How Sendoso uses Clay to inject creativity, efficiency, and $1M in pipeline into their outbound motion 

Sendoso helps revenue teams drive pipeline using direct mail and personalized gifting. Its marketing team owns qualified pipeline generation, with three SDRs that partner closely with sales. As the team's outbound operation grew, managing multiple tools and manual research processes left them stretched thin. They wanted to scale personalized outreach while maintaining high levels of engagement with target accounts. 

Enter: Clay. 

Austin Sandmeyer, Head of Growth Marketing, Katie Penner, Head of Sender Relations, and Adrien Pearson, a Senior SDR, used Clay to transform Sendoso’s outbound approach by automating personalized outreach and simplifying workflows for their sales reps.

Impact TL;DR:

• 10x'd outbound productivity: one SDR now functioned like a full team
• ‍Over $1M in pipeline generated through a combination of personalized outreach and strategic gifting‍
• 20% higher response rates with enriched data and personalized direct mail campaigns‍
• Centralized outbound motion, including contact enrichment, signal capture, data syncs, CRM lookups, and personalized messaging in Clay‍

The challenge: Manual processes and limited personalization

Before using Clay, Sendoso’s outbound team faced several challenges:

• Manual prospecting: Adrien spent up to 10 minutes per prospect researching and personalizing emails, limiting outreach to around 20 personalized emails per day. Managing 500+ target accounts required significant manual effort, with much of the work going into gathering contact data and insights.
• Siloed data sources: The team relied on multiple tools for prospecting, which required extensive manual research and coordination and slowed outreach.
• Scaling personalization: Sendoso’s couldn't integrate 1:many highly personalized gifts and direct mail into outbound campaigns because manual prospect research and data entry was too time consuming.

The team needed a solution to automate their processes, streamline prospecting, and scale personalization efforts without sacrificing the quality of their outreach.

The solution: Automated, personalized sales outreach with Clay

To solve these challenges, Sendoso implemented Clay to scale their outbound motion, including data enrichment, workflow automation, and personalized outreach. 

Clay allowed the team to automate tasks like contact enrichment, signal capture, data syncs, CRM lookups, and email personalization—all of which used to take the Sendoso team hours to do manually. 

“Automating mundane tasks with Clay allows revenue teams to focus on high intent, best fit accounts and prioritized selling, optimizing the limited hours available each day for more critical and impactful activities,” said Kris Rudeegrap, Sendoso’s CEO. “Clay ensures that no step in the outbound process is overlooked, addressing a common issue where SDRs might skip essential research or personalization due to time constraints.”

Use case 1: Turning stalled deals into new opportunities and revenue

Sendoso’s first major win with Clay was automating their "Wake the Dead" play, a custom workflow that re-engaged dormant leads.

Previously, restarting conversations with closed/lost deals required manual research in Salesforce, followed by manual outreach campaigns. With Clay, Sendoso automated both account research and personalized outbound messaging. 

Here’s how they did it: 

1. Identify target accounts: The team imported closed-lost opportunities from the past year and leads who had meetings in the last two years but didn’t move forward into Clay. 
2. Enrich data with pre-call notes: They fed pre-call notes from Salesforce into ChatGPT (natively integrated with Clay) to generate concise summaries about why the prospects had initially engaged with Sendoso.
3. Generate personalized emails: With standardized summaries, Clay automatically generated personalized cold emails that referenced the AE’s name, the timing of the last meeting, and why the prospect had been interested.
4. Automate campaigns: The team connected personalized emails to Instantly.ai, their email outreach sequencer, and automated email sends. 

The results? 

With just a few hours of work, Sendoso booked 16 meetings, generated 23 leads, and closed a deal within two weeks of launching the campaign, all at a 75% open rate and 11% response rate. 

Use case 2: Scaling hyper-personalized gifting 

Sendoso’s GTM strategy leverages SmartSend, their AI-powered gifting personalization engine, to engage prospects, book meetings and accelerate deals. Before using Clay, it was difficult to automate hyper-personalized outbound messaging and gifting on a 1:many basis. 

By integrating Clay with Sendoso’s SmartSend API, the team automated the entire process of sending personalized gifts to prospects, so each contact in a list  automatically received a message and gift tailored to them. 

Here’s how they did it: 

1. Import list of contacts: The team imported a target list of contacts from their CRM into Clay (if you don’t already have one, Clay can create a list for you). 
2. Enrich with personalized details: Clay enriched contacts with contact information, LinkedIn profile URLs, latest posts, recent job changes or promotions, and other relevant signals. 
3. Design personalized direct mail campaigns: Using the enriched data and ChatGPT, Clay crafted personalized direct mail campaigns with tailored messaging, like offering gifts based on specific milestones or job changes.
4. Send direct mail through Sendoso integration: Using its integration with Clay, Sendoso automatically triggered personalized gift sends, such as custom mugs, local restaurant gift cards, or branded swag, directly to the prospects’ addresses. 

Once the direct mail was sent, automated follow-up tasks were triggered for sales reps, ensuring timely and personalized engagement. Reps monitored engagement and performance through Clay so they could optimize future campaigns based on the results.

This workflow helped Sendoso scale personalized direct mail campaigns and book 14 opportunities in just a few weeks. 

Use case 3: Automating job change campaigns using Clay with UserGems

The Sendoso team uses Clay, in combination with UserGems, to automate personalized outreach based on job changes. This saves time on manual prospecting while significantly improving response rates. 

Here’s how they did it: 

1. Track job changes with UserGems: When key contacts, such as former customers, closed-lost opportunities, or decision-makers, moved to new companies, UserGems automatically detects the job changes. (Now, you can also do this in Clay directly!)
2. Trigger workflow in Clay: Once a job change was identified, UserGems triggers a workflow in Clay to begin the outreach process.
3. Enrich contact data in Clay: Clay enriched the contact’s profile with updated information, including details about their new role, company, and other relevant data (e.g., LinkedIn activity).
4. Craft personalized outreach emails: Using the enriched data, Clay generated personalized emails. Each email congratulated the contact on their new role and highlighted how Sendoso’s platform could help solve challenges in their new position or company.
5. Include a personalized gift 
6. Automate and scale outreach: The personalized messages were sent automatically through the workflow, allowing the sales team to re-engage these warm leads efficiently and at scale.

For example, if a decision-maker previously engaged with Sendoso at one company but then moved to a new organization, they got an automated congratulations email that acknowledged the job change and suggested how Sendoso could benefit their new team. 

This outreach workflow allowed the Sendoso team to re-engage warm leads at scale, leading to higher open rates and increased conversion opportunities, without additional headcount or resources.

Use case 4: Creative outreach campaigns like location-based offers

In today’s competitive sales environment, standing out is hard. Prospects are inundated with generic cold emails every day, making it essential to differentiate your outreach with creativity and personalization.

“With outbound, you always have to be changing things up. There's so many people sending emails, and inboxes are so full,” Adrien said. “You need to stand out and be creative, and Clay has helped us do that.”

Sendoso used Clay to inject personalization, humor, and creativity into their campaign, resulting in higher response rates and more successful engagements. For example, one campaign offered prospects gift cards to top-rated local restaurants. 

Using Clay’s direct integration with Yelp’s API, Sendoso ran an automated workflow that finds top-rated local restaurants near their prospects' hometowns, then sent personalized emails with gift cards to one of those restaurants to increase booked demos. 

“It was actually really awesome because we got such cool responses from prospects. Like, ‘OMG, that's my favorite restaurant!’ or ‘OMG I have always wanted to try this restaurant!’ said Austin.

Clay’s impact on Sendoso’s revenue operations

By integrating Clay into their sales and marketing processes, Sendoso significantly improved the efficiency and effectiveness of their outbound efforts. Clay helped them streamline data enrichment, personalize outreach at scale, and reduce the manual burden on their sales team.

The results have been impressive:

• Over $1M in pipeline generated through a combination of personalized outreach and strategic gifting.
• A 20% increase in response rates by leveraging enriched data and personalized direct mail campaigns.
• Automated workflows allowed the team to handle 3x the number of prospects without increasing headcount.

“Clay has allowed me to scale my outreach in ways I never thought possible. I’m now able to send personalized emails and gifts at the scale of an entire team. It’s been a game changer for us,” said Adrien. 

Clay’s automation and enrichment capabilities helped Sendoso not only re-engage warm leads and improve response rates but also drive real, tangible results in their pipeline growth. As Sendoso continues to refine their outreach strategies, Clay remains a central part of their ability to execute at scale, ensuring personalized, timely, and impactful engagement with prospects.