Get your first ten customers
No brand, no referrals, no budget. Work out who to talk to, what to say, and how to close.
4 steps, 16 questions underneath, read for how the best do it
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1
Who you sell to
Picking a customer worth chasing, and knowing early when a deal is not one.
How do the best companies keep their ICP sharp as they grow instead of letting it blur into everyone?The gist They re-derive it on a schedule from data they already have: which segments renew, which expand, which churn, which cost the most to serve. Then they act on the answer, including the unpopular half, cutting a segment they used to sell to. The best ones also separate the ICP from the total market deliberately, so nobody confuses 'who we could sell to one day' with 'who we chase this quarter'. And they revisit it whenever the product changes shape, because shipping a new capability quietly makes a previously bad-fit segment good, and vice versa.
Defining our ICP is the most important thing we ever did A real company showing its ICP before and after, including the messy middle where they were guessing. The point that narrow ICPs beat broad ones, a... 4 questions on who you sell to → -
2
Positioning and messaging
Making a buyer understand in one sentence why you exist and why you are the one to pick.
How do the best B2B companies get positioning agreed when product, sales and the founders all disagree?The gist They stop arguing about opinions and go find the buyer's view, because the only competitive alternative that matters is the one the prospect would actually pick if you did not exist, and that is a research question, not a debate. They run the exercise as a cross-functional working session rather than a marketing deliverable, with sales in the room, since sales already knows which strengths land. They also watch for product pessimism, teams get so close to their own gaps that they discount advantages customers find remarkable. And they treat positioning as something revisited as the product and market move, not carved once at launch.
A guide to advanced B2B positioning This is the piece for teams that already know the theory and are stuck on the human problem: nobody agrees on the competitors, and everyone is pess... 4 questions on positioning and messaging → -
3
Outbound that works
Cold email, cold calls, LinkedIn, sequences and lists. How to start conversations with people who have never heard of you.
What are the best outbound teams doing in 2026 that the rest of us are not?The gist They treat outbound as an engineering problem, not a headcount problem. The best teams have someone technical sitting inside GTM (the GTM engineer role) who wires together data sources, enrichment and AI to find signals nobody else is acting on, then builds a play around each one. The three rules Clay's own team lives by are worth stealing: find signals that are specific rather than generic, expect your creative edge to decay quickly, and win by iterating faster than the competition. Notice what this is not: it is not more volume, and it is not better templates. It is a tighter loop between a hypothesis and a measured result.
The GTM Inflection Points That Powered Clay to a $1B+ Valuation Seven specific decisions rather than a success story: the narrow first segment, reverse demos, community-led content, a waitlist held for fifteen m... 4 questions on outbound that works → -
4
Running a sales process and closing
Discovery, demos, qualification, champions, procurement and the last mile to a signature.
What separates the top ten percent of AEs from everyone else?The gist Discovery discipline, mostly. Top performers spread questions evenly across the whole cycle rather than front-loading a checklist on call one, and they treat discovery as something that continues right up to signature. They uncover three or four business problems instead of one, they name the cost of the status quo in the customer's own numbers, and they bring price up early and confidently rather than hiding from it. They also qualify out faster, which is why their pipelines look smaller and convert better. The gap is rarely charisma, it is that the best reps run a tighter, more curious process and are comfortable losing deals on purpose.
Effective strategies for successful sales discovery calls Gives you numbers to aim at on your next call instead of vague advice: roughly 11 to 14 questions, spread through the call rather than front-loaded... 4 questions on running a sales process and closing →
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