HUMBLE
First Things First…

It was such a riot speaking with Sian Taylor and Andy Laws this week on Linkedin, and it was all about how to Transform B players into A players.

Maximising your team's potential is critical, especially as the focus of SDR Leaders. Sian and Andy did a brilliant job sharing their insights into how they do it. If you would love to check it out, go here!

STUFF ONLINE
Content of the week

• Want to hire top tier, SDR talent? Read on..

• We need to stop focusing on vanity metrics

• How to personalise Linkedin outreach

THOUGHTS
What am I seeing this Week: You own your career

A bit of a quick thought this week. YOU own your own career.

No one else cares.

Try these tips to help accelerate your career growth.

1️⃣ Find a mentor
2️⃣ Go out and get outside coaching/training
3️⃣ Ask your leadership what else you can do to help the organisation
4️⃣ Take the lead on cross-functional projects

Don't wait for someone else to run your career for you.

Take control of it now!

The sooner you start, the quicker the progression.

How have you taken control of your career development? Let me know in the comments section below.

For those new to the newsletter and like what you are seeing, please click on the subscribe button, and you’ll receive this top-quality newsletter in your inbox every Friday morning!

INTERVIEW
Five Questions of the Week: Yash Tekriwal

This week, we have the excellent Yash Tekriwal of Clay joining our newsletter! Clay is one of the most exciting solutions on the market, and we are so happy that Yash took the time to speak with us.

Thanks for joining today, Yash! Can you give a bit of insight into Clay for those who aren't aware?
Clay helps B2B GTM teams like Ramp and Verkada fully automate and orchestrate their data enrichment, outbound, and inbound workflows with 70+ integrations + AI.

Clay’s data provider waterfalls and AI web scrapers increase data quality by 150%+, saving tens of thousands of dollars on data waste while fully automating manual research.

With a strong data foundation, customers use LLMs to create 1:1 messaging for every prospect, with complete control of prompts to ensure message quality. Go from idea to execution in 30 minutes instead of 30 days with Clay, and scale your revenue without scaling headcount.

So when we spoke Yash, you said you're a person of many hats, maybe give us a rundown of what you do at Clay?
My day-to-day at Clay ranges drastically. My primary focus is moving along our Enterprise deals in progress with large companies and talking to customers about complex problems they're trying to solve in Clay. I'm also working on standing up our first iteration of Clay University - content geared towards helping people who want to build world-class Growth organizations. I spend the rest of my day helping design AI prompts, thinking through our internal systems and automation, and spec-ing updates to our product from customer convos. 

If we look at how the SDR function is evolving, Clay is at the forefront of that; how are you utilising your solution in your team's SDR outreach?
At Clay, we truly believe the old SDR/BDR function (focused on email outreach and manual prospecting) will cease to exist. Outreach should be 90-95% automated, from warm to cold outbound. We live and breathe that philosophy at Clay—we have Clay powering automatic emails to new trial sign-ups, filtering our inbound leads, and general buzz powering most of our growth. 

What do you believe outreach will look like in a perfect world in the coming 2-3 years?
I think outreach is a lot like dating. If you spray and pray with zero rhyme or reason, you're going to … waste a lot of time on people who are not great fits for you. But if, instead, you talk to people with similar interests, common communities, or shared hobbies - you're far more likely to spark a connection. The same is valid with Outreach. Why are you contacting the person you're emailing vs. a colleague? Why now vs. a month from now? What can you offer them? How can you add value to that first email? The future of outbound is more targeted, personalized, and relevant - while fully automated. 

Do you see tools such as Clay taking over outreach for organisations, or do you still feel there will be a need for an SDR organisation?
Our power users at Clay are often Growth/RevOps teams that automate the traditional SDR function at their orgs. This doesn't mean SDRs are out of jobs—but it means they shift to focusing on the part of the job that can't be automated: building relationships, taking calls, and adding the personalized touch after the first message. 

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LASTLY
Whenever you’re ready, here are two ways I could help you

The new Community for European-based SDR leaders: SDR leaders of Europe

An ebook about SDR<> AE Alignment: Closing the Gap