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🧙‍♀️ The many lives of spreadsheets

🧙‍♀️ The many lives of spreadsheets

With love from the Clay team
10
 min.

Ever wondered how many people use spreadsheets? Some estimates say around 800 million people use Microsoft Excel, and another 160–180 million use Google Sheets. Not bad for a tool that started as a basic visual calculator.

With nearly 1 billion people using spreadsheets around the world everyday, innovation is inevitable. And where the history of spreadsheets may center on basic number crunching, its future lies in applications like automated data collection. Today, spreadsheets can fill themselves using the entire internet as a data source, and people can make their own automated apps and spreadsheets without knowing a line of code.

There’s so much more packed into the history of spreadsheets, from how they became hubs for cloud-based collaboration powering entire organizations to how spreadsheets now form the foundations of new apps and tools. But perhaps what’s most fascinating is how after 50 years, entrepreneurs continue realizing the core idea behind spreadsheets — to help people technically solve problems without knowing how to code — in powerful and unexpected new ways.

The 50-year (or so) history of spreadsheets: A timeline

The beginnings of the spreadsheet is a bit of a moving target. Purists often point to LANPAR (LANguage for Programming Arrays at Random) as the the first electronic spreadsheet. Created in 1969, LANPAR gained traction with companies that relied on time-sharing computers, most notably AT&T, Bell Canada, and General Motors.

But the history of spreadsheets coming to home computers really starts in the late 1970s, with a fresh graduate student Dan Bricklin trying to solve two personal problems. In both cases, his vision — to help nontechnical people create technical solutions without needing to know how to code — remains alive and well with the no-code movement.

1979 — VisiCalc ships with the Apple II

Bricklin, a student at Harvard Business School, came up with an idea for a no-code tool after he was inspired by two insights. First, seeing his father, a printer, endure the time-consuming process of manually redoing his prints each day. Second, Bricklin also watched his classmates at HBS struggle to keep up because of all their manual coursework. It was the repetitive, limiting nature of these tasks that drove day dream ways that they could be automated.

Bricklin’s idea bloomed into VisiCalc and quickly achieved wild success. In a 1984 interview, Steve Jobs credits VisiCalc as “what really drove, propelled the Apple II to the success it achieved, more than any other single event.”
Short-lived competitors followed. In 1980, Sorcim shipped SuperCalc on the Osborne 1 personal computer. In 1982, Microsoft took its first crack at a spreadsheet program with Multiplan.

1983 — IBM brings Lotus 1–2–3 to the PC market

The next jump in the history of spreadsheets came with Lotus 1–2–3. Though experts piled on praise such as “revolutionary” and “state of the art,” Lotus 1–2–3 didn’t change the spreadsheet’s core format much. Instead, the program’s biggest contribution came from pushing into personal computers, bringing spreadsheets to even more users.

Lotus 1–2–3 competed well for several decades. In fact, some regard it as “the spreadsheet that defined the PC generation” after a 31-year run.

1985 — Microsoft launches Excel

Three years after Multiplan, Microsoft bounced back with Excel, starting with version 1.0 for Mac. Two years later, version 2.0 expanded Excel into the PC market. But it’s the release of Microsoft Office for Windows 95 that propelled Excel into the limelight.

First, Office 95 gave Excel a presence on both home and business computers (and the Windows brand along with it). Second, it freed spreadsheets from being tied to specific operating systems. Now, someone could download a spreadsheet from one computer, then load it on another — the beginnings of collaboration.

2006 — Google Sheets puts collaboration at the forefront

By freeing spreadsheets to run across different operating systems, Microsoft made it possible to work on spreadsheets collaboratively. Google pushed the idea further by taking spreadsheets to the cloud. In 2006, Google acquired 2Web Technologies, turning its XL2Web web publishing service into Google Spreadsheets, known today as Google Sheets.

Since Google made its productivity tools available for free via the cloud, users from anywhere could collaborate on spreadsheets in real time. This ease of access made Google Sheets highly influential in spreading the use of spreadsheets to nearly 1 billion people, and could even be seen as setting the stage for later cloud-based multiplayer platforms such as Notion, Figma and Coda. Microsoft eventually followed by making Excel accessible via the cloud, too, with platforms like 365.

2012 — Reimagining spreadsheets for workflow automation

Two products launched in 2012 that made spreadsheets much more interactive and capable of working with nonnumerical data, opening up new use cases. Airtable embedded database features into the spreadsheet, allowing teams to build spreadsheets that worked as product roadmaps, bug trackers, and more. Monday.com (launched as daPulse, rebranded in 2017) turned spreadsheets into workspaces for teams to plan, track, and deliver projects.

Both evolved the no-code idea behind spreadsheets with a low-code solution. Nontechnical users could select from prebuilt options such as templates, smart fields, and mini-apps. But the programs could also be handed to in-house developers for deeper customization.

2017 — Clay Lets Users build automated spreadsheets that fill themselves

Built upon a vision of expanding people’s creativity by making programming more accessible, Clay made it possible to build automated spreadsheets that fill themselves with any publicly available data on the internet. Without knowing any code, users could build spreadsheets that automate workflows such as sales prospecting, prioritizing signups, and collecting customer data.

Say users wanted a spreadsheet that could double as a database or CRM. They could build an automated spreadsheet filled with prioritized prospects by searching a library of clickable integrations, such as Clearbit, GitHub, and Shopify.

Today, entrepreneurs continue making spreadsheets more versatile, powerful, and accessible through no-code and low-code. Glide publishes your Google Sheet as an app; GRID turns spreadsheets into interactive web visualizations.

How automation is rapidly reshaping the evolution of spreadsheets

And so, where the first spreadsheets ran mathematical formulas with data entered manually -y today, automation powers spreadsheets to fill themselves, fetching data from internal tools — Segment, HubSpot, Twilio — and the internet to feed workflows.

Let’s say you sell software engineering tools and want to automate the collection of sales data to fill your pipeline with qualified leads. Here’s a quick run-through of how you might do it in Clay.

  1. Create a new base and enter a few dream customers, like Stripe or Twilio.
  2. Select an integration such as Google or Clearbit to find domain names.
  3. Select an integration such as Owler to build an enriched customer profile, specifying the data you want (revenue, funding, employee count).
  4. Use keywords (engineer, engineering manager, senior engineer) to find contacts at your dream customer, specifying the data you want (name, role, LinkedIn URL).
  5. Compile leads into lists by company. Every new potential customer will go through the same automated process you just built, reducing hours of manual labor into seconds.
  6. Push the leads into Outreach or another email automation tool of your choice.
  7. Alternatively, crosscheck your team’s LinkedIn network to find introduction opportunities.

Clay’s Chrome extension augments your data collection, too, as in the image above. The extension recognizes and captures structured data, then maps it to fields on your spreadsheet. Above, it’s capturing open engineering roles. Once that data is fed to the spreadsheet, it will find the companies, identify their senior engineering employees, and compile their contact information, so it’s ready for an email automation workflow.

The future of spreadsheets: How the no-code movement is creating spreadsheets that run like CRMs

Just like a spreadsheet can be the interface of a database, so, too, can a spreadsheet turn into the command center of a customer relationship management (CRM) platform. That opens up new possibilities for sales, marketing, product, and other teams that often share the same CRM but have unique needs that a one-size-fits-all solution can’t meet. For instance:

  • Sales needs to follow each customer’s buying journey and monitor post-sales activity for upsell opportunities.
  • Marketing needs to focus on campaign performance, brand mentions, and competitor activity.
  • Engineering needs to build a CRM for developer tracking, so it can track customers’ technical issues.
  • Customer success needs to track tickets in Zendesk while watching conversations on Intercom and Slack.

What if, instead of sharing one heavyweight CRM, each of these teams could build their own lightweight solution that captures the exact CRM data their workflows need? Clay makes that possible. With it, a sales team could rapidly build an automated spreadsheet that:

  • Captures leads and shows when and where they came from, such as a Typeform survey
  • Triggers flows based on actions you define, such as sending automated Calendly emails at specific status updates
  • Shows each customer’s buying journey, such as their site activity on FullStory and lead status
  • Sets up reminders, so the customer success team delivers contract renewals well ahead of time

There’s so much you could do from there, too. Pull the handles of everyone who follows a specific Twitter account, such as an influencer in your industry. Or standardize your customer onboarding process for a strong post-sales experience by automating tasks such as billing and check-in reminders.

Change the course of spreadsheet history with Clay

The spreadsheet has been nothing short of a history-making tool. Decades ago, it brought business software to personal computers, helping people save time on numbers-based tasks, from budgeting to organizing Little League rosters. Nearly 50 years later, the spreadsheet enters a new age, one where it can fill and update itself using the internet as a data source.

We can't wait to see where they go next.

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Cold Email Copywriting Frameworks for Marketing Agencies in 2023

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Cold Email Copywriting Frameworks for SAAS Companies in 2023

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The ‘job to be done’ for us is to prompt AI correctly to give better answers than what a person could write on their own.

I like to say, “Open AI is wildly powerful but it’s like a five year old at a bowling alley. On their own, the odds of getting a strike are zero. With bumpers, bowling ball ramp and some heavy direction, they can get a strike every time.”

When creating your own prompts, remember to be specific and feed as many details and examples into the data as you can.

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With love from the Clay team

Why should you do outbound sales?

You need to prove/disprove your hypothesis about the market.

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You get more control than you would with marketing.

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🧙‍♀️ The many lives of spreadsheets

With love from the Clay team

Ever wondered how many people use spreadsheets? Some estimates say around 800 million people use Microsoft Excel, and another 160–180 million use Google Sheets. Not bad for a tool that started as a basic visual calculator.

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Get Mobile Phone Number

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Hey friend,

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Mar 2023

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Mar 2023
Mar 2023
Mar 2023

Merge Column

Clay Team

Blog

Get access to our community's favorite templates. Clay gives your prospecting superpowers! 🧙

Blog

Get access to our community's favorite templates. Clay gives your prospecting superpowers! 🧙

Up next!

Updates on feature releases, product improvements, and our roadmap as we keep molding Clay.

← Back to all posts
November 29, 2021
🧙‍♀️ The many lives of spreadsheets

🧙‍♀️ The many lives of spreadsheets

With love from the Clay team

Ever wondered how many people use spreadsheets? Some estimates say around 800 million people use Microsoft Excel, and another 160–180 million use Google Sheets. Not bad for a tool that started as a basic visual calculator.

With nearly 1 billion people using spreadsheets around the world everyday, innovation is inevitable. And where the history of spreadsheets may center on basic number crunching, its future lies in applications like automated data collection. Today, spreadsheets can fill themselves using the entire internet as a data source, and people can make their own automated apps and spreadsheets without knowing a line of code.

There’s so much more packed into the history of spreadsheets, from how they became hubs for cloud-based collaboration powering entire organizations to how spreadsheets now form the foundations of new apps and tools. But perhaps what’s most fascinating is how after 50 years, entrepreneurs continue realizing the core idea behind spreadsheets — to help people technically solve problems without knowing how to code — in powerful and unexpected new ways.

The 50-year (or so) history of spreadsheets: A timeline

The beginnings of the spreadsheet is a bit of a moving target. Purists often point to LANPAR (LANguage for Programming Arrays at Random) as the the first electronic spreadsheet. Created in 1969, LANPAR gained traction with companies that relied on time-sharing computers, most notably AT&T, Bell Canada, and General Motors.

But the history of spreadsheets coming to home computers really starts in the late 1970s, with a fresh graduate student Dan Bricklin trying to solve two personal problems. In both cases, his vision — to help nontechnical people create technical solutions without needing to know how to code — remains alive and well with the no-code movement.

1979 — VisiCalc ships with the Apple II

Bricklin, a student at Harvard Business School, came up with an idea for a no-code tool after he was inspired by two insights. First, seeing his father, a printer, endure the time-consuming process of manually redoing his prints each day. Second, Bricklin also watched his classmates at HBS struggle to keep up because of all their manual coursework. It was the repetitive, limiting nature of these tasks that drove day dream ways that they could be automated.

Bricklin’s idea bloomed into VisiCalc and quickly achieved wild success. In a 1984 interview, Steve Jobs credits VisiCalc as “what really drove, propelled the Apple II to the success it achieved, more than any other single event.”
Short-lived competitors followed. In 1980, Sorcim shipped SuperCalc on the Osborne 1 personal computer. In 1982, Microsoft took its first crack at a spreadsheet program with Multiplan.

1983 — IBM brings Lotus 1–2–3 to the PC market

The next jump in the history of spreadsheets came with Lotus 1–2–3. Though experts piled on praise such as “revolutionary” and “state of the art,” Lotus 1–2–3 didn’t change the spreadsheet’s core format much. Instead, the program’s biggest contribution came from pushing into personal computers, bringing spreadsheets to even more users.

Lotus 1–2–3 competed well for several decades. In fact, some regard it as “the spreadsheet that defined the PC generation” after a 31-year run.

1985 — Microsoft launches Excel

Three years after Multiplan, Microsoft bounced back with Excel, starting with version 1.0 for Mac. Two years later, version 2.0 expanded Excel into the PC market. But it’s the release of Microsoft Office for Windows 95 that propelled Excel into the limelight.

First, Office 95 gave Excel a presence on both home and business computers (and the Windows brand along with it). Second, it freed spreadsheets from being tied to specific operating systems. Now, someone could download a spreadsheet from one computer, then load it on another — the beginnings of collaboration.

2006 — Google Sheets puts collaboration at the forefront

By freeing spreadsheets to run across different operating systems, Microsoft made it possible to work on spreadsheets collaboratively. Google pushed the idea further by taking spreadsheets to the cloud. In 2006, Google acquired 2Web Technologies, turning its XL2Web web publishing service into Google Spreadsheets, known today as Google Sheets.

Since Google made its productivity tools available for free via the cloud, users from anywhere could collaborate on spreadsheets in real time. This ease of access made Google Sheets highly influential in spreading the use of spreadsheets to nearly 1 billion people, and could even be seen as setting the stage for later cloud-based multiplayer platforms such as Notion, Figma and Coda. Microsoft eventually followed by making Excel accessible via the cloud, too, with platforms like 365.

2012 — Reimagining spreadsheets for workflow automation

Two products launched in 2012 that made spreadsheets much more interactive and capable of working with nonnumerical data, opening up new use cases. Airtable embedded database features into the spreadsheet, allowing teams to build spreadsheets that worked as product roadmaps, bug trackers, and more. Monday.com (launched as daPulse, rebranded in 2017) turned spreadsheets into workspaces for teams to plan, track, and deliver projects.

Both evolved the no-code idea behind spreadsheets with a low-code solution. Nontechnical users could select from prebuilt options such as templates, smart fields, and mini-apps. But the programs could also be handed to in-house developers for deeper customization.

2017 — Clay Lets Users build automated spreadsheets that fill themselves

Built upon a vision of expanding people’s creativity by making programming more accessible, Clay made it possible to build automated spreadsheets that fill themselves with any publicly available data on the internet. Without knowing any code, users could build spreadsheets that automate workflows such as sales prospecting, prioritizing signups, and collecting customer data.

Say users wanted a spreadsheet that could double as a database or CRM. They could build an automated spreadsheet filled with prioritized prospects by searching a library of clickable integrations, such as Clearbit, GitHub, and Shopify.

Today, entrepreneurs continue making spreadsheets more versatile, powerful, and accessible through no-code and low-code. Glide publishes your Google Sheet as an app; GRID turns spreadsheets into interactive web visualizations.

How automation is rapidly reshaping the evolution of spreadsheets

And so, where the first spreadsheets ran mathematical formulas with data entered manually -y today, automation powers spreadsheets to fill themselves, fetching data from internal tools — Segment, HubSpot, Twilio — and the internet to feed workflows.

Let’s say you sell software engineering tools and want to automate the collection of sales data to fill your pipeline with qualified leads. Here’s a quick run-through of how you might do it in Clay.

  1. Create a new base and enter a few dream customers, like Stripe or Twilio.
  2. Select an integration such as Google or Clearbit to find domain names.
  3. Select an integration such as Owler to build an enriched customer profile, specifying the data you want (revenue, funding, employee count).
  4. Use keywords (engineer, engineering manager, senior engineer) to find contacts at your dream customer, specifying the data you want (name, role, LinkedIn URL).
  5. Compile leads into lists by company. Every new potential customer will go through the same automated process you just built, reducing hours of manual labor into seconds.
  6. Push the leads into Outreach or another email automation tool of your choice.
  7. Alternatively, crosscheck your team’s LinkedIn network to find introduction opportunities.

Clay’s Chrome extension augments your data collection, too, as in the image above. The extension recognizes and captures structured data, then maps it to fields on your spreadsheet. Above, it’s capturing open engineering roles. Once that data is fed to the spreadsheet, it will find the companies, identify their senior engineering employees, and compile their contact information, so it’s ready for an email automation workflow.

The future of spreadsheets: How the no-code movement is creating spreadsheets that run like CRMs

Just like a spreadsheet can be the interface of a database, so, too, can a spreadsheet turn into the command center of a customer relationship management (CRM) platform. That opens up new possibilities for sales, marketing, product, and other teams that often share the same CRM but have unique needs that a one-size-fits-all solution can’t meet. For instance:

  • Sales needs to follow each customer’s buying journey and monitor post-sales activity for upsell opportunities.
  • Marketing needs to focus on campaign performance, brand mentions, and competitor activity.
  • Engineering needs to build a CRM for developer tracking, so it can track customers’ technical issues.
  • Customer success needs to track tickets in Zendesk while watching conversations on Intercom and Slack.

What if, instead of sharing one heavyweight CRM, each of these teams could build their own lightweight solution that captures the exact CRM data their workflows need? Clay makes that possible. With it, a sales team could rapidly build an automated spreadsheet that:

  • Captures leads and shows when and where they came from, such as a Typeform survey
  • Triggers flows based on actions you define, such as sending automated Calendly emails at specific status updates
  • Shows each customer’s buying journey, such as their site activity on FullStory and lead status
  • Sets up reminders, so the customer success team delivers contract renewals well ahead of time

There’s so much you could do from there, too. Pull the handles of everyone who follows a specific Twitter account, such as an influencer in your industry. Or standardize your customer onboarding process for a strong post-sales experience by automating tasks such as billing and check-in reminders.

Change the course of spreadsheet history with Clay

The spreadsheet has been nothing short of a history-making tool. Decades ago, it brought business software to personal computers, helping people save time on numbers-based tasks, from budgeting to organizing Little League rosters. Nearly 50 years later, the spreadsheet enters a new age, one where it can fill and update itself using the internet as a data source.

We can't wait to see where they go next.

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Mar 2023

How IntroCRM cut its prospecting data budget by 65% and built better lead lists lists with Clay

My company, IntroCRM, is a fractional sales agency that helps small sales teams excel with email deliverability, list building, and messaging. Clay is a critical part of how we help our customers generate, qualify, and book time with leads. In this blog post, I’m going to describe our life before Clay, why and how we use it today, and show you an example of a creative prospecting campaign that we ran for a client.

Mar 2023

Automate 6 cold email campaigns in a single Clay workflow

Clay Team

In this post, we’ll go over how we automated six different outbound cold email campaigns using a single Clay table. Follow along step-by-step in our video.

In this campaign, we were selling sales engagement tools to marketing leaders in American B2B companies with under 100 employees. At a high level, we started with just a broad list of prospects’ names and emails from Apollo. From there, we used Clay to sort prospects into the following buckets: management consulting, recruiting, or financial services.

Mar 2023

Troubleshooting outbound sales and prospecting: a comprehensive guide

Stefan Kollenberg

Nailing your outbound sales and prospecting process can help you generate leads, acquire customers, and drive revenue growth. In this guide, we’ll share a step-by-step approach to troubleshooting each stage of your outbound sales campaign—whether you’re a new sales professional or a seasoned team leader.

We’ll cover how to check early campaigns, identify quality prospects, analyze insights from metrics, double down on well-performing sequences, and more, with detailed examples from our own experiences. You can use the table of contents to easily navigate to the areas that are most relevant to you.

Feb 2023

B2B Sales Prospecting: 15 Strategies to Drive More Conversions

Clay Team

When it comes to B2B sales, one of the biggest challenges is identifying potential customers and transforming them into qualified leads. However, by utilizing effective sales prospecting methods and tools, you can achieve more conversions and grow your business. In this ultimate guide to B2B sales prospecting, we'll delve into the most effective techniques, tools, and strategies to help you generate more quality leads, build a strong sales pipeline, and close more deals.

Feb 2023

How To Create Your Own Sales Prospect List in Minutes

Clay Team

Sales prospecting efforts can be a time-consuming and challenging task for any business. Finding the right prospects and gathering the necessary information to approach them can often feel like searching for a needle in a haystack. You may spend hours scouring various sources such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and company websites, only to come up with a fragmented and incomplete picture of your potential customers. The process of aggregating this information and organizing it into a usable format can take even more time and effort. However, what if we told you that you could create a sales prospecting list in just a few minutes? With Clay, an in-depth  sales prospecting tool, you can quickly and easily import prospects from multiple sources and enrich them with valuable information. You can also export this data to your preferred platform such as a CRM, saving you time and allowing you to focus on what you do best - closing deals!

Feb 2023

How To Get More Customers By Using Outbound Sales - A Complete Guide

Clay Team

In today's fast-paced and highly competitive business landscape, it's more important than ever to have a solid sales strategy in place. While inbound sales and social media marketing can be effective in attracting potential customers, outbound sales is still a crucial component of any successful sales plan. Outbound sales refers to the process of actively reaching out to potential customers through methods such as cold calling, email marketing, and cold outreach. In this blog post, we'll explore the benefits of outbound sales, the types of businesses that can benefit from it, and how to execute a successful outbound sales strategy.

Feb 2023

Cold Email Copywriting Frameworks for Private Equity Firms in 2023

Clay Team

Private equity firms often seek out new investment opportunities and are always on the lookout for promising startups. In this blog post, our expert Eric Nowoslawski provides his tips and frameworks for launching successful lead generation strategies using cold email campaigns to target potential customers and qualified leads. The topics covered in this post include: the critical importance of the subject line, personalizing your cold email approach, focusing on getting a response instead of a sale, including a compelling call-to-action (CTA), emphasizing what your firm enables, keeping your emails short and sweet, limiting follow-up emails, defining your investment offer and marketing strategy, and utilizing cold email templates.

Feb 2023

Cold Email Copywriting Frameworks for VC Firms in 2023

Clay Team

Lead generation is a crucial aspect of sales and marketing for venture capital firms. In this blog post, our expert Eric Nowoslawski shares his tips and frameworks for lead generation through cold emails. By following his strategies, you can secure new investment opportunities, generate high-quality leads, and reach your target audience effectively. This post covers topics such as the importance of personalization in cold emails, the role of a clear call-to-action (CTA), defining your value proposition and marketing angle, and tips for crafting an effective cold email sequence.

Feb 2023

Cold Email Copywriting Frameworks for Recruiting Agencies in 2023

Clay Team

As a recruiter, having a well-rounded lead generation strategy is essential for reaching potential job candidates and securing new clients. In this post, we will go into detail about the key elements that can help optimize your lead generation and increase the chances of making a sale. The topics covered will include lead generation through cold email outreach, leveraging social media, the importance of having a sales team, creating landing pages, lead scoring, lead generation tools, and much more.

Feb 2023

Cold Email Copywriting Frameworks for Marketing Agencies in 2023

Clay Team

Cold emails are a crucial component of lead generation for marketing agencies looking to expand their customer base and drive sales growth. In this post, we will highlight the key elements of a successful cold email marketing strategy, including optimizing subject lines, utilizing personalized email templates, and measuring metrics for lead generation optimization.

Feb 2023

Cold Email Copywriting Frameworks for SAAS Companies in 2023

Clay Team

Cold emails are a crucial aspect of a successful b2b sales and lead generation strategy for SAAS Companies. In this blog post, our expert Eric Nowoslawski shares his tips and techniques for crafting personalized and effective cold emails that can generate new customers through a cold email outreach. Key topics discussed include optimizing cold email subject lines for better open rates, crafting compelling email body and email signature, tracking metrics, and identifying pain points to drive lead conversion.

Feb 2023

11 AI Prompts to Automate Your Prospecting Research

Eric Nowoslawski

Open AI has taken the world by storm with their generative image and text capabilities. The use cases in Sales and Marketing seems almost infinite. From coming up with ideas, writing customer facing copywriting, and automating customer support, every business can leverage AI in some way to boost their productivity.

The ‘job to be done’ for us is to prompt AI correctly to give better answers than what a person could write on their own.

I like to say, “Open AI is wildly powerful but it’s like a five year old at a bowling alley. On their own, the odds of getting a strike are zero. With bumpers, bowling ball ramp and some heavy direction, they can get a strike every time.”

When creating your own prompts, remember to be specific and feed as many details and examples into the data as you can.

Feb 2023

A 7 Step How-To Guide: Successful Outbound Sales Campaigns

With love from the Clay team

Why should you do outbound sales?

You need to prove/disprove your hypothesis about the market.

Outbound sales is beneficial if you have hypotheses but need more certainty about who must have your product and why. It enables you to quickly create, test, and validate these hypotheses with real potential customers.

You get more control than you would with marketing.

Marketing allows you to get content in front of groups of people, but you have far less control over the exact people who will see it. In contrast, outbound sales allows you to pick the specific people that you want to target. This level of control removes the uncertainty of "did the people I want to test this with actually see my message?"

Feb 2023

Cold Email Copywriting Frameworks and Best Practices for 2023

Eric Nowoslawski

Cold emails are one of your most powerful tools for landing new customers, but a few factors can determine whether your messages get trashed or earn replies. In this blog post, we take a look at cold email copywriting tips and frameworks from our resident expert Eric Nowoslawski, who has helped companies with cold email and outbound marketing. We'll cover what to keep in mind before you start an email sequence, how to write your offer and marketing angles, a framework for an effective initial cold email, and how to structure a complete cold email sequence.

Feb 2023

21 Tips for Keeping Cold Emails Out Of Spam in 2023

Eric Nowoslawski

Mastering the art of sending relevant and effective cold emails is crucial for any sales team that wants to convert new customers. The email deliverability landscape, however, can be overwhelming, with hundreds of strategies to consider amidst a constantly changing set of rules and red flags. In this post, we'll share our 21 best tips to help you land cold emails in prospects’ inboxes and acquire customers in 2023. Our guide includes mastering the basics, like setting up essential authentications, cleaning lists, and following sending limits, as well as creative techniques like how to use personalizations and spin taxes. No matter what the tip is, our overall philosophy is simple: whatever spammers do, try to do the opposite. 

Feb 2023

How to Use OpenAI To Write the Perfect Cold Email from Scratch

Eric Nowoslawski

Effective cold emails are critical for any business, but they’ve been extremely time-consuming to write—until now. Instead of spending hours reading LinkedIn bios and company websites, you can use OpenAI with Clay to quickly mass personalize your email outreach with the click of a few buttons. In this post, we’ll show you how to use OpenAI to write personalized outreach emails from scratch based on someone’s LinkedIn bio, company description, and more.

Jan 2023

How to Use Formulas in Clay

Eric Nowoslawski

When building a Clay table, the sources, integrations, and CRM plugins can accomplish the goals of most users. Sometimes, there is a need for some data merging, splitting, or otherwise clean up that is needed in your table. This is where you can use Formulas to accomplish your goals!

In this blog, we are going to first go over how to think about formulas using the AI formula generator and then we will go over common formulas that you can write yourself in your Clay table.

Jan 2023

Optimize your Credit Usage in Clay

Eric Nowoslawski

Clay is a spreadsheet that fills itself with data from many data providers across the internet. We partner with data providers on your behalf to bring lots of different data sources — like job listings, tech stacks, news and more — into your workflows.

In this blog, we will go over a couple of functions in Clay that can will help you optimize your credit usage in Clay. There are many ways to optimize credit usage in Clay that the team has built into the product that we will go over in this blog. We will cover formulas that optimize your workflows and some features that are often overlooked that can help keep your credit usage down.

Here are 3 ways to optimize your Clay credit usage

Nov 2022

Basics of Google search operators

Eric Nowoslawski

Getting started with Google's Search Operator to creatively find new leads

Sep 2022

Lead scoring in Clay

Varun Anand

Welcome to the second post in our series on how to use formulas in Clay!  We’re going to walk you through prioritizing your lead list using scoring formulas in Clay 🌶️

Aug 2022

Formulas in Clay: conditional statements, waterfalling data and qualifying leads

Varun Anand

Ever wanted to learn formulas in Clay but didn't know where to start? Join the club. Just kidding. Read this and you'll be well on your way to mastering the basics of formulas.

Jun 2022

How to prioritize your waitlist

Matt Maiale

If you’re an early stage startup, you’ve probably built a waitlist (or are considering one). And for most startups, it makes a lot of sense.

Nov 2021

🧙‍♀️ The many lives of spreadsheets

With love from the Clay team

Ever wondered how many people use spreadsheets? Some estimates say around 800 million people use Microsoft Excel, and another 160–180 million use Google Sheets. Not bad for a tool that started as a basic visual calculator.

Mar 2023
Mar 2023
Mar 2023

Merge Column

Clay Team
Mar 2023
Mar 2023

GPT-4

Clay Team
Mar 2023

Scrape Website

Clay Team
Mar 2023
Feb 2023
Feb 2023

Find A User's Recent LinkedIn Posts

Clay Team

We hope you're having a wonderful Valentine's Day! On a day filled with love and joy, we thought we'd give you something close to our hearts- new Clay features 💝

Get ready to fall in love 👇

Jan 2023

Get Mobile Phone Number

What's new at Clay

Hey friend,

New Year, new features! 🎊 We've been working hard on building out new integrations to give your teams superpowers for 2023.

We're also super pumped to announce that we've been selected as a finalist for the Golden Kitty Awards! We would love your help by upvoting us here.

Now for the good stuff!! 👇

Aug 2022

Using Google As A Source

Matt Maiale

As you're getting ready for your wonderful Labor Day Weekend break, we're pumped to share some exciting updates to our sources and integrations within Clay 🧚

Aug 2022

Salesforce Integration

Matt Maiale

We hope you're staying cool with your Birkenstocks, bucket hats, and wonderful office AC. We're so pumped to share some new features and updates from Clay.

Dec 2021

Closing out the year with Clay

With love from the Clay team

As we wish this year farewell, we're excited to share some of the bells, whistles, and magic the Clay team is building for you. We're forever in awe of each of you, and can't to see all you'll build in the new year 🎊

Nov 2021

New features, documentation series, and sneak peeks of Clay!

With love from the Clay team

As we get closer to releasing Clay to a larger community, we're excited to share some new features and improvements with you 🤩. With some big features right around the corner, this month we're focused on making all of your interactions in Clay, big and small, absolutely delightful. Check out some of our recent updates:

Oct 2021

Life is getting easier with Clay

With love from the Clay team

We have a couple of new features up our sleeve, but before sharing those with you we are laser focused on making your time in Clay a little more magical - from duplicating tables, to smoother keyboard interactions, record counts and more.

Sep 2021

HTTP API

Matt Maiale

In Clay 2.0, you can now source leads directly from Linkedin within the table. Our 'Clay Find People' source takes queries such as location, title, company, experience, skills, and more to search LinkedIn and add matches to your table.

Sep 2021

Introducing Clay's New Interface

With love from the Clay team

While we'll be migrating all of our users over the fall, we're jazzed to be currently onboarding teams that have ✨ a waitlist to enrich and prioritize✨. This use case is ideal for those with a product in beta, whose signups are feeling unruly (don't be shy if that's you - that was us, too).

Jul 2021

Join our Clay 2.0 beta

With love from the Clay team

We are looking for users interested in testing our revamped UI! We've been teasing our revamped UI and are excited to get you in as soon as humanly possible 🏃.

This month we're prioritizing waitlists in the new UI. You would be a great fit for our beta if you need to better understand people and prioritize sign ups. Shoot us over a note if this sounds like you!

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Mar 2023

How IntroCRM cut its prospecting data budget by 65% and built better lead lists lists with Clay

My company, IntroCRM, is a fractional sales agency that helps small sales teams excel with email deliverability, list building, and messaging. Clay is a critical part of how we help our customers generate, qualify, and book time with leads. In this blog post, I’m going to describe our life before Clay, why and how we use it today, and show you an example of a creative prospecting campaign that we ran for a client.

Mar 2023

Automate 6 cold email campaigns in a single Clay workflow

Clay Team

In this post, we’ll go over how we automated six different outbound cold email campaigns using a single Clay table. Follow along step-by-step in our video.

In this campaign, we were selling sales engagement tools to marketing leaders in American B2B companies with under 100 employees. At a high level, we started with just a broad list of prospects’ names and emails from Apollo. From there, we used Clay to sort prospects into the following buckets: management consulting, recruiting, or financial services.

Mar 2023

Troubleshooting outbound sales and prospecting: a comprehensive guide

Stefan Kollenberg

Nailing your outbound sales and prospecting process can help you generate leads, acquire customers, and drive revenue growth. In this guide, we’ll share a step-by-step approach to troubleshooting each stage of your outbound sales campaign—whether you’re a new sales professional or a seasoned team leader.

We’ll cover how to check early campaigns, identify quality prospects, analyze insights from metrics, double down on well-performing sequences, and more, with detailed examples from our own experiences. You can use the table of contents to easily navigate to the areas that are most relevant to you.

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Mar 2023
Mar 2023
Mar 2023

Merge Column

Clay Team

🧙‍♀️ The many lives of spreadsheets

November 29, 2021
With love from the Clay team

Ever wondered how many people use spreadsheets? Some estimates say around 800 million people use Microsoft Excel, and another 160–180 million use Google Sheets. Not bad for a tool that started as a basic visual calculator.

Ever wondered how many people use spreadsheets? Some estimates say around 800 million people use Microsoft Excel, and another 160–180 million use Google Sheets. Not bad for a tool that started as a basic visual calculator.

With nearly 1 billion people using spreadsheets around the world everyday, innovation is inevitable. And where the history of spreadsheets may center on basic number crunching, its future lies in applications like automated data collection. Today, spreadsheets can fill themselves using the entire internet as a data source, and people can make their own automated apps and spreadsheets without knowing a line of code.

There’s so much more packed into the history of spreadsheets, from how they became hubs for cloud-based collaboration powering entire organizations to how spreadsheets now form the foundations of new apps and tools. But perhaps what’s most fascinating is how after 50 years, entrepreneurs continue realizing the core idea behind spreadsheets — to help people technically solve problems without knowing how to code — in powerful and unexpected new ways.

The 50-year (or so) history of spreadsheets: A timeline

The beginnings of the spreadsheet is a bit of a moving target. Purists often point to LANPAR (LANguage for Programming Arrays at Random) as the the first electronic spreadsheet. Created in 1969, LANPAR gained traction with companies that relied on time-sharing computers, most notably AT&T, Bell Canada, and General Motors.

But the history of spreadsheets coming to home computers really starts in the late 1970s, with a fresh graduate student Dan Bricklin trying to solve two personal problems. In both cases, his vision — to help nontechnical people create technical solutions without needing to know how to code — remains alive and well with the no-code movement.

1979 — VisiCalc ships with the Apple II

Bricklin, a student at Harvard Business School, came up with an idea for a no-code tool after he was inspired by two insights. First, seeing his father, a printer, endure the time-consuming process of manually redoing his prints each day. Second, Bricklin also watched his classmates at HBS struggle to keep up because of all their manual coursework. It was the repetitive, limiting nature of these tasks that drove day dream ways that they could be automated.

Bricklin’s idea bloomed into VisiCalc and quickly achieved wild success. In a 1984 interview, Steve Jobs credits VisiCalc as “what really drove, propelled the Apple II to the success it achieved, more than any other single event.”
Short-lived competitors followed. In 1980, Sorcim shipped SuperCalc on the Osborne 1 personal computer. In 1982, Microsoft took its first crack at a spreadsheet program with Multiplan.

1983 — IBM brings Lotus 1–2–3 to the PC market

The next jump in the history of spreadsheets came with Lotus 1–2–3. Though experts piled on praise such as “revolutionary” and “state of the art,” Lotus 1–2–3 didn’t change the spreadsheet’s core format much. Instead, the program’s biggest contribution came from pushing into personal computers, bringing spreadsheets to even more users.

Lotus 1–2–3 competed well for several decades. In fact, some regard it as “the spreadsheet that defined the PC generation” after a 31-year run.

1985 — Microsoft launches Excel

Three years after Multiplan, Microsoft bounced back with Excel, starting with version 1.0 for Mac. Two years later, version 2.0 expanded Excel into the PC market. But it’s the release of Microsoft Office for Windows 95 that propelled Excel into the limelight.

First, Office 95 gave Excel a presence on both home and business computers (and the Windows brand along with it). Second, it freed spreadsheets from being tied to specific operating systems. Now, someone could download a spreadsheet from one computer, then load it on another — the beginnings of collaboration.

2006 — Google Sheets puts collaboration at the forefront

By freeing spreadsheets to run across different operating systems, Microsoft made it possible to work on spreadsheets collaboratively. Google pushed the idea further by taking spreadsheets to the cloud. In 2006, Google acquired 2Web Technologies, turning its XL2Web web publishing service into Google Spreadsheets, known today as Google Sheets.

Since Google made its productivity tools available for free via the cloud, users from anywhere could collaborate on spreadsheets in real time. This ease of access made Google Sheets highly influential in spreading the use of spreadsheets to nearly 1 billion people, and could even be seen as setting the stage for later cloud-based multiplayer platforms such as Notion, Figma and Coda. Microsoft eventually followed by making Excel accessible via the cloud, too, with platforms like 365.

2012 — Reimagining spreadsheets for workflow automation

Two products launched in 2012 that made spreadsheets much more interactive and capable of working with nonnumerical data, opening up new use cases. Airtable embedded database features into the spreadsheet, allowing teams to build spreadsheets that worked as product roadmaps, bug trackers, and more. Monday.com (launched as daPulse, rebranded in 2017) turned spreadsheets into workspaces for teams to plan, track, and deliver projects.

Both evolved the no-code idea behind spreadsheets with a low-code solution. Nontechnical users could select from prebuilt options such as templates, smart fields, and mini-apps. But the programs could also be handed to in-house developers for deeper customization.

2017 — Clay Lets Users build automated spreadsheets that fill themselves

Built upon a vision of expanding people’s creativity by making programming more accessible, Clay made it possible to build automated spreadsheets that fill themselves with any publicly available data on the internet. Without knowing any code, users could build spreadsheets that automate workflows such as sales prospecting, prioritizing signups, and collecting customer data.

Say users wanted a spreadsheet that could double as a database or CRM. They could build an automated spreadsheet filled with prioritized prospects by searching a library of clickable integrations, such as Clearbit, GitHub, and Shopify.

Today, entrepreneurs continue making spreadsheets more versatile, powerful, and accessible through no-code and low-code. Glide publishes your Google Sheet as an app; GRID turns spreadsheets into interactive web visualizations.

How automation is rapidly reshaping the evolution of spreadsheets

And so, where the first spreadsheets ran mathematical formulas with data entered manually -y today, automation powers spreadsheets to fill themselves, fetching data from internal tools — Segment, HubSpot, Twilio — and the internet to feed workflows.

Let’s say you sell software engineering tools and want to automate the collection of sales data to fill your pipeline with qualified leads. Here’s a quick run-through of how you might do it in Clay.

  1. Create a new base and enter a few dream customers, like Stripe or Twilio.
  2. Select an integration such as Google or Clearbit to find domain names.
  3. Select an integration such as Owler to build an enriched customer profile, specifying the data you want (revenue, funding, employee count).
  4. Use keywords (engineer, engineering manager, senior engineer) to find contacts at your dream customer, specifying the data you want (name, role, LinkedIn URL).
  5. Compile leads into lists by company. Every new potential customer will go through the same automated process you just built, reducing hours of manual labor into seconds.
  6. Push the leads into Outreach or another email automation tool of your choice.
  7. Alternatively, crosscheck your team’s LinkedIn network to find introduction opportunities.

Clay’s Chrome extension augments your data collection, too, as in the image above. The extension recognizes and captures structured data, then maps it to fields on your spreadsheet. Above, it’s capturing open engineering roles. Once that data is fed to the spreadsheet, it will find the companies, identify their senior engineering employees, and compile their contact information, so it’s ready for an email automation workflow.

The future of spreadsheets: How the no-code movement is creating spreadsheets that run like CRMs

Just like a spreadsheet can be the interface of a database, so, too, can a spreadsheet turn into the command center of a customer relationship management (CRM) platform. That opens up new possibilities for sales, marketing, product, and other teams that often share the same CRM but have unique needs that a one-size-fits-all solution can’t meet. For instance:

  • Sales needs to follow each customer’s buying journey and monitor post-sales activity for upsell opportunities.
  • Marketing needs to focus on campaign performance, brand mentions, and competitor activity.
  • Engineering needs to build a CRM for developer tracking, so it can track customers’ technical issues.
  • Customer success needs to track tickets in Zendesk while watching conversations on Intercom and Slack.

What if, instead of sharing one heavyweight CRM, each of these teams could build their own lightweight solution that captures the exact CRM data their workflows need? Clay makes that possible. With it, a sales team could rapidly build an automated spreadsheet that:

  • Captures leads and shows when and where they came from, such as a Typeform survey
  • Triggers flows based on actions you define, such as sending automated Calendly emails at specific status updates
  • Shows each customer’s buying journey, such as their site activity on FullStory and lead status
  • Sets up reminders, so the customer success team delivers contract renewals well ahead of time

There’s so much you could do from there, too. Pull the handles of everyone who follows a specific Twitter account, such as an influencer in your industry. Or standardize your customer onboarding process for a strong post-sales experience by automating tasks such as billing and check-in reminders.

Change the course of spreadsheet history with Clay

The spreadsheet has been nothing short of a history-making tool. Decades ago, it brought business software to personal computers, helping people save time on numbers-based tasks, from budgeting to organizing Little League rosters. Nearly 50 years later, the spreadsheet enters a new age, one where it can fill and update itself using the internet as a data source.

We can't wait to see where they go next.

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