Happy Saturday to the 4k+ readers of the Collab!

If you are a Seed to Series A/B Founder or GTM Leader (or those that collaborate with them), this newsletter is written for you.

Here’s today’s 1 Big Idea, 2 LinkedIn Posts, 3 Tools to try.

Let’s dive in.

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The Big Idea

Clay’s GTM Creator Playbook

Tommy Colitsas works on the growth marketing team at Clay, specifically focused on creator economy and product led growth.

I sat down to talk with him to learn more about the growth programs Clay runs with creators after joining it myself.

I was fascinated with unpacking what they’re doing so you can learn how to build a creator program yourself.

Jared: What programs are you responsible for building out?

Tommy: Three big things right now that we're focusing on the community and PLG front:

1. Creators Program, which is effectively a UGC engine is the goal. So our goal is to empower people that are thought leaders in the outbound and inbound sales automation space to create better content. So we build a ton of tools and infrastructure to make that process easier for them, kind of allowing them to grow alongside Clay. 

2. Experts Program, which is our goal is to create the premier marketplace for agencies and freelancers also in the sales automation space. So kind of a very high bar for people that really, really know how to build these motions at companies. And then people that are other businesses that are trying to incorporate these practices know to come to us to kind of find the best. 

3. Templates Infrastructure. So effectively building a way for people to quickly find workflows that have been built by others and reproduce them for their specific use case. And you can go to clay.com templates to kind of learn what I mean more there. And it makes a lot of sense in the context of our product.

Jared: So templates are kind of on demand, created by Creators & Experts, is that right?

Tommy: Yeah, I think templates kind of reach beyond the programs, but it's a big part of the creator economy. Just the idea, like right now, you can go turn any Clay workflow you've built into a template. If you're a creator and expert, you can add your affiliates information at the end of it. So you monetize all of these kinds of workflows that you share publicly. But yeah, beyond that, it's just a really fast way to reproduce workflows other people have built.

Jared: How do you identify and find people for the two groups, and then how do you identify the content you want to best surface up for the third?

Tommy: So for creators, you know, very focused on people with a strong social following, you know, people that have audiences that trust them, that are growing quickly on a social front. And for the experts, a lot of it's about kind of technical proficiency with the product. So we have an experts exam. You can see on clay.com experts that kind of tests them in terms of building within clay, leveraging integrations, webhooks, kind of creatively sourcing leads, and also really indexes on their past successful campaigns they built. So we index a lot on client testimonials and results from stuff they've done in the past.

Jared: I think it's spectacular. Now, what are some of the results you could share of the program? And also, what's the right number of creators of agencies, etc? And how are you figuring that out?

Tommy: Yeah, it's a great question. And I think on the creators front, we want people that represent us well. You know, it's not something where we kind of give everyone that asks for an affiliate link and just say, hey, go off and do what you want. We really see it as a partnership, and our goal is to grow alongside you, and we dedicate time to delivering you resources that are going to work well and help you grow and resonate with your audience. So I don't know if there's a specific number. But, you know, I think you want to make it. You want to make it kind of exclusive enough that it represents you well and you have time for working with each of them. And on the experts front, I kind of give a similar answer.

If everyone in the world is like that, everyone in the world isn't tremendously talented at all this sales automation and outbound stuff and using Clay, kind of its full potential. But if you are, I think that we've built an infrastructure that allows us to really quickly grow these programs and incorporate more people.

Jared: What results can you share from the growth of this program?

Tommy: Yeah, so they're going very, very well.

So I've joined Clay pretty recently. So I joined in late January, and the first thing we did was Creators. And now we're moving to kind of focus a lot on some really, really cool benefits for the Experts program, building some really interesting infrastructure in the sales assist front.

But for creators, you know, we've grown it to about 150 members in this period of time. All, again, kind of very meticulously selected for who they are and audiences that trust them. We've seen very, very strong growth in the referral front and really, really strong activation. Effectively 45, 50% month over month growth since we launched the program.

I can't share specific details, obviously, on how much it's increased our pipeline in terms of dollars, but it's quickly becoming one of the largest channels for us in terms of activation to paid accounts.

Jared: Good artists borrow. Great artists steal. Where did you get inspiration from for this program? Who are companies that are doing something like this that you want to shout out?

Tommy: First of all, love the quote, Picasso and then Steve Jobs stole it in. That's one of my favorite quotes. But, yeah, so I think there are a couple places we look.

Our product definitely has a learning curve to it, especially to kind of unleash its full potential on go to market engineering and sales ops and RevOps teams.

And I think I really like and spent a lot of time talking to and looking at what Figma did with the Figma community when they first launched. Really creating kind of champions for their product that had kind of very strong, loyal followings and then empowering those champions to make money off of referrals and also publicizing their resources in a way that, yeah. Allowed people to build businesses around becoming designers on Figma.

I think the other kind of traditional examples would be HubSpot is one that I look at a lot and I think obviously, and Salesforce as well, there's entire skill sets based on what their product does. And, you know, I think I see clay as more of a canvas.

2 Posts

I. Eric Nowoslawski, Clay Expert & Creator:

II. Clay promoting their Expert’s Posts:

3 Tools

I. Amplemarket

AI platform for modern sales teams. Magically simplify the way you discover, engage, and convert your next customers Check it out.

II. AudiencePlus

AudiencePlus™ brings your revenue strategy into the modern era by enabling marketing teams to build, engage, and convert an owned audience. Check it out.

III. Equals

Equals is the fastest way for startups to do any analysis. We are the only spreadsheet with built-in connections to any database, versioning, and collaboration. Check it out.

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Until next week,

Jared

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