Hey, GTM Engineers!
4,000+ of you to be more exact… which keeps my excitement high for creating GTM Engineering content for you all.
You may see some content tweaks. High level, my goal is to create a couple different types of posts (all deeply researched):
Claybooks - step-by-step in-depth guides you can learn from
Prompts - tested, fine tuned, and designed to be super useful
Custom GPTs - built off of the prompts & extended so you can reuse more easily
Integration Features - to help you stay on top of the best as many come out
My first integration feature will be with The Swarm - an API/data provider that maps your company’s network (executives, investors, advisors, etc.) and find connections that are most likely able to make warm introductions for your target accounts.
Included in this feature:
Overview of The Swarm
How it works
How to set it up (with a Clay template you can copy)
2 emails you can steal
Additional use cases to explore
🤘 Alex
p.s. check out the growing Reddit community: r/gtmengineering (top 39% now)
p.p.s. I’m doing a webinar with The Swarm tomorrow. Come join to see this in action.
🔦 Overview of The Swarm
The Swarm was started by:
David Connors, Co-Founder & CEO
Previously Entrepreneur in Residence at Sequoia Capital where the idea was born after spending years developing recruiting methods.
Michal Bil, Co-Founder & CTO
Olivier Roth, Co-Founder & Chief Growth Officer
They help you map you & your companies networks to find optimal introduction paths to your prospects, target accounts, hiring candidates, investors, and so on.
I’ve wanted a solution for this at all of the 8 Series A companies I’ve worked at. Leveraging your investor and executive networks has always been the best way to break into accounts when few know you.
However, the Go-To-Network has historically been manual and spreadsheet based. Almost impossible to scale.
Now we can include The Swarm in Clay workbooks and sales automations via our native integration. This is one of four ways to use The Swarm:
The Swarm for LinkedIn, our free Chrome Extension, reveals unlimited business emails and intro paths on top of LinkedIn.
Our Clay integration lets you find intro paths to the people and companies you want to reach, right from your Clay tables.
The Swarm API gives product builders and data leaders next-level people and relationship data.
Our SaaS application lets you securily combine and search through the network of your team members and stakeholders.
🎯 Use Case w/ Clay
Find warm introductions at target accounts at scale.
Inputs:
Company Name
Outputs:
Target person at your target company
LinkedIn URL of that person
The most likely person to have a connection to that person (Connector)
How they are connected
Work overlap (default mapping)
Education overlap (default mapping)
Shared investors (default mapping)
LinkedIn connection (with Swarm account)
Email contacts (with Swarm account)
Calendar contacts (with Swarm account)
Personalized emails for each type of connection
⚙ How to Setup
Overview:
Copy provided Clay table (subscribe for access)
Log into The Swarm in the Clay template
Setup Swarm inputs (your website, personas, etc.)
Add your Account signals
Tweak the provided emails as needed
Run table
Step-by-step Guide:
1. Copy this Clay Template
2. Log into The Swarm & setup Inputs
Inputs:
Target account (tag in the domain column)
Add your target job functions
Add your target seniority
Getting The Swarm setup in Clay
3. Add your Signals
The shared table doesn’t have any signals built into it.
There’s too many variations to make it custom for everyone.
All companies have what I call Ideal Customer Signals, which look something like the following:
👉 use these Ideal Customer Signal prompts for OpenAI DeepResearch to find yours.
The signal is what you want to reference in the reason for:
The context of why the target person would be interested to connect
How you’d provide value to that person/company
This makes it easier, and more comfortable, for your connector to make the introduction.
Conditional Snippet in Clay
4. Tweak the intro emails templates
There’s 2 email variations for 2 of the 6 different scenarios (that indicate a connection) in The Swarm:
Connector is connected via work experience overlap
Connector is connected on LinkedIn
Email 1: Work experience overlap
Hi [First Name]
Any chance you know [Target Person] well from your time at [Common Company Experience]?
[Target Person] is now working at [Target Company] as [Target Person’s Title]. We think they’d be a great fit for [Your Company] because [Signal + Reason for Fit].
Would you be comfortable making an intro?
I’d be happy to provide a note you can forward with context.
Thanks,
Alex
Email 2: Connected on LinkedIn
Hi [First Name],
This is a long shot, but I noticed you’re connected to [Target Person Full Name]. By chance do you know [Target Person First Name]?
[Target Company] is [Insert Signal]. Companies in similar situations get really excited when they see how [Insert Your company] can [Insert Your Value Prop Tied to Signal].
If you know [Target Person First Name] well enough, would you be open to making an intro?
I’d be happy to provide a note with the context above that you can forward.
Thanks,
Alex
4. Run your table
✅ Additional Use Cases
Network driven recruiting
Fundraising through trusted connections
Investor network management
Community building and engagement
Job hunting
👉 check out The Swarm: www.theswarm.com