Hey Sania Z. You already have the hardest part figured out: understanding buyers, personalization, and how to start real conversations. A lot of people entering GTM Engineering come from the opposite direction - they know tools and automations, but have never written an email that actually converts. I don’t think Clay Bootcamp is mandatory, but bootcamp provide credits which will be very helpful for practice. Also, it definitely helps accelerate the learning curve because you learn proven workflows, and you get exposure to real GTME thinking. The fastest path for you is probably:
keep learning Clay/AI/automation publicly
rebuild workflows you already used manually
document everything on LinkedIn
create 2–3 practical projects
work with a small agency/startup/founder on real campaigns
That last part is important because GTME is learned by execution, not theory. For example, take one of your old manual workflows and ask:
How would I automate prospect research?
How would I enrich leads?
How would I personalize at scale without losing quality?
How do I reduce 8 hours of research into 10 minutes?
That mindset shift is basically GTM Engineering. And honestly, your manual research experience is incredibly valuable right now because AI outbound is becoming noisy. People who understand relevance and positioning still stand out. You also don’t need a huge budget initially. You can:
use Clay free credits strategically
use Google Sheets + GPT
build mock workflows
optimize small datasets first
The “internship under an agency” route is actually underrated too - especially if:
they actively use Clay
they run outbound at scale
That’s not starting over. It’s just compressing the execution learning curve. A lot of strong GTM engineers today are basically: sales psychology + systems thinking + AI tooling + automation You already have the first two. The rest is practice and repetition. All the best!!
Hey Rares A. This is actually a really solid use case for Clay. A lot of people focus only on SaaS/LinkedIn workflows, but local brick-and-mortar prospecting is where Clay can create huge leverage because the data is usually fragmented and painful to gather manually. The Internal Champions layer is the most interesting part to me - even just identifying likely decision-makers for restaurants/hospitality businesses saves hours of research for BDRs. For optimization, 300+ credits for 25 rows does feel high, so I’d probably:
add conditional runs (“only enrich if field is empty”)
separate high-confidence vs low-confidence enrichment waterfalls
avoid running AI on every row upfront
use cheaper providers first before triggering Claygent/AI steps
But overall this looks like a strong real-world workflow, especially for agencies targeting SMB/local businesses.🙌
I have noticed plain-text style emails consistently perform better long term. Heavy HTML tracking + too many images can definitely increase spam/promotions placement, especially on newer domains.
Hey Olga K. I feel the biggest gap still feels like deliverability maturity. Clay’s sequencer is getting strong fast, especially for AI personalization and workflow automation, but Instantly still seems ahead on the sending infrastructure side with pre-warmed inboxes, rotation, and warmup reliability. For lower volume (~500 contacts/month), I’d personally keep Clay for enrichment/personalization and use Instantly Growth for sending. Hypergrowth feels unnecessary unless you’re scaling aggressively or managing multiple outbound brands/clients. The all-in-one vision with Clay is really appealing though curious to see how their deliverability performs over the next 6–12 months.
