After working with 200+ clients in the last 5.5 years here are the 4 steps I started implementing in client communication to help me prevent client misalignment.

During a Clay Cafe weekly call on Friday (thanks Kellen Casebeer for the awesome community) the topic of client misalignment and "we never approved these parts of the project" came up.

These things happen because humans forget, assume, take shortcuts, and get busy. And as service providers, that becomes our problem fast.

I've been there. More times than I'd like to admit. So I shared a few things that have saved me over the years. Especially for GTMe's working solo or freelance, new agency owners, or anyone working directly with clients:

1️⃣ Share your screen and take notes live during the meeting. Write down key decisions, action items, and feedback as you talk. Then spend 2-3 minutes at the end reviewing them together.

It gives the client two chances in real time to agree or push back. No room for confusion later. This skill took me longer to acquire, but trust me, it is so worth it.

2️⃣ Might be a hot take but I don't like relying on automated post-meeting notes. Yes, they feel productive. But if you don't have time to write these out after the call, the client probably also doesn't have time to read through AI generated notes that might or might not hit the mark.

I believe real notes beat auto-summaries every time and if you followed point 1, you won't even need post-meeting notes, they are already there.

3️⃣ Meet the client where they actually live. Some prefer WhatsApp. Others are Slack-only. I've used email, Telegram, Discord, you name it. Adapting to their preferred channel eliminates most of the friction before it starts.

This step might become a problem as you scale operations and start working on 50+ clients at a time, but champagne problems once you get there. In certain situations it will help the client pay attention and keep track of the results.

4️⃣ Hardest step. Not every client is a client for you and that's fine. This one takes experience to recognize. You don't need to keep clients who drain your energy or constantly misalign with how you work.

If there is a partner on the team that matches their energy better, let them take lead. There are clients built for your style, and clients built for someone else's. That's just reality.

I have yet to master this one.

*BONUS*

If there is a serious misalignment that pops up with the client, getting them on a call as soon as possible is a life-saver! 

By the end of that Clay Café call, I realized how universal this issue is no matter your experience level. That's pretty cool about this community: everyone shares real situations, not theory, and we all get better because of it.

If you're building a GTM agency or running solo: Client communication isn't a "soft skill." It's a survival skill - the thing that keeps great partnerships going for years.

Done Miladinov

AI Outbound GTM | Automating Operations | Clay

Client Management

Sometimes, thinking > prompting... A week of prompting later.

My goal was simple:
👉 Find companies in the same Clay lookup table that are competitors from the same state, and list their names.

This meant, compare a few attributes like:
- Service the company does
- Size of the company
etc... 

Let's keep it short for the purposes of simplicity.

1 week of AI vs 1 hour of painful thinking.

My 5 attempts at glory:

🤖 1. AI Agent inside Clay
I probably wrote 20 different prompts every day last week to go through the lookup arrays and find the company I needed.

🤝 2. I gave up, but then I read a few posts here and there this week from:
Willy Hernandez - how he finished a JavaScript codecamp course
Elias Stråvik - how he used Scoring and JSON.stringify() inside formula. 

🤯 3. I can just... Do things without AI?

💬 4. So I went to ChatGPT...
Write me a javascript for Clay... bla bla.
- fix it, doesn't work
- another version
- give me 3 different types of code
- still not working, fix it
...

🧠 5. I remembered I should have stop and think at step 3, so I went and did it for an hour. Checked the names of the Clay table columns, Looked at the lookup arrays of arrays, wrote the javascript code, iterated a few times, and 1 hour later I had it:

({{Same Country}}?.records || [])
 .filter(l =>
  (l?.["Comapny Service"] + "").trim().toLowerCase() ===
  ({{Company Service}} + "").trim().toLowerCase()
 )
 .map(l => l?.["Clean Company Name"])
 .join(", ")

Now I can launch my "NOV-25 | Competitors | Internal" campaign in peace. 😌

AI is truly amazing, but don't be lazier than you need to be.

If you want help implementing this in your Clay table, dm me. 👋

Unexpected easter egg from Zoominfo.
Pair it with Google + Clay + Zenrows and get revenue and funding for your TAM.

Whenever you search this, the first result on Google has the revenue or funding info in the span text and you can get it at scale with Zenrows. 

A few constraints:
1. New companies won't be in the zoominfo database
2. Companies below 5M yearly revenue are all shown <$5M
3. Companies with the same names might get mixed up, but from what I saw using the domain, it usually pushes the right company as the first result in Google, with the rest following up as the 2-3 results. 

Let me know if you want the json for catching this info by using Zenrows in Clay.

taplio

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