How Clay’s growth team ships 6x faster with Ploy

When Davide joined to build out the growth function at Clay, he was tasked with building the engine to convert strong brand affinity into sales-led revenue.

The sales-led motion was nascent, and the company was growing fast. The team had to start running tests from day one to get a signal on what worked. But the resources needed to run those tests were the same resources working on brand campaigns, partnerships, and the core product.

Before Ploy, the team had two options: run fast and break things (most likely the brand’s strict brand guidelines and quality standards), or build a case, submit a ticket, and wait for the internal support needed to execute on their vision.

Once the team discovered Ploy, they were able to execute complex projects 6x faster without compromising the high standards that make the Clay brand what it is. Sara Lundberg, Brand Designer at Clay, “was the first person to get that aha moment,” Sung Jo, Clay’s PLG Lead explained. “She saw that what Ploy had shipped was super on brand.” That stamp of approval gave the team the confidence to move fast while keeping quality high.

Emily Chen, SLG Lead, spends her days working side by side with sales, building programs that create and convert enterprise pipeline. When it comes to targeted outbound, Clay wrote the playbook on accurate targeting and precise messaging. Internally, though, creating bespoke branded landing pages for more than 100 enterprise accounts, on brand and at scale, was still a challenge.

The team had previously used Clay with Webflow templates to build custom landing pages for target accounts. But every new template, and every change to one, still had to come from brand designers and web developers, which slowed execution and limited the team’s ability to act on ongoing feedback from sales.

With Ploy, the team was able to:

1. Create new ABM pages and implement edits in 2 hours instead of days
2. Expand the number of accounts they could target in Clay’s TAM
3. Build specialized experiences for mid-market and enterprise accounts

A core tenet of product-led growth is figuring out how to turn your customers into advocates. Sung saw a twofold opportunity: 1) build a skills marketplace that showcases the templated workflows of Clay’s most passionate power users, and 2) rank for high-intent keywords such as “ICP outbound campaign” or “pricing page signal” while surfacing the matching skill. The Skills Marketplace is now home to more than 40 Clay skills.

After leading SEO and AEO at companies like Amazon, Etsy, and Webflow, Sung knew a project like this would take the better part of two quarters. “Before, it would take me six months working with engineering, product, and design to ship a marketplace like this,” Sung explained. “With Ploy, it takes me about a month.”

By moving from idea to live project six times faster, the team can shift its attention to finding the next growth lever while Ploy handles ongoing optimization of the Skills Marketplace.

At their core, lead magnets are meant to trade free value for a contact’s information, warming them up and educating them about your product. In practice, that usually means a personal email swapped for a stale PDF. Alex Lindahl, Creator in Residence at Clay, decided there was no reason it had to be that way. So he built the Speed to Lead Benchmark, a mini-app powered by PloyDB that answers the question on every Head of Sales’ mind: how long does it take one of my SDRs to get back to a relevant lead?

Alex took the idea to a working POC in days. “Instead of going from idea to the design team to the marketing team and so on, we collapse that workflow into just one person,” Alex explained. “And now we’re able to ship things much faster.”

For a team at the heart of two fast-evolving industries, AI and GTM software, speed is everything. Ploy has helped Clay’s growth team move fast, build creatively, and unlock revenue on their own. With full ownership of the marketing funnel, from creation to tracking to optimization, they are not only able to ship faster, but also freed to dream bigger.