"You Live Like This?"

Hey there,

Elias Stråvik dropped this line during our conversation earlier this week, and it's been stuck in my head ever since:

"A messy CRM is like going to someone's dirty house and thinking, you live like this?"

It's brutal. And it's perfect.

Because that's exactly what's happening across thousands of B2B companies right now. They're spending 5-6 figures annually on their CRM, treating it like some mission-critical piece of infrastructure, when in reality it's functioning like a glorified spreadsheet filled with bad data.

The disconnect is wild when you really think about it.

You wouldn't run your business out of a cluttered, disorganized office. You wouldn't present to investors with slides full of typos and outdated information. But somehow, we've normalized having CRMs that are absolute disasters—and then wondering why our GTM motions feel so broken.

Which is why I thought this was a perfect topic for this week's newsletter.

Today we're breaking down the things that so many companies are getting wrong with their current CRM, and showing you how there's a super easy fix to this madness through Clay.

My goal? To have every single reader of this newsletter go away and implement this process in their organizations, and have a squeaky clean CRM that actually works for them.

But first, a little bit about why I think things have gotten so bad.

Its because data comes in from everywhere—inbound forms, trade shows, manual entry, list uploads,—and none of it gets validated or standardized. People change jobs, companies get acquired, contact info goes stale, and most organizations don't realize it's happening.

The result? Your reps stop trusting the system, marketing burns budget on dead leads, and leadership makes decisions based on fantasy numbers.

So how do we go about solving it?

It's honestly pretty simple.

Let's break down the cookbook:

Step 1: Import Your Records Start by creating a workflow to import records from HubSpot or Salesforce. Find the object—account—list view—my entire list, hit submit and import everything into a Clay table.

Now we have all your accounts in a Clay table. All we have at this point is the company name, but we're going to start from there.

Step 2: Basic Enrichment Did a Google search and found their website which means website data is now populated. Also did the same thing with LinkedIn to grab their company LinkedIn profile.

Step 3: Layer on Company Data For all the ones we found LinkedIn profiles for, I added enrichment to get company details. This includes employee count, follower count, industry classification—all the good stuff.

Step 4: Revenue & Tech Stack Then I used a waterfall (aggregation of data providers) to find their revenue estimates and main competitors, plus a list of technologies they're using. All of this gets output into the Clay table. 

Step 5: Traffic & Performance Data Found website traffic integration using Semrush to understand how much web traffic they're getting and where it's coming from.

Step 6: Financial Documentation Using Claygent, I pulled company financial documentation and other public filings.

The Result? All of this gets pushed back into Clay, and now each record has this tremendous amount of data. When it syncs back to your Salesforce or HubSpot, every record is up to date, accurate, and has additional information that your sales team can actually use.

I went from having just a company name to having all of this data, normalized and updated in the CRM.

(PS you can see a video of the full flow here)

But here's the best part—do I have to run this manually?

The answer is no. You can go to settings, set the table to run on a schedule—every day, week, month—and you have an evergreen system you never have to touch that constantly updates and enriches all your CRM data.

This table takes minutes to build, and every time a new Salesforce record gets added, it automatically gets added to Clay and enriched.

Why This Matters More Than Ever

We're entering an era where GTM efficiency is becoming the primary competitive advantage. The companies that can move fastest with the most accurate information are going to win.

But you can't move fast when your team is constantly fighting bad data. 

Clean CRM data is table stakes for building a modern GTM engine that can scale without breaking.

And the best part? This stuff isn't hard to build. You can set up this one table in Clay in 10 minutes and have it run on autopilot.

That 10-minute Clay table I built? It's doing the work that most companies spend weeks on every quarter. Except it's doing it automatically, continuously, and more accurately than any manual process ever could.

If you are reading this and realizing that your CRM is a mess  here's where i would start:

• Audit your current data quality—pick a random sample of 100 records and see how many have outdated or incorrect information

• Map your data sources—identify everywhere contacts and accounts are coming from, because each source is a potential contamination point

• Build the enrichment pipeline—start with basic job title and company validation, then layer on more sophisticated data points.

Because at the end of the day, your CRM should be supporting your GTM motion, not sabotaging it.

And nobody should be looking at your CRM and thinking, "You work like this?"

Clay Updates You May Have Missed

https://www.clay.com/signals - You can now create tables with multi-layer signals to get high propensity leads. This is huge for finding accounts that are actually ready to buy.

Clay also announced a partnership with Smartlead where it now becomes easy to send emails directly from Clay. Massive unlock if you're using the platform to run outbound.

Need Help?

If you need any help setting up the cookbook featured in today's issue, hit me up on LinkedIn or reach out to the Kiln.

Talk soon,

Pat