Why using Clay for your ICP Is Outdated: How a Legal AI Firm Unlocked Growth with Real-Time Updates

Most marketing teams put together Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) information that they believe is useful for their internal alignment between the product, marketing and sales teams. 

The ICP includes but is not limited to the following: demographics, psychographics, technographics and other information. Examples are customer industry, location, employee size, annual revenue, technology footprint (installed products and usage).

The next step is to create the ideal persona. Many companies include title, role, and painpoints, Some also use a BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timeframe) framework to qualify prospects.

Advanced users of persona and ICP also have detailed information about persona’s career progression, professional profile and motivations, events they attend, content engagement, decision making style and content preferences.

This process starts with product management and marketing and ends with a PowerPoint slide that they share with the executive team and get sign off.

The best teams use this information for campaigns, audience targeting, and personalization. Most teams never use it again. They sit on pretty slides with beautiful images.

These slides go  into the library only to gather dust and cobwebs before they revisit it again during their annual planning sessions.

The problem with this approach is obvious - your ICP is constantly changing their requirements and new data (or technology) changes the dynamic. What Clay and other enrichment tools give you is a static snapshot of your ICP during their last refresh. Unless you change your ICP or update your campaign daily with a new refreshed list, it's going to be outdated as soon as your build your Clay table.

That’s what iCustomer changes. We realized this was a problem for our customers and maintained a dynamic ICP system that seamlessly integrates with your existing ad platforms, campaign systems and tools. It gives you a dynamic view into who you are targeting, who is responding to your messages and which customers are converting.

One of our customers is a small AI SaaS product in the legal space. They compete in the same space as Harvery AI, EverLaw, CoCounsel, and Lexroom. They target smaller law firms with a focus on helping them streamline their pro bono work.

Their ICP is the same as the other competitors but their use case is very different. They initially worked with an agency and used Clay to enrich their list of target accounts and focus on the people within those accounts.

Then they automated outbound workflows, creating custom presentations for each company with a personalized landing page and started sending emails.

After 1 month of sending outbound emails, (20 per day for 21 days), they got no responses and their open rate was a miserable 0.7% and delivery rate was 3%.

The 3 biggest challenges with Clay for ICP they faced were:

1. The waterfall enrichment provided by Clay with 3rd party providers is static. People change roles and titles frequently. According to LinkedIn reports on job changes, about 32% of people change roles within the company every 15 months. What was important to a person 15 months ago is most likely not as important any more. But the enrichment data is still 18 months old for most cases.

2. Clay workflows are complicated and have a steep learning curve. They needed a professional to set up the workflow and enrichment and keep them updated. Which starts at $3500 per month just for the agency.

3. While the new “AI based columns” allow for LLM based information to be added to your Clay table, most of the information provided using LLM is wrong, (frequent hallucinations), incorrect and outdated.

The ideal way is to make sure your enrichment system integrates into your activation systems and you manage your data and processes within that system. Some people call this a “headless experience” and it has multiple benefits:

1. There’s no new system to learn with a steep learning curve.

2. The data that you bring into your system has to be refreshed or the campaign does not run

3. The data enrichment and signal enhancement is constantly changing and updating, so your campaigns are as well.

For larger enterprises, iCustomer is a better fit that works seamlessly with your existing data warehouse / data lake and provides both a headless (no UI - works with your current UI) system and composable (use only the portions you want / need).