How Clay Built the GTM Team Behind a $5B Valuation w/ Becca Lindquist, Head of Sales @ Clay

Becca Lindquist is the Head of Sales at Clay, the go-to-market infrastructure platform that's grown past nine figures and become one of the most loved tools in modern sales. Before Clay, she spent four-plus years at dbt Labs, where she joined at roughly $600K in committed revenue (three reps, no SDRs) and scaled it into one of the most respected go-to-market runs in data. Prior to that, she was building the sales motion at Heap alongside Todd Baszler, going all the way back to 2017. A former D1 rower at Cal, she traces her competitive streak straight back to her time spent in that boat, and she's now building Clay's sales team from a group of artists and generalists toward hundreds of reps.

Discussed in this episode:

• Why she optimizes for people over product or market, and the booze-cruise gut check that sealed the Clay decision

• The best way to use AI in GTM: Waste Management's green-dumpster play and the Tide sentiment workflow

• Building a pipe-gen muscle before the inbound music stops

• Why "how much pipeline do you self-source?" is a useless interview question

• The mock-call-plus-deal-debrief that replaced the memorized product demo

• Spike in product or spike in sales: how Clay hires when there's no playbook yet

• No variable comp, on purpose and the signal that it's time to switch it on

• The autopilot trap: how to tell you're decaying at a good company

• "Learn like Mongo, join like Stripe" and the two tracks for a sales career in AI

• The biggest mistakes founders make hiring their first sellers

Timestamps:

(0:00) Cold open

(1:40) Welcome + why Becca chose Clay

(2:30) The Brooklyn walks with Varun, and optimizing for people

(6:27) "Are they your people?" and why you should always vet the team first

(9:06) Joining at $100M (mostly PLG) vs. dbt at sub-$1M

(11:06) Diligencing product love before joining

(13:16) Pipe-gen culture: grow while the sun shines

(14:08) The World Cup analogy: predict the future for the team

(14:56) Hiring for outbound: the "favorite deal" question

(17:23) The Spotify-playlist cold open, and spotting hunters

(18:05) The healthy pipeline split, and Clay Day

(19:52) SDR/AE pods, pipeline channels, and Tuesday readouts

(23:53) The best way to leverage AI in GTM

(28:20) Your alpha: executing on new ideas faster than competitors

(31:43) The Waste Management green-dumpster play

(33:08) Running a hiring seminar: how to read a LinkedIn profile

(37:09) The 80/20 of a great mock call

(38:01) Teaching vs. learning: the rhythm of the best calls

(45:02) Comp in a usage-based, land-and-expand business

(46:17) Company selection and the leap of faith

(48:31) The autopilot trap: decay vs. loyalty

(50:25) Sales orgs she admires: the MongoDB lineage

(52:28) Learn like Mongo, join like Stripe

(53:34) The biggest mistakes founders make hiring sellers

(56:44) Reading energy: "what does your Friday look like?"(59:55) How to actually stand out to when applying to Clay

About The Crew Podcast
The Crew podcast interviews GTM leaders and investors at top AI startups and early-stage companies.

Every week, host Chris Balestras, partner @ Crew (an advisory, recruiting, investing, & media firm for seed through series C AI-natives) sits down with GTM operators from the fastest-growing AI natives and SaaS companies to break down what's actually working in go-to-market today.

No fluff, no theory - just honest, tactical insights from people in the trenches building the next generation of AI breakouts.

About Crew
Crew is an advisory, recruiting, investing, & media firm for seed through series D AI-natives & fast-growing SaaS startups.

Where to Find Crew

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/crewgtm

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@thecrewgtm

Newsletter: https://www.withcrew.blog/

Website: https://www.withcrew.ai/