily operate through swiping and you can’t control who the app shows you next. You might set a few basic criteria, like age range and location, but beyond those levers, you don’t have much control. Ultimately you are at the mercy of the algorithm (built by a company whose interests may or may not line up with yours!)

Sales data providers operate in the same way. They give you a limited amount of data about people and often that data is outdated or flat out inaccurate. It’s also rare, if not impossible, that a single data provider can cover each of your leads.

To make matters worse, data providers also don’t make outbound sales research much less manual. Most teams today still employ armies of SDRs, who spend their days slogging through hours of unproductive web research and data entry just to set up a couple of meetings. It’s so painful — kind of like swiping through dating profiles and making decisions about whether to reach out to someone just based on pictures. Shouldn’t we have all the relevant data, upfront, to help us make more informed decisions?

Clay thankfully aggregates data from over 75+ different data providers. Plus, our combination of AI and web scraping can retrieve any data that’s on the internet, even if it’s not available through one of our data providers. That’s right — with Clay, the whole internet can be used for sourcing data.

With so many data points, you can set up filters that best match your criteria for a target customer. Imagine if you could do the same thing with dating. Imagine if you had so much data that you could filter and tweak it exactly to your liking, ultimately creating a whole spreadsheet of all the potential dates near you that meet your criteria. Wouldn’t dating be a much more efficient and empowering process for you? That’s what Clay does, but for finding your ICP. 

Write emails, at scale, that convince prospective customers you’re a perfect match

There is a basic tradeoff between the sheer quantity of people you can message versus the effort you can put into tailoring each message to its recipient. If you had just five minutes to message leads on a lead list, you could either send dozens of people a generic, obviously templated message or take the time to write something unique to just a few. 

The benefit of the latter is that people are more likely to respond to messages that indicate the sender intentionally chose them. If someone matched with you on a dating app, wouldn’t it be better if they took the time to read your profile and messaged you in a way that makes that clear? Don’t you want them to show you exactly why they think they’re a match for you?

Now growth marketers don’t have to make the tradeoff between quantity and quality of outbound messages. Clay automates it! Clay can aggregate so much data on a single lead from 75+ different integrations—and AI!—that writing personalized outbound messages is simple. 

All a growth marketer has to do is supply a basic email template and Clay’s workflows take care of the rest. We can update your template with information for each customer and argue the case, always, that they are a perfect match for you and your business.

Clay is the first good sales matchmaker

There is so much untapped potential waiting to be unlocked simply by connecting the right people to one another. That’s why we’re building a product that restores intention to the matchmaking process between growth marketers and prospective customers. Our product is engineered to help you find and connect with those matches: the value-aligned pairings between companies and their customers. 

Yes, we really do think that relationships between companies and customers can be as good as the relationships between two compatible romantic partners.

In an ideal world, receiving an email from a sales or growth team should be a pleasant experience — one that almost makes you feel grateful. You’re being shown the perfect solution to a problem you currently have or didn’t even know you had. Clay is the bridge to building this world. It’s the bridge to finding your matches. 

Growth marketers should — and now can — target their ICP better than ever before. They can convert them into customers that don’t just sign a contract once, but renew over and over again. That’s the power of finding your people. So give Clay a try and find and nurture the right relationships for you.