We’re going through a dramatic change in b2b marketing.

A company’s ‘organic reach’ used to mean the segment of their own followers that would see a post.

Today, companies are going viral on demand by leveraging their audience and their audience’s audience.

Users + communities + influencers + partners + employees + earned media + content experiments + memes + IRL activations + … + .. + .

With impeccable timing and coordination, the world’s best in-house marketing teams have realised they can take over an entire industry’s internet feeds for 48 hours. Sometimes longer.

Here’s the playbook from a company that did it just ~2 weeks ago.

I got behind-the-scenes access to learn not just how, but why they pulled it off.

Enjoy.

— Tom

Clay’s $1.3 billion repositioning masterclass

Chess Move

The what: A TLDR explanation of the strategy

When most companies announce fundraising news, they follow a familiar playbook: press release, social posts, maybe a TechCrunch article if they're lucky.

The story usually boils down to "we raised $X at $Y valuation."

Clay took a different approach with their $40M Series B expansion. Rather than just broadcasting numbers, they used the moment of attention to completely reposition their company and product and reward their most loyal users by opening up a community equity offering.

Clay recognised their biggest growth lever wasn't capital (they hadn't touched their last round), but rather market perception.

Through careful orchestration of media, content, and community activation, they claimed ownership of an emerging category: GTM development environment

Breakdown

The how: The strategic playbook boiled down to 3x key takeaways

1.  A repositioning masterclass

Clay's marketing team knew that their unicorn fundraising announcement would bring the most daily traffic of all time.

This moment represented an opportunity: Leverage the traffic surge to reposition themselves in a way that unlocks Clay’s next phase of growth.

Clay initially found product-market-fit as a next-gen “outbound email personalisation” tool.

They launched on Product Hunt in 2022, 10x’d revenue in both 2022 and 2023, and 6x’d revenue in 2024.

But their record-breaking growth created a positioning problem:

While the market viewed it as the tool it once was, Clay quickly outgrew its category, and was more commonly used as a unified environment for developing and continuously running the full spectrum of growth projects.

OpenAI used Clay's AI agent with GPT models to automate this workflow and summarise information from earnings reports, company websites, and other key sources for every relevant account.

Vanta used company signals — such as job postings, funding announcements, and website updates — to prioritise their massive pool of CRM contacts.

Just like developers have VSCode, and designers have Figma, the de facto home for high-performing GTM teams was Clay.

To shift broader market sentiment in line with how next-gen companies were using the product, Clay decided to use the fundraise (i.e. a rare moment of widespread attention) to introduce (and own) a new category with an expanded Total Addressable Market (TAM):
→ "GTM development environment"

The key to making the new messaging stick was 3rd-party validation.

Clay wasn’t just explaining the repositioning from their own point of view. They released flagship case studies at the exact same time (e.g. OpenAI and Verkada) that unmistakably demonstrated the CRM enrichment and automated research (rather than just outbound email) use cases were driving results for top RevOps teams.

The play: if you’re going to double your traffic overnight, you may as well direct it towards your #1 growth vector. In this case - repositioning your product towards a fast-growing untapped market.

2. Orchestrate a multi-channel symphony

Clay created an intricate network of announcements and content to ensure their message was absorbed across different audiences:

Internal vision: Published a detailed post on their public blog; a ‘nucleus’ piece of content on an owned channel that others link back to.

Media strategy: Lined-up a string of high-profile articles to establish credibility, starting with a Forbes exclusive and First Round Review deep dive.

Social distribution: Viral launch posts on company and founder socials.

Employee advocacy: Promotional content from Clay’s own employees.

Influencer amplification: Leveraged their network of creators and thought leaders to share custom branded assets, and even physical merch.

Content experiments: Architected an assortment of novel, viral, social posts.

Community activations: Gifted unique experiences to community members.

Video content: YouTube interview with industry insider, Adam Robinson.

Customer stories: Released flagship case studies featuring high-profile companies like OpenAI and Vanta.

Each piece was carefully timed, cross-referenced, and consistently framed (aligned to repositioning) creating an omnipresent sense that something significant was changing in the GTM space.

3. Deepen investment in community

One of Clay's deepest defensive moats is it's own community. The passionate group of power-users, service providers, agencies, and partners that Clay go above and beyond to give back to.

Fully recognising that they wouldn’t be where they are now without the powerful community flywheel they’ve cultivated, Clay conjured another trick up their sleeve.

A surprise announcement, 2 weeks later.

One that didn’t just thank the community, but rewarded them.

Today, they just announced their community equity offering, giving their community an opportunity to invest at the same $1.25 billion valuation as other Series B expansion round investors like Sequoia and Meritech.

Clay’s long-term bet on the community was inviting the community make a long-term bet on Clay.

Normally you can’t just invest in the world’s fastest-growing companies → access is limited to exclusive networks of insiders.

Normally companies fundraise when they need the cash → Clay hadn’t touched their last round.

The community round wasn't just a symbolic gesture. It cemented their belief that “the people who helped build Clay should benefit from its future”.

Rather than keeping the fundraise news solely centred on Clay, they were able to position the moment as a milestone for the broader GTM community they'd fostered:

• Highlighted the 90+ “Claygencies” building businesses on Clay

• Spotlighted Clay specialists making $1M+/year

• Announced 60+ meetup groups forming organically

• Showcased the new career path of "GTM Engineering" they'd pioneered

• Offered their most passionate users the chance to become shareholders

Ultimately, the community fundraise transformed the announcement from company news into a community celebration.

That’s all for today’s breakdown - hope you enjoyed!

— Tom

P.S. Have you seen another example of novel marketing / launch strategies in the wild? Reply to this email and let me know!

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