How can you double your positive replies and meetings booked—with half your sales team?
Mehak Batra, the co-founder of Qrew, a recruiting software company, figured it out with Clay.
Before using Clay, Qrew’s sales team was spending hours finding, qualifying and researching potential prospects. Their process was slow—and their emails were unpersonalized.
It wasn’t their fault. Even his fastest and most skilled SDRs had to manually look at LinkedIn posts and company descriptions before they could even think of writing cold emails or phone calls. That left no time for writing personalized emails.
One SDR focused purely on research: coming up with a company list, looking up the CEO, seeing if they did anything interesting online. Unpersonalized messages, of course, meant low response rates.
“Our ICP is companies that are under 50 employees that don’t have a recruiting or an HR team. There are quite a few of these, and we wanted to personalize based on who they were and what they did—but we simply didn’t have the bandwidth to manually personalize emails,” Mehak said.
“As a result, we were just sort of spraying and praying and hoping to kind of get someone at a good time. It was a whole bunch of outbound emails going out with minimal results.”
One day, as Mehak was scrolling through LinkedIn, he came across a post from our own Eric Nowoslawski featuring workflows he was creating in Clay.
At first, he was skeptical. He’d used many tools before that promised a fully automated outbound flow, but delivered limited results. However, he eventually decided to try Clay.
Fast-forward to now, and his sales team is half the size and generating around double the positive responses from their outreach campaigns.
Yep, double. ½ the sales team, 2x the positive replies, and a 40% increase in meetings booked.
“What Clay does automatically, one person earlier did for 8 hours a day. Now, our remaining SDRs take leads and run them through Clay to enrich them—we have 2 SDRs and one AE. Clay has helped us be more efficient and increase margins,” Mehak said.
“Clay has made our sales team much more efficient,” Mehak said, “able to do way more with less. Our positive rates have doubled, response rates have doubled. Even the no's are people who are just actually just saying, hey, reach out to me in 2024 instead. If you reach out to a small business CEO, and you actually talk about their business and how you can help, it lands well.”
Besides doing their existing work better, Clay has opened up time for Qrew’s SDRs to do tasks that they couldn’t earlier spare time for. “One of the other underrated things that our SCR team is able to do more of now is targeted cold calls, because they’re not spending hours just researching accounts. We have leads in personalized sequences, and if they open an email a bunch of times, it triggers the SDR to reach out to them sooner or just kind of come up with a different message to get their attention. Before it was harder to tell who to even call, because we were just spraying and praying.”
Qrew's workflow with Clay
So, how did they do it? Let’s break it down, step by step. “Our flow is pretty simple,” Mehak said. “We don't send too many emails. We do a 4-email sequence over 14 days. Our workflow has worked pretty well and helped us cut our team in half, and we're booking meetings a lot more.”
First, Mehak and his team needed to find people within their ICP, which was already defined. (Companies with less than fifty employees, without recruiting or HR teams).
This was incredibly easy to do within Clay, by importing people from LinkedIn. Suddenly, Mehak had thousands of relevant prospects at his fingertips.
Next, they enriched their profiles for more information such as the company description, recent posts, and more.
After that, he used Clay’s work email integrations to find the verified email addresses of the enriched prospects.
From there, he was able to personalize messages for every single one of his prospects using our OpenAI integration to brainstorm a couple of different ways Qrew could help the founder’s their business. (The template is simple—a quick opening sentence about their company and then a couple different bullet points on the roles we can help them recruit, and a call to action.) You can check out a similar example in this video.
And that personalization is just a start. “The companies we’re reaching out to are small, and the CEOs are usually pretty attached to their business. They're generally impressed with just the company level personalization. We’re exploring personalizing based on online open job listings, LinkedIn posts, and more.”
These outputs were then dropped into his Smartlead campaigns where he would send his newly-personalized emails to the thousands of prospects he found in Clay.
It’s that easy: find, enrich, personalize, and send.
This method allowed Qrew to make their team significantly more efficient and allowed them to spend time on the more important aspects of their business.
Clay allows companies to do this at scale without the need to increase their SDR count. In the case of Qrew, they had an SDR dedicated just to research, which was spending unnecessary company resources for something that can be easily automated with our tool.
Here are tutorials for each step of the process:
Finding Leads in LinkedIn: video
Enriching Leads for More Information: video
Personalizing Outbound with OpenAI: video
We hope this story inspires you to make your sales motion as effective as possible. Happy prospecting!
How can you double your positive replies and meetings booked—with half your sales team?
Mehak Batra, the co-founder of Qrew, a recruiting software company, figured it out with Clay.
Before using Clay, Qrew’s sales team was spending hours finding, qualifying and researching potential prospects. Their process was slow—and their emails were unpersonalized.
It wasn’t their fault. Even his fastest and most skilled SDRs had to manually look at LinkedIn posts and company descriptions before they could even think of writing cold emails or phone calls. That left no time for writing personalized emails.
One SDR focused purely on research: coming up with a company list, looking up the CEO, seeing if they did anything interesting online. Unpersonalized messages, of course, meant low response rates.
“Our ICP is companies that are under 50 employees that don’t have a recruiting or an HR team. There are quite a few of these, and we wanted to personalize based on who they were and what they did—but we simply didn’t have the bandwidth to manually personalize emails,” Mehak said.
“As a result, we were just sort of spraying and praying and hoping to kind of get someone at a good time. It was a whole bunch of outbound emails going out with minimal results.”
One day, as Mehak was scrolling through LinkedIn, he came across a post from our own Eric Nowoslawski featuring workflows he was creating in Clay.
At first, he was skeptical. He’d used many tools before that promised a fully automated outbound flow, but delivered limited results. However, he eventually decided to try Clay.
Fast-forward to now, and his sales team is half the size and generating around double the positive responses from their outreach campaigns.
Yep, double. ½ the sales team, 2x the positive replies, and a 40% increase in meetings booked.
“What Clay does automatically, one person earlier did for 8 hours a day. Now, our remaining SDRs take leads and run them through Clay to enrich them—we have 2 SDRs and one AE. Clay has helped us be more efficient and increase margins,” Mehak said.
“Clay has made our sales team much more efficient,” Mehak said, “able to do way more with less. Our positive rates have doubled, response rates have doubled. Even the no's are people who are just actually just saying, hey, reach out to me in 2024 instead. If you reach out to a small business CEO, and you actually talk about their business and how you can help, it lands well.”
Besides doing their existing work better, Clay has opened up time for Qrew’s SDRs to do tasks that they couldn’t earlier spare time for. “One of the other underrated things that our SCR team is able to do more of now is targeted cold calls, because they’re not spending hours just researching accounts. We have leads in personalized sequences, and if they open an email a bunch of times, it triggers the SDR to reach out to them sooner or just kind of come up with a different message to get their attention. Before it was harder to tell who to even call, because we were just spraying and praying.”
Qrew's workflow with Clay
So, how did they do it? Let’s break it down, step by step. “Our flow is pretty simple,” Mehak said. “We don't send too many emails. We do a 4-email sequence over 14 days. Our workflow has worked pretty well and helped us cut our team in half, and we're booking meetings a lot more.”
First, Mehak and his team needed to find people within their ICP, which was already defined. (Companies with less than fifty employees, without recruiting or HR teams).
This was incredibly easy to do within Clay, by importing people from LinkedIn. Suddenly, Mehak had thousands of relevant prospects at his fingertips.
Next, they enriched their profiles for more information such as the company description, recent posts, and more.
After that, he used Clay’s work email integrations to find the verified email addresses of the enriched prospects.
From there, he was able to personalize messages for every single one of his prospects using our OpenAI integration to brainstorm a couple of different ways Qrew could help the founder’s their business. (The template is simple—a quick opening sentence about their company and then a couple different bullet points on the roles we can help them recruit, and a call to action.) You can check out a similar example in this video.
And that personalization is just a start. “The companies we’re reaching out to are small, and the CEOs are usually pretty attached to their business. They're generally impressed with just the company level personalization. We’re exploring personalizing based on online open job listings, LinkedIn posts, and more.”
These outputs were then dropped into his Smartlead campaigns where he would send his newly-personalized emails to the thousands of prospects he found in Clay.
It’s that easy: find, enrich, personalize, and send.
This method allowed Qrew to make their team significantly more efficient and allowed them to spend time on the more important aspects of their business.
Clay allows companies to do this at scale without the need to increase their SDR count. In the case of Qrew, they had an SDR dedicated just to research, which was spending unnecessary company resources for something that can be easily automated with our tool.
Here are tutorials for each step of the process:
Finding Leads in LinkedIn: video
Enriching Leads for More Information: video
Personalizing Outbound with OpenAI: video
We hope this story inspires you to make your sales motion as effective as possible. Happy prospecting!
