#60 How to do product marketing at Clay

I've been a fan of Clay's marketing for a while.

Their ads follow me around the internet. Their out-of-home campaigns are hard to miss. And unlike most B2B brands, their stuff is actually worth stopping for.

So I was genuinely excited when Tanvi, PMM at Clay, came on tl;dl this week.

She has an unusual background for a PMM. Before she ever wrote a positioning doc, she spent years on Clay's post-sales team. Helping customers use the product every day. Watching where it clicked and where it didn't. Noticing the gap between what engineers were building and what users were actually trying to do.

That experience shaped everything about how she thinks about go-to-market.

The thing she kept coming back to: nobody cares about your product.

Not in a nihilistic way. In a practical one. If you lead with features, you miss the point. Customers don't buy features. They buy solutions to problems they already have. The job of PMM is to speak that language fluently, and make sure everyone else on your go-to-market team does too.

Here's what that looks like at Clay in practice:

Use-case pages over feature pages. Clay's product is so flexible it works for tech companies, music labels, restaurants, breweries. The website can't just explain what Clay does. It has to show exactly how it works for your specific situation. So they built a use-case library. Step-by-step breakdowns. Customer stories. Specific value props per use case. It's their most important GTM asset.

Messaging has to travel. Writing good positioning is only half the job. If your sales team can't repeat it in a first call, it doesn't matter. Tanvi talks about enablement like it's the most critical piece of any launch, because it is. All the strategy in the world falls flat if sellers don't know how to use it.

Ship fast, stay aligned. Clay ships new features every week. Their PMM team is four people. Keeping messaging consistent at that pace is genuinely hard. The answer isn't slowing down. It's having a clear central source of truth and making sure every team, growth, brand, narrative, sales, stays in sync around it.

Her advice for early-career PMMs: start with customers. Understand what they want before they can articulate it. Know your product deeply enough to connect how it works to the problems it solves. Everything else follows from that!

See you next Friday with more episodes! 📨