Rootly, an incident management platform trusted by companies like Dropbox, Figma, LinkedIn, and our team at Clay, faced a common challenge familiar to many YC startups selling to enterprise clients: how to scale outbound sales efficiently without the resources of larger teams.
Traditional approaches, like building large BDR teams, were expensive and difficult to sustain. Manual research and outreach processes slowed progress and left gaps in personalization and targeting.
Rather than follow the conventional path and expand traditional sales operations, Rootly took a bold, modern approach with Clay at its core. With Clay's data enrichment and customizable workflows, they crafted a new role—the AI Demand Generation Engineer—designed to handle all sales operations from list building to outreach. Their small sales team, as a result, was able to focus on what matters most: building relationships with prospects.
Clay helped Rootly’s outbound program achieve results typically associated with much larger teams. Their approach gives startups and smaller companies a blueprint for running effective sales motions without a full-fledged team of BDRs.
"Clay enabled us to scale our outbound motion in ways we never thought possible. The automation and personalization we’ve achieved are unmatched, and it’s given us a smarter, more efficient way to engage with prospects," said JJ Tang, co-founder and CEO of Rootly.
Impact TL;DR
- Automated identification of incident signals to enable response within minutes
- Consolidated tech stack and reduced operational costs from using multiple vendors (Apollo, UserGems, 6sense) to one Clay-centered workflow
- Introduced an AI Demand Gen Engineer role to automate manual research and enrichment tasks
- Delivered 50+ highly personalized and automated emails per day with better engagement
The challenge: scaling outbound sales efficiently
As a fast-growing startup, Rootly needed to build an effective outbound sales motion while keeping costs manageable. Traditional BDR teams, while effective, introduced several challenges:
- High costs: Managing a team of 15 BDRs and multiple tools stretched their budget
- Inefficient targeting: BDRs often pursued accounts that didn’t fit their ICP, wasting time and effort
- Low throughput: Manual processes limited outreach to a few personalized emails/BDR/day
- Inconsistent quality: Even top-performing BDRs struggled to maintain high-quality messaging
- Complex tool management: The team juggled multiple platforms including Apollo, UserGems, and 6sense, creating operational inefficiencies
"The traditional BDR model has its strengths, but it’s resource-intensive and not always scalable," said JJ Tang. "Even with a dedicated team, the process of identifying the right accounts, personalizing outreach, and maintaining quality requires significant effort and coordination across multiple tools."
The solution: building a smarter sales engine with the AI Demand Generation Engineer
To address these challenges, Rootly implemented a new outbound strategy centered around a new role and Clay. They imagined one highly skilled individual—a GTM Engineer—who could achieve the volume, precision, and research quality of an entire SDR team.
To pioneer this role, Rootly brought on a team member with a unique background in both traditional marketing and AI development, who’d experienced firsthand the limitations of manual outreach and started building basic automation agents to complete sales tasks. Clay’s automation features and community support helped him focus on building sophisticated workflows rather than managing technical infrastructure. This experience made him the perfect fit for Rootly's vision of a more automated, intelligent sales process.
"I was a marketer before joining Rootly, but now we're developing this autonomous demand generation engine,” he told us. "Clay is at the core of our structure, enabling us to transform how we approach sales operations."
To decide what data to collect and act upon via Clay, Rootly's GTM Engineer built a comprehensive knowledge base by:
- Analyzing previous sales calls and customer conversations
- Studying successful and unsuccessful email campaigns
- Creating an Airtable database of pain points, roles, and effective messaging
- Developing custom GPTs to analyze emotional patterns in successful sales conversations
By using Clay to automate research, enrichment, scoring, and outreach, Rootly replaced repetitive, manual tasks typically handled by multiple BDRs, making it easy to streamline prospecting and outbound. This lean approach allowed Rootly to achieve the productivity of a larger sales team with fewer resources.
"The AI-forward GTM Engineer role has redefined how we approach outbound sales. By combining automation and enriched data through Clay, we’ve built a system that’s faster, smarter, and more efficient than ever before," said Tang.
Use case 1: automating company research and lead scoring
Before Clay, manually identifying ICP-fit companies and roles required extensive effort, often resulting in misaligned targeting.
With Claygent, Clay’s AI web researcher, Rootly automated the research and lead-scoring process, integrating data from LinkedIn, job postings, and tech stack signals to identify high-fit accounts fast.
The team implemented a three-tier scoring system:
- Yes - Ready for personalized outreach
- Maybe - Needs additional qualification
- No - Not currently a good fit
This automated approach ensured that they consistently evaluated prospects."Clay has helped automate our lead scoring to identify the accounts most likely to benefit from our solution. It’s a game-changer for efficiency and precision," said Tang.
Use case 2: real-time outreach triggered by “incident signals”
As an incident management platform, Rootly’s prospects need them most when critical incidents like system outages, service degradation, or security breaches occur.
One problem: Rootly’s manual processes couldn’t act quickly enough to capitalize on these moments.
So they integrated their incident monitoring tool with Clay to enable timely, event-triggered outreach.
Using Clay and Make.com, Rootly created workflows to trigger outreach immediately when an incident occurred. Within minutes, decision-makers received personalized messages, increasing response rates and opening opportunities when they mattered most.
"Clay’s ability to act on incident signals in real time has transformed how we engage with prospects. We now reach out at the exact moment our solution is most relevant," said Tang.
Use case 3: scaling personalized outreach
Manually crafting personalized emails limited Rootly’s ability to scale.
While effective for small volumes, it was time-intensive and inconsistent given the size of Rootly’s target audience. Each email required extensive research and customization, making it difficult for their team to balance personalization with productivity.
Clay made it easy for Rootly to automate the creation of personalized email and LinkedIn campaigns.
By enriching contact data and integrating insights from customer conversations, case studies, and decision-maker roles, Clay helped Rootly generate targeted, relevant messaging at scale. For example, Rootly uses information about a prospect’s role, company, and industry to highlight how their incident management platform aligns with the prospect's priorities.
This automation allowed Rootly to increase their outreach to over 50 highly personalized emails per day—without sacrificing quality. Engagement rates improved, as tailored messaging resonated more effectively with recipients than generic outreach.
"Clay lets us maintain personalization at scale, delivering outreach that resonates without compromising quality," said Tang.
Use case 4: consolidating tools for streamlined workflows
Rootly’s outbound motion previously relied on a fragmented stack of tools, including Apollo, UserGems, and 6Sense. While each served a purpose, managing multiple platforms created inefficiencies, higher costs, and a disjointed workflow for the team.
Clay replaced these tools by centralizing data enrichment, signal tracking, and outreach workflows into one platform. With everything in Clay, Rootly reduced costs, eliminated redundancies, and accelerated time-to-action on high-value signals like job changes, funding events, and account activity.
"Clay allowed us to consolidate our workflows and eliminate the need for multiple tools. It’s streamlined everything, saving us time and money while improving our ability to act on key signals," said Tang.
Clay’s impact on Rootly’s outbound sales motion
Rootly’s adoption of Clay has transformed its sales process, delivering clear, measurable results:
- Cost savings: Reduced reliance on a large sales tech stack and team, cutting operational expenses.
- Higher throughput: Achieved over 50 tailored emails per day with better engagement.
- Improved targeting :Improved lead scoring and real-time incident monitoring ensures alignment with high-value accounts.
- Deeper personalization: Enriched data enabled messaging that resonated with prospects.
- Scalable foundation: Created repeatable processes that can scale with company growth.
"With Clay, we’ve reimagined how outbound sales works. We’re leaner, faster, and more precise, all while delivering a higher level of engagement," said Tang.
Rootly’s success with Clay offers a roadmap for startups and smaller teams seeking to scale outbound sales efficiently. By leveraging automation, enriched data, and streamlined workflows, Rootly has proven that it’s possible to achieve big results without big teams.
"This isn’t about just replacing roles—it’s about building smarter processes. Clay has given us the tools to succeed in a more competitive, data-driven landscape," Tang concluded.
Rootly, an incident management platform trusted by companies like Dropbox, Figma, LinkedIn, and our team at Clay, faced a common challenge familiar to many YC startups selling to enterprise clients: how to scale outbound sales efficiently without the resources of larger teams.
Traditional approaches, like building large BDR teams, were expensive and difficult to sustain. Manual research and outreach processes slowed progress and left gaps in personalization and targeting.
Rather than follow the conventional path and expand traditional sales operations, Rootly took a bold, modern approach with Clay at its core. With Clay's data enrichment and customizable workflows, they crafted a new role—the AI Demand Generation Engineer—designed to handle all sales operations from list building to outreach. Their small sales team, as a result, was able to focus on what matters most: building relationships with prospects.
Clay helped Rootly’s outbound program achieve results typically associated with much larger teams. Their approach gives startups and smaller companies a blueprint for running effective sales motions without a full-fledged team of BDRs.
"Clay enabled us to scale our outbound motion in ways we never thought possible. The automation and personalization we’ve achieved are unmatched, and it’s given us a smarter, more efficient way to engage with prospects," said JJ Tang, co-founder and CEO of Rootly.
Impact TL;DR
- Automated identification of incident signals to enable response within minutes
- Consolidated tech stack and reduced operational costs from using multiple vendors (Apollo, UserGems, 6sense) to one Clay-centered workflow
- Introduced an AI Demand Gen Engineer role to automate manual research and enrichment tasks
- Delivered 50+ highly personalized and automated emails per day with better engagement
The challenge: scaling outbound sales efficiently
As a fast-growing startup, Rootly needed to build an effective outbound sales motion while keeping costs manageable. Traditional BDR teams, while effective, introduced several challenges:
- High costs: Managing a team of 15 BDRs and multiple tools stretched their budget
- Inefficient targeting: BDRs often pursued accounts that didn’t fit their ICP, wasting time and effort
- Low throughput: Manual processes limited outreach to a few personalized emails/BDR/day
- Inconsistent quality: Even top-performing BDRs struggled to maintain high-quality messaging
- Complex tool management: The team juggled multiple platforms including Apollo, UserGems, and 6sense, creating operational inefficiencies
"The traditional BDR model has its strengths, but it’s resource-intensive and not always scalable," said JJ Tang. "Even with a dedicated team, the process of identifying the right accounts, personalizing outreach, and maintaining quality requires significant effort and coordination across multiple tools."
The solution: building a smarter sales engine with the AI Demand Generation Engineer
To address these challenges, Rootly implemented a new outbound strategy centered around a new role and Clay. They imagined one highly skilled individual—a GTM Engineer—who could achieve the volume, precision, and research quality of an entire SDR team.
To pioneer this role, Rootly brought on a team member with a unique background in both traditional marketing and AI development, who’d experienced firsthand the limitations of manual outreach and started building basic automation agents to complete sales tasks. Clay’s automation features and community support helped him focus on building sophisticated workflows rather than managing technical infrastructure. This experience made him the perfect fit for Rootly's vision of a more automated, intelligent sales process.
"I was a marketer before joining Rootly, but now we're developing this autonomous demand generation engine,” he told us. "Clay is at the core of our structure, enabling us to transform how we approach sales operations."
To decide what data to collect and act upon via Clay, Rootly's GTM Engineer built a comprehensive knowledge base by:
- Analyzing previous sales calls and customer conversations
- Studying successful and unsuccessful email campaigns
- Creating an Airtable database of pain points, roles, and effective messaging
- Developing custom GPTs to analyze emotional patterns in successful sales conversations
By using Clay to automate research, enrichment, scoring, and outreach, Rootly replaced repetitive, manual tasks typically handled by multiple BDRs, making it easy to streamline prospecting and outbound. This lean approach allowed Rootly to achieve the productivity of a larger sales team with fewer resources.
"The AI-forward GTM Engineer role has redefined how we approach outbound sales. By combining automation and enriched data through Clay, we’ve built a system that’s faster, smarter, and more efficient than ever before," said Tang.
Use case 1: automating company research and lead scoring
Before Clay, manually identifying ICP-fit companies and roles required extensive effort, often resulting in misaligned targeting.
With Claygent, Clay’s AI web researcher, Rootly automated the research and lead-scoring process, integrating data from LinkedIn, job postings, and tech stack signals to identify high-fit accounts fast.
The team implemented a three-tier scoring system:
- Yes - Ready for personalized outreach
- Maybe - Needs additional qualification
- No - Not currently a good fit
This automated approach ensured that they consistently evaluated prospects."Clay has helped automate our lead scoring to identify the accounts most likely to benefit from our solution. It’s a game-changer for efficiency and precision," said Tang.
Use case 2: real-time outreach triggered by “incident signals”
As an incident management platform, Rootly’s prospects need them most when critical incidents like system outages, service degradation, or security breaches occur.
One problem: Rootly’s manual processes couldn’t act quickly enough to capitalize on these moments.
So they integrated their incident monitoring tool with Clay to enable timely, event-triggered outreach.
Using Clay and Make.com, Rootly created workflows to trigger outreach immediately when an incident occurred. Within minutes, decision-makers received personalized messages, increasing response rates and opening opportunities when they mattered most.
"Clay’s ability to act on incident signals in real time has transformed how we engage with prospects. We now reach out at the exact moment our solution is most relevant," said Tang.
Use case 3: scaling personalized outreach
Manually crafting personalized emails limited Rootly’s ability to scale.
While effective for small volumes, it was time-intensive and inconsistent given the size of Rootly’s target audience. Each email required extensive research and customization, making it difficult for their team to balance personalization with productivity.
Clay made it easy for Rootly to automate the creation of personalized email and LinkedIn campaigns.
By enriching contact data and integrating insights from customer conversations, case studies, and decision-maker roles, Clay helped Rootly generate targeted, relevant messaging at scale. For example, Rootly uses information about a prospect’s role, company, and industry to highlight how their incident management platform aligns with the prospect's priorities.
This automation allowed Rootly to increase their outreach to over 50 highly personalized emails per day—without sacrificing quality. Engagement rates improved, as tailored messaging resonated more effectively with recipients than generic outreach.
"Clay lets us maintain personalization at scale, delivering outreach that resonates without compromising quality," said Tang.
Use case 4: consolidating tools for streamlined workflows
Rootly’s outbound motion previously relied on a fragmented stack of tools, including Apollo, UserGems, and 6Sense. While each served a purpose, managing multiple platforms created inefficiencies, higher costs, and a disjointed workflow for the team.
Clay replaced these tools by centralizing data enrichment, signal tracking, and outreach workflows into one platform. With everything in Clay, Rootly reduced costs, eliminated redundancies, and accelerated time-to-action on high-value signals like job changes, funding events, and account activity.
"Clay allowed us to consolidate our workflows and eliminate the need for multiple tools. It’s streamlined everything, saving us time and money while improving our ability to act on key signals," said Tang.
Clay’s impact on Rootly’s outbound sales motion
Rootly’s adoption of Clay has transformed its sales process, delivering clear, measurable results:
- Cost savings: Reduced reliance on a large sales tech stack and team, cutting operational expenses.
- Higher throughput: Achieved over 50 tailored emails per day with better engagement.
- Improved targeting :Improved lead scoring and real-time incident monitoring ensures alignment with high-value accounts.
- Deeper personalization: Enriched data enabled messaging that resonated with prospects.
- Scalable foundation: Created repeatable processes that can scale with company growth.
"With Clay, we’ve reimagined how outbound sales works. We’re leaner, faster, and more precise, all while delivering a higher level of engagement," said Tang.
Rootly’s success with Clay offers a roadmap for startups and smaller teams seeking to scale outbound sales efficiently. By leveraging automation, enriched data, and streamlined workflows, Rootly has proven that it’s possible to achieve big results without big teams.
"This isn’t about just replacing roles—it’s about building smarter processes. Clay has given us the tools to succeed in a more competitive, data-driven landscape," Tang concluded.
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